Review of Wray Herbert's "On Second Thought"

ON SECOND THOUGHT

Outsmarting Your Mind's

Hard-Wired Habits

By Wray Herbert. Crown. 289 pp. $25

In his engaging new book, Wray Herbert delves into a subject that has topped the bestseller lists of late: the unconscious actions and reactions that affect our daily lives (think Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink"). But ignore the subtitle's promise of self-help tips, because Herbert doesn't spend much time telling you how to circumvent your gut reactions. Instead, he's more interested in explaining how our minds process information and the implications of our cognitive quirks.

The book starts slowly, with a discussion of unconscious physical reactions, before moving into the more interesting territory of how we comprehend numbers, the world and existence itself. "Our brains employ all sorts of tricks and shortcuts to get us through the day," Herbert writes. They can be simple, such as imitating others in order to feel accepted and connected, and the littlest things can have a big impact. The font used for exercise instructions, for example, can influence whether we choose to work out. Wray also cites intriguing research that shows how "our deepest psychological needs may play a big part in determining where we fall on the political spectrum." In one study, psychologists found that conservatives "have little tolerance for any messiness," whereas liberals are more likely to live amid clutter.

Herbert, a former Newsweek columnist who writes the blog We're Only Human for the Association for Psychological Science, clearly shows the effects of various daily mental maneuvers and peppers the text with explanations of how the human mind has evolved. It's readable, meandering and eminently "Gladwellian."

-- Mark Berman