A Danish science writer deduces the severe limitations of conscious thought from the basic laws of Newtonian physics, with a dash of computer science and economic theory.

The User Illusion by Tor Norretranders (1998)Īnd now for something completely different.

How did they choose each other? … Juliet Binoche and Daniel Day-Lewis as Teresa and Tomas in the 1988 film of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. To better understand what consciousness was, he used the method of subtraction: “Where something is so resistant to even the beginnings of clarity, it is wisdom to begin by determining what that something is not.” Jaynes begged to differ, building his argument on evolutionary and anthropological grounds. This surprise bestseller of 1976 arrived at a time when conscious intents and awareness were assumed to underlie all of human thought and behaviour. The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes (1976) The existential novelist who fought in the Spanish civil war against fascism and was a prisoner of the Nazis, focused on behaviourism’s attempt (based on studies of rats and pigeons) to account for complex human social interaction, and lampooned it so mercilessly that everyone could finally see that the emperor was naked.ĥ. Koestler’s impassioned case for human freedom was the coup de grâce for behaviourism. The Ghost in the Machine by Arthur Koestler (1967) In Todorov’s most dramatic demonstrations, ratings of the trustworthiness and competence of political candidates based on their photographs alone predicted the outcome of elections in the US with better than 70% accuracy.Ĥ. Take Grumpy Cat, for instance, who isn’t really grumpy – it’s just the way her face was made. We mistake the features of their resting face for a temporary emotional expression instead. We feel so sure that we know someone’s personality from just their face, but we are wrong. The power of a person’s face over our impressions of their personality is a case in point. Subsequent research (on humans) showed that events in the outside world can indeed affect us directly and unconsciously – but only through activating internal cognitive mechanisms that he had long insisted were irrelevant.ģ. But we so wanted to believe otherwise that we persisted in the illusion. Skinner’s last-gasp appeal to the general public, following the “ cognitive revolution” in psychology of the 60s, arguing that we had no actual freedom of will, that our conscious thoughts were not causal at all.

The book that got me started in psychology, a bestseller when I was taking a high-school psychology class. Beyond Freedom and Dignity by BF Skinner (1971)

The subconscious mind book