Tag Archives: Psychology

Paranormality – Richard Wiseman ****

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The subtitle here is ‘Why we believe the impossible’ or ‘Why we see what isn’t there’ (depending on your edition) emphasising that this a book not so much on parapsychology – the study of paranormal capabilities of the mind – but what you might call metaparapsychology – the study of why human beings incorrectly think that they have paranormal capabilities of the mind.

This is a very entertaining, lightly written book that takes a storytelling approach to introducing some of the strange and wonderful claims that people have made for supernatural mental abilities, only to pull them apart.

We begin with that most dubious of paranormal topics, psychics, with a UK psychic roundly failing in controlled tests and another psychic admitting exactly how he used cold reading tricks to fool his clients. Many books have debunked cold reading, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen before such a clear list of the six key techniques with a demonstration of how they were used in a specific reading. It’s superb.

Next under the microscope are out of body experiences (and for some reason the spurious idea of a body losing weight on death), which prove rather dull, and then moving things with the mind. There is interesting material on a specific case, though I found the ‘five psychological principles’ that make people believe this kind of act a touch heavy handed after we’d already been through the six for cold reading, especially as by the time we get to the fifth there is not one, but two asides in the middle of explaining it.

Next up is the table shifting/rapping/Ouija board style of spirit medium. There’s some nice historical introduction with the Fox sisters (who made ‘raps’ by clicking their toes) and some practical guidance on the do-it-yourself use of involuntary movement effects to jiggle tables or spell out Ouija messages (with perhaps a bit of cheating thrown in). We then move swiftly on to some entertaining ghost hunting tales (and thoughts on why we imagine ghosts exist), mind control and future gazing. All very readable, entertaining and often enlightening.

Although as a whole I liked the book, there was something about it that put me off a little (otherwise it might have made 5 stars). It was a touch gimmicky – I’m not sure, for instance, I particularly liked the used of QR codes to direct the reader to find out more online. In principle this should be a good thing, but these 3D barcodes were so large and obtrusive that they ruined the look of the page every time they were introduced.

The gimmickry also extends to some extent to the way the book is written, with chapters jumping around their subject and introducing little ‘tests’ that are supposed to show the reader the effect being discussed. (I’m pleased to say I avoided choosing the shape combination most people come up with when asked to think of one geometric shape inside another*.)

However, that’s just a personal thing – I think many people would like this kind of messing about in format, so it shouldn’t count against what I think is a really interesting book on a topic that isn’t really called metaparapsychology, but ought to be. If psychics, ESP and the world of the paranormal interest you, this book is an essential balance to your library – and if you are a sceptic, it will give you plenty of chances to raise an eyebrow and have a chuckle at the gullibility of the rest of the world.

* The usual choice is apparently a circle in a triangle or a triangle in a circle. I went for a triangle in a square.

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Review by Brian Clegg

How Pleasure Works – Paul Bloom ****

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I have to start this review with a confession and an apology to the author. When the book arrived for review in 2010 (no, not a typo), I was totally fed up with books about different human emotions. We had been absolutely drenched with the things, many of them rather tedious. So I put it to one side and forgot about it. A few days ago I needed a book to read, had nothing else to hand and discovered I’d made a big mistake – because the book is brilliant. So my apologies to Paul Bloom: the only thing I would say is that as an author I appreciate reviews however late they come and I hope he will too.

Bloom makes a wonderful exploration of what pleasure is and why we appreciate everything from basic animal desires like food and sex to much more complex enjoyment like reading a book or looking at an artwork. In doing so he digs into the real attachments we have – why, for example, we appreciate a ‘real’ original painting more than a perfect copy, even though the artwork itself is identical. And why we value a tape measure owned by J. F. Kennedy (one sold for $50,000) more than just an ordinary one off the shelf in a hardware store.

At the heart of Bloom’s argument is the rather philosophical concept of essences. Human beings have a tendency, he argues to associate invisible intangible essences with objects that change their value to us. The fact that in an objective sense these essences don’t exist doesn’t matter to us – and so from a psychological viewpoint they are important and real. If this sounds a little dull and philosophical don’t worry – Bloom’s writing is light and interesting and he makes all this stuff… a pleasure to read.

