Your Brain Is Playing Tricks on You
Good Fit
- Readers who want a plain-language account of how the brain shapes perception and memory
- Anyone interested in disinformation, fake news and critical thinking
- Students meeting psychology and neuroscience for the first time
Not a Fit
- Readers who have already read Kahneman, Loftus and Gazzaniga and want new information
- Anyone who wants academic depth with full references
- Readers sensitive to examples of psychological abuse and trauma
The first chapter starts with an illusion: is the black figure facing us or turned away, above us or below? After looking at one of two stable versions, the brain reads the ambiguous picture in exactly that way. Moukheiber calls this «reducing ambiguity»: the brain interprets signals and picks one option, and we are so sure of what we see that we cannot believe another person sees something different. The dress of 2015, argued over on social media as white and gold or blue and black, is given as an example.
The same chapter has the blind-spot experiment: close one eye, bring the page closer and the black dot vanishes while the brain fills the gap with the surrounding background. Magic tricks play on the same mechanism: a magician hiding a coin by «palming» fools not the eyes but the brain's assumption that objects do not move on their own. Teller, in an article in Nature, tells how the cups left at home had to be replaced with clear cups and balls made of paper tissue, and the audience was more amazed than ever. The chapter ends with how easily we read a scrambled sentence such as «Simdi bu Satlrı böyl3...».
The second chapter opens with confabulation, the brain filling a gap with invention. In Anton syndrome the patient is blind but sure of seeing well; only 28 cases have been recorded to date. A six-year-old reported in 2007 said «I was playing» after walking into walls. In a callosotomy experiment, Gazzaniga shows a patient a house covered in snow; the patient picks a shovel and explains it as «to clean the chicken coop».
The memory section shows memory as a structure rebuilt every time, not a camera. In 1974 Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer showed 150 students a video of a car accident; when the question used the harsher word «smashed» instead of «hit», more people remembered broken glass, though no glass breaks in the video. The Innocence Project (1992) has used DNA tests to overturn many verdicts based on eyewitness testimony, and Kirk Odom was cleared after 22 years in prison. In Loftus's «lost in the mall» experiment, 25% of participants came to believe an event that never happened.
Moukheiber does not hide the dark side of memory manipulation either: gaslighting, the 2017 conviction of physiotherapist Marie-Catherine Phanekham for planting false memories of childhood rape in female patients, the French Facebook group «Ligue du LOL» that harassed female journalists, the Great Purge interrogations of the 1930s, in which detainees confessed to crimes they had not committed, and Costa-Gavras's film «The Confession».
The part of chapter three that was read is about guessing and inference. After a coin has landed heads 50 times, we struggle to accept that the next toss is still 50-50. Finding a taxi on New Year's Eve, a handshake and heuristic thinking are used as examples, and the 1974 paper by Tversky and Kahneman is recommended. The question of whether the shy, tidy Steve is a librarian or a farmer shows the representativeness bias. The main idea: guessing is not bad, it is at the centre of our thinking, but it leads to errors when too fast.
- Experiments that test the reader on the page itself: two stable illusions, the blind spot, a sentence of scrambled letters
- A scientific base that ties every idea to a real study and a name (Gazzaniga, Loftus, Kahneman, Tversky)
- Short chapters, subheadings and everyday examples (finding a taxi, a handshake)
- An epigraph at the head of each chapter (Disraeli, Rothfuss)
- In the foreword, Asimov's principle of «the relativity of wrong»: the book offers not absolute truth but today's most reliable theoretical models
Kahneman's core work on errors in thinking, mentioned several times in the book
Shows in the same vein how attention and memory deceive us
Explains why our decisions are irrational but predictable
Johansson's team shows passers-by photographs of two women and ask them to pick the one they find more attractive. Then, without telling them, they swap the photographs, show the one that was not chosen and ask the participants to justify their choice. 74% of participants do not notice the trick and defend their «choice» with all their might, saying it was the smile or the shape of the chin. Johansson names this «choice blindness». Other researchers questioned the conditions of the experiment, but choice blindness was later shown again in several different experimental protocols.
In 2010 Lars Hall set up a fake local-products stand in a supermarket. Shoppers tasted two jams and two teas and picked a favourite. The jar opened from both ends and had different flavours on each side (apple-cinnamon and bitter orange). The researcher turned the jar over and asked the shopper to taste the chosen jam again to «confirm» the choice. Only a third of participants noticed the taste had changed; the rest defended the jam they had not chosen. Told about the trick, they were stunned. The chapter ends: we are not flawless, our brain often plays tricks on us because we build the world through guesses, but guessing is not bad in itself.
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