Decisions, decisions

I can't remember how I noticed Jonah Lehrer's book How We Decide. I think I was searching for something else in the library catalog and saw it - or maybe it was on the new books cart. In any case, I was very intrigued and checked it out. As someone who is indecisive, and often rehashes old decisions, I thought - ah, this will offer some insight into what my brain is doing. Well, the book turned out to be more about decisions where there is a clear "good" and "bad" outcome - not the sorts of decisions I was thinking about. Not a lot in there about decisions that involve relationships with other people. The interesting thing is, though, I got to a certain point in the book, and one of the illustrative examples started sounding familiar. I realized I had heard Jonah Lehrer on some NPR show, and not remembered his name - but maybe that unconsciously figured into my decision to check out the book. (How meta!)

Anyway. It is a very interesting book and a quick read. A lot of it is about how the brain uses both emotion and reason to make decisions, and when is the "best" time to use each of those. There was also one sentence that stood out to me: "From the perspective of the brain, new ideas are merely several old thoughts that occur at the exact same time." To me, this was very encouraging. To me, it means that innate ability and quick reactions mean very little without constant thinking and learning. That effort and study and actually thinking about things contribute to our ability to solve problems and make decisions. Maybe that's an obvious point. But I thought it bore mentioning.