You may wonder when I think this book is so excellent why it has only got four rather than five stars. This is primarily because the subject, though fascinating, is frankly rather woolly. There is a lot in here that isn’t so much science as philosophy and guesswork (there’s  difference?). Because of that, I hesitate to give it the full whack. But it is a great read, there is fascinating material in there, and I’d really encourage you to give it a go. With the proviso of not giving it to anyone who’d be shocked by the description of S&M etc. it would make a great present too.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Loneliness – John T. Cacioppo & William Patrick ***

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“For the last five centuries or more, Western societies have demoted human gregariousness from a necessity to an incidental.” This bold claim is the starting point for an in-depth survey of our human need for “social connection” and the perils that await individuals and societies that do not meet this need. The authors do well to narrow down this impossibly broad theme and bring it within the range of recent psychology, neuroscience, and ethology (the study of animal behaviour). The result is comprehensive and in many ways convincing. Loneliness, it seems, contaminates everything from our diet to our DNA transcriptions.

The lead author is John Cacioppo, a psychology professor at the University of Chicago and Director of Chicago’s Centre for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience. As you might expect, Cacioppo takes the science seriously. And he and his co-editor William Patrick keep the narrative moving along with plenty of personal anecdotes and literary references. The result is a book that is rarely dull and usually rigorous.

Does Loneliness make a convincing case for social connectedness? By and large, yes. There are three parts to Cacioppo’s argument. The first part deals with all the ways that loneliness damages the overall health of an individual. If Cacioppo is right, loneliness is a major psychological toxin, with symptoms ranging from a lowered IQ and poor self-control to unhealthy diet, loss of sleep and elevated blood pressure. The second part deals with the ways that loneliness impairs our ability to connect socially. Lonely people, it seems, respond less well to social cues than non-lonely people, take less pleasure in company, and exaggerate their own social incompetence. As Cacioppo points out, these feedback effects are what makes loneliness, in the worst cases, such a corrosive and long-lasting condition.

The last part of the argument is about the health of communities rather than individuals. In lizards and in bonobos, and therefore in humans, mutual aid and self-sacrifice is a great survival strategy for a group. In general, “the more extensive the reciprocal altruism born of social connection, the greater the advance towards health, wealth and happiness.” Even if our interests are purely economic, the authors argue, we are better off banding together than splitting into factions.

Tacked on to this economic/sociological/evolutionary claim is a polemic against “global capitalism” and its accompaniments: social atomisation, the breakdown of neighbourhoods, and the reliance on meagre substitutes such as pets, mega-churches, and the internet. The critique of capitalism is half-baked, but the statistics about social isolation make for grim reading. They also make the second-to-last chapter of the book – a recovery guide for the lonely – an important resource. If the statistics are right, most readers will benefit from the author’s suggestions on how to restore their sense of social connection. The self-help style of this chapter – complete with quotes from the Dalai Lama and a 5-step programme summarised in a cute anagram, EASE – may be off-putting for some. But by and large this chapter, like the rest of the book, delivers sensible advice without waffle or sentimentality.

For readers who are already paragons of social connectivity, Loneliness still has plenty of material not directly related to loneliness. There is the obligatory introduction to evolutionary theory, with a socially-oriented twist. There are sections on mirror neurones, confirmation bias, and attachment theory. And, for those who wonder how psychologists find stuff out, the studies in the book embrace a wide range of investigative techniques, from brain scans to highly controlled laboratory studies to surveys that follow a group of individuals over multiple years.

One problem with Loneliness is its over-reliance on evolutionary arguments. Aside from the fact that socio-biology is no longer young and exciting, and that it is outside the author’s expertise, there is the uncomfortable fact that we owe most of our adaptive features to millennia of brutal competition with other species and with other individuals in our own species. With this background, tales of co-operative lizards and compassionate bonobos seem like so much cherry-picking. Also, the authors tend to blur the boundaries between analogies and shared causes. Female bonobos masturbate when they meet, as a sign of good will; humans gossip. In both cases co-operation is aided by sharing information. But are we seriously meant to believe that human gossip has the same genetic basis as bonobo masturbation? And if there is no such causal link between these analogous behaviours, what purpose does the analogy serve?

Another defect in the book is the old problem of causes and correlations. If people who suffer from condition A also suffer from condition B, how do we know that A causes B and not the other way round? The authors do not answer this question at all in their flagship study on loneliness in an Ohio population. They show, for example, that lonely people tend to have more run-ins with neighbours and a higher rate of divorce. But this on its own does not show that loneliness causes the run-ins and divorces. The point is not just academic. If loneliness is not the cause here, then making people less lonely is not going to make them less prone to run-ins and divorces.

My last complaint is that the book lacks spark. It stands out from the current crop of books on positive psychology and social relations, but only for the rather dull reason that it is more thorough and down-to-earth. For all the anecdotes and personal stories, none of them really lose the stiffness of case histories. For a book about social connection I felt too little real connection with the authors – at any rate, too little to give it more than 3 stars.

When reading popular science books on psychology, I waver between pity and admiration. Pity because often a long string of careful experiments seem only to confirm, in a highly artificial setting, what we all know from ordinary life. Admiration because the human mind, especially the social mind, is so complicated that only the very brave and skilful are likely to find out anything new about it. I’m pleased to report that after reading Loneliness I felt more admiration than pity for Cocioppo and Patrick. Lonely readers will find plenty of reassurance and helpful advice in this book, not least from the knowledge that many others share their condition. And non-lonely readers will be reminded how lucky they are to live socially well-rounded lives – even as they are reminded of how much they have in common with bonobos and lizards.

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Review by Michael Bycroft

What’s Luck Got to do with It? – Joseph Mazur ****

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Joseph Mazur’s aim in this book is to expose the “diabolical con” of the voice in the gambler’s ear that tells him he can win. To attack the “gambler’s illusion” Joseph Mazur brings out some big guns of modern science, from the mathematics of probability to the psychology of cognitive biases. Preaching is not his style, however, and there is much more in the book than arguments against gambling. The book sometimes loses its way through thickets of sociology, reportage, literary analysis and personal anecdotes. But the end results is Mazur an eclectic, personable introduction to the topic.

The first third of the book is a potted history of lotteries, casinos, shares trading, and theories of probability. Mazur takes us from eighteenth-century Bath to nineteenth-century Mississippi, from the Iliad to modern-day Monte Carlo. Inevitably some important developments are left out. For example, the rise of private life insurance in the late 18C, and its origins in a middle class anxious to protect its newly gained wealth, gets short shrift. Mazur pushes the story along with succinct scene-setting, judicious borrowing from historians of the topic, and tales of lost riches.

Modern-day gamblers will be glad to know that they are in good company–even, or especially, if they are massively in debt. Past gambling debtors include writers such as Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, wealthy plantation owners in the American South, well-heeled dandies from the London coffee-house scene, and the entire royal court of Louis XIV. Women as well as men made disastrous flutters. Consider Francis Baddock, the accomplished 19C heiress who hung herself with gold and silver girdles after wasting her £24,000 (£2 million today) fortune in a month of high-rolling.

From history Mazur moves on to his area of expertise, mathematics. Statistical concepts are notoriously hard to get across to laypeople, and Mazur uses plenty of examples, diagrams and anecdotes to help the medicine go down. Most interesting is a chapter on the “truly astonishing” law of large numbers; most useful, a summary of the mathematics of poker, blackjack, sports betting, lotteries, and slot machines. The aims of the other maths chapters are less well-defined, but a patient reader will find colourful introductions to significance tests, normal distributions, Pascal’s triangle, the statistics of the Wall Street crash, and more.

Next up, psychology. This third of the book, like the third on mathematics, has problems of organisation. Chapter 12, sub-titled “psychomanaging risk”, seems like a chapter of left-overs, with an analysis of “Deal or No Deal” thrown together with a study of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and the sad tale of a minister and psychotherapist who ruins himself in a Nigerian email scam. More purposeful is a chapter on 20th century psychologies of gambling–although Mazur concludes that general theories about why people gamble, starting with the Freudian theory that gamblers have a subconscious desire to lose, are in a sorry state.

More promising is the psychology of specific errors of reasoning. Mazur draws on those darlings of popular social science writing, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, in a chapter on the so-called “hot hands fallacy”: the belief that lucky streaks are more likely to continue than not. Reports of other gambling fallacies are scattered through the third on the book on psychology, from the house money effect (gamblers take more risks with their winnings than with their own money) to the Monte Carlo fallacy (after a string of reds, bet on blue). By showing that our statistical intuitions are not to be trusted, this material is at least as powerful an antidote to gambling behaviour as mathematical arguments.

If we count all these psychological effects, there is not one gambler’s illusion but many. Mazur is never very up-front about this problem, and one consequence is that the “gambler’s illusion” he describes in the introduction (the hot hands effect) is the opposite of the “gambler’s illusion” that appears in the book’s conclusion (the Monte Carlo fallacy). Another weakness is that Mazur never properly debunks the Monte Carlo fallacy. If a fair coin has come down head 60 times in 80 throws, surely we can expect the next 20 throws to have more tails than heads? Mazur’s rebuttal is that “we all know” that coins do not have memories; the chance of heads on a fair coin is always 50/50, irrespective of past throws. But this rebuttal is no use insofar as it does not reconcile our “no-memory” intuition with the equally strong intuition–the one behind the Monte Carlo fallacy–that fair coins should give half heads and half tails in the long term. This intuition is a version of the law of large numbers, which Mazur discusses — but not in enough detail to show why this otherwise sound law is misapplied in the Monte Carlo fallacy.

Gambling is a sad topic. For every lucky winner there are many forlorn addicts, like the women Mazur meets at casinos feeding coins into one-armed bandits at 5am. And along with the jackpots there are the suicides, like the London man who sunk his life savings on 24,000 lotto tickets in one week and came away with nothing. Stories like this are perhaps the best medicine for would-be gamblers, and Mazur’s book is full of them. But the book has an upbeat tone nevertheless, thanks to Mazur’s anecdotal style and passion for mathematics.

For gamblers, What’s Luck Got To Do With It? is a non-preachy introduction to the reasons for quitting, even if it leaves open some logical loopholes. For non-gamblers it is a sweeping tour of the seedy, sad and grandiose world of games of chance, with Mazur as a well-informed (if sometimes disoriented) guide.

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Review by Michael Bycroft

Introducing Psychology: a graphic guide – Nigel C. Benson ***

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It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge Introducing … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as … for Beginners, puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point.

Psychology is a difficult topic for this site because, to be honest, it’s not clear that it’s science. If this book is anything to go by, the reason it has a problematic image is that it is a mix of science and philosophy, and all too often the philosophy has too much weight.

Nigel Benson provides a useful summary of the different approaches to psychology (another indicator of its lack of modern scientific credentials – you certainly get disagreements about specific theories in physics, but you don’t get different ‘schools’, always an indicator you are drifting away from science and into philosophy). It was fascinating to see how much certain aspects of modern thinking are influenced by particular aspects of psychology – for example, how behaviourism seems to dominate education and particularly the sort of ‘Super Nanny’, how-to-deal-with-problem-children TV show. I was surprised how much content there was on Freud, all stated without any feeling this was arbitrary made-up rubbish with no scientific basis, with just a paragraph or so saying many don’t consider Freud useful anymore. Puzzling.

As a book it was quite approachable, but it was rather too bitty to get provide an ideal introduction. Now and again there would be some flow of the text, but often it seemed to be made up of a whole series of definitions. The illustrations were also a mix of useful and not. I really had no idea why the first part of the book is narrated by a figure wearing a Hannibal Lecter mask, but then he suddenly disappears. It’s not a particularly pleasant image and I really didn’t feel it helped. (There was extra confusion because the masked face used to be on the cover of the book, and is referred to as such inside, but it isn’t anymore.)

Overall, certainly not one of the best in the series, but will give a useful background on psychology if you want to get a quick fix on what the subject is about.

*Marmite? If you are puzzled by this assessment, you probably aren’t from the UK. Marmite is a yeast-based product (originally derived from beer production waste) that is spread on bread/toast. It’s something people either love or hate, so much so that the company has run very successful TV ad campaigns showing people absolutely hating the stuff…

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Review by Brian Clegg

Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear – Dan Gardner ****

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For me, the title of this book is somewhat misleading. ‘Risk’ suggests probabilities, but what this is really about, as the subtitle suggests, is fear. Our unnatural fear of things going wrong, and how that fear is manipulated by those who want to encourage us to buy things or to follow certain political lines.

Dan Gardner makes the distinction between two types of thinking -what once would have been called head and heart, but he rather more crudely calls head and gut, as in gut reaction. In reality, of course, this is all going on in the brain – but it does seem to be the case that once we slip into ‘gut’ thinking we lose control of our ability to assess a danger and overreact.

Gardner shows eloquently how we can be persuaded that something is more frightening than it really is by the way we hear about it all the time. For example, many more people are killed in car accidents than terrorism – yet most people are a lot more scared of terrorism. He makes the point that this in part reflects the way that we see a lot more in the media about the dangers of terrorism than we do about car crashes – and how language like the ‘war on terror’ has given terrorism more weight than it truly deserves.

There are other aspects of fear here too, from medical fears and fears of paedophiles to the way fear is used to sell and to raise money for charity. Misuse of statistics is one of the common techniques here – there’s a wonderful example of the way such numbers are made up – so it was a little disappointing that Gardner himself seems to misuse statistics in making his point. He gives the annual risk of dying in a car accident as 1 in 6,000. Now this is very high – it’s actually closer to 1 in 15,000 (though that may reflect better safety in the UK than wherever he is looking at – he implies it’s the US, but doesn’t explicitly say this, which is another trick of misusing statistics). However even that is misleading in the way it’s compared with the risk of air travel, because we take a lot more car journeys than plane journeys. The chances of dying in this car trip, as opposed to this air flight (surely what more people are frightened of) is actually less by car than by air.

He also does some pretty fishy manipulation of probabilities. He says ‘The probability of the earth being walloped by a 300-metre asteroid in any given year is 1 in 50,000, which makes the odds 1 in 500 over the course of a century.’ No it doesn’t. That’s like saying ‘The odds of getting a head with one throw of a coin is 1 in 2, which makes the odds 1 in 1 over two throws.’ That’s not how probabilities combine. He also draws an illogical conclusion on the death penalty. He points out that people who are against the death penalty have their views strengthened when they read a balanced report on whether or not the death penalty deters crime. But his surprise at this is only valid if people are against the death penalty because it doesn’t deter crime. I’m against the death penalty because it’s morally indefensible, and because courts sometimes convict innocent people, and no one can justify killing an innocent victim. Gardner was confusing associated information with causality.

This might seem picky, but a book that is attacking the way that fear is misused to make a point shouldn’t get this kind of thing wrong itself. Even so – and despite it getting a bit repetitious (it’s what my agent calls a magazine article of a book), it’s an effective insight into human behaviour, and one that more of us should take account of.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Personality – Daniel Nettle ***

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High sexual appetite and compulsive promiscuity rule Erica’s life. Bill’s is governed by a drive to make money; he was worth several million pounds by the age of 40, he then blew it all but is now obsessed with rebuilding it. These two have one thing in common. They both have high scores for extraversion, one of five personality characteristics.

Daniel Nettle, an academic psychologist, guides us through a key theory of psychology, that all human personalities can be accurately mapped by assessing five simple measures. The five-factor model scores people for their levels of extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness and openness. He then examines why such a range of personality should have been preserved through evolution, arguing that there are merits in all the traits. For example, having a low agreeableness score, which indicates a lack of empathy, might serve someone well in a society where a high-status goal-seeking approach is valued strongly. Conversely, women tend to score significantly higher for agreeableness, which hints at the advantages of having a social network when raising children.

When Nettle uses real people to illustrate each characteristic the book zips along and you’re hooked. The quirks of those high in extraversion are fascinating as are the misfortunes that befall those who have high neuroticism. Unfortunately, the chapter on openness (creativity) does not include any examples of real people interviewed by the author for his research. Instead it relies on an analysis of Allen Ginsburg’s poem Howl, a poor substitute. Lack of real anecdotes left this section difficult to engage with and it reads like a theoretical exercise. Maybe Nettle couldn’t find any good examples – do creative people just not like filling in research questionnaires?

Nettle is a good explainer of the issues he discusses and the analogies he uses make his subject easy to understand. There is a great quiz at the back to find out your own personality type. The evolutionary perspective he takes is interesting and affirming – there is no such thing as a “good” or a “bad” personality, all have some evolutionary advantages. But his detailed detour into the variation of beaks of finches on the Galapagos Islands and evolution seems a bit out of place in a book whose main audience will be those interested in understanding their own personality. If you want a book simply about personality then this probably isn’t the one for you.

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Review by Maria Hodges

Why People Believe Weird Things – Michael Shermer ****

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Michael Shermer is probably best known as Scientific American’s resident sceptic – a man who has what seems the wickedly enjoyable job of going around finding fault with other people’s beliefs – a sort of modern day court jester without (presumably – I’ve never seen him) the funny costume and bells. In this classic, originally published in 1997 but reviewed in a new UK edition, he gives a powerful argument for taking the sceptical viewpoint.

Although along the same lines as Carl Sagan’s The Demon Haunted World, this book works alongside Sagan’s masterpiece, rather than competing with it. It focuses more on why we believe strange things, and also very usefully expands out from the paranormal and pseudoscience to include pseudohistory, a topic I hadn’t even realized existed.

Shermer is something of a convert to scepticism, so has a convert’s fervour, but none of the unpleasant aggressiveness of the likes of Randi and Dawkins. Instead he gently shows us how strange beliefs come into being, and why they have such a strong hold. Inevitably strong on the paranormal and UFOs, he is particularly good when looking at the likes of modern accusations of satanic rituals, and the remarkable cult of Ayn Rand. The section on creationism is a little weaker, partly because it isn’t quite up-to-date enough, and also because there has been so much material going into this in more depth (see, for example, Scientists Confront…)

In some ways I was most impressed by the next section on pseudohistory, in part, I suspect, because of not having really thought about this as a concept before. The chapters on holocaust denial were fascinating, and perhaps even more surprising was the self-deception of the ‘all ideas originated in Africa’ movement (again new to me).

The only reason that this book doesn’t get 5 stars is that I found the last section before getting to the summaries, on a scientific idea that its originator says gives a mechanism for a form of eternal life, irritating. It just isn’t the same sort of problem as the other topics covered in the book. Here someone is speculating wildly based on extrapolating scientific theories to the extreme – but that’s a very different game to having an unshakable belief in concepts with no support in evidence, and I think Shermer does himself and the reader a disservice by confusing the two. However, the book doesn’t entirely end on this mistake, as there are a couple of short chapters pulling together the whys and wherefores of belief in weird things, so this small glitch doesn’t destroy the flow, and certainly shouldn’t detract from the fact that overall this is a book, alongside Sagan’s, that ought to be on every thinking person’s shelf.

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Review by Brian Clegg

De La Mettrie’s Ghost – Chris Nunn ***

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For most readers that title could mean almost anything. But it looks like we’re given a bit of a clue to make the decision on whether or not to be interested in this book. According to the subtitle it’s The Story of Decisions. At first sight this might be more a business book than popular science – books on decision theory have been popular in management sciences for many years. And that, in a sense, is the starting point for the most difficult decision of all – how to rate this book – bits of it are great, but as a whole, I’m not sure it does what it says on the tin, nor does it read as a fluid whole. The three star rating it has ended up with is a huge compromise. The best bits are five star, the worst the other end of the spectrum.

It’s necessary to get one disappointment out of the way first – that aspect of decisions. A book about how we make choices, about the theoretical logical approach – evaluating different options by giving various criteria weightings, then scoring the options against them to see which comes out on top – set against the real world approach which often differs so significantly – how and why – would be a fascinating popular science book. Decisions are, after all, a vast part of our life. Instead, though, it’s not about the decision making so much as where the decisions come from… do we make decisions at all… in fact lurking underneath is that hoary old chestnut (though no less important for being that), is there such a thing as free will.

The introductory chapter, where we meet De La Mettrie (an 18th century Frenchman who had to go into swift exile for daring to say than man is no more than a biological machine) suggests this is going to be an enjoyable read, and so it often is, nicely written by Chris Nunn, but don’t expect it all to be easy going. Perhaps unwisely he drops us into the hands of the philosophers at the opening of the first true chapter, and the reader is left reeling (and perhaps wondering what some of the arbitrary guesswork that often passes for philosophy is doing under the heading of “science”). But luckily we are returned fairly swiftly to the fold… and so it goes on.

I can pick out particular chapters that are truly fascinating. For instance, when Nunn is explaining how ME cannot really be a physical disease, and the lengths to which organizations have gone to avoid the psychological label. Also when he is talking about “cognitive objects”, which seem like the old medieval idea of types and shadows, that have influenced the way people behave. All this is wonderful stuff, brilliantly told. Even his two fictional chapters, following the life of “Susan” and where her life decisions come from (the main lesson seems to be let your children watch Doctor Who on the TV, as they’ll be imbued with a sense of right and wrong). But there are almost as many chapters, particularly earlier in the book, when we are presented with a melange of theories from different scientific and quasi-scientific disciplines that really don’t tell us anything about the way we make decisions. It’s almost as if each chapter were a separate entity, strung together without making a cohesive whole.

In the end, Nunn’s final conclusion of how we sort of exert free will despite being deterministic, based around the idea of story, is interesting but isn’t well supported by the rest of the book. It’s truly a mixed bag. If you approach it like that, though – like a collection of essays, some of which are a lot better than others – you’ll get plenty out of it.

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Review by Brian Clegg