This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking (Paperback)

Featuring a foreword by David Brooks, This Will Make You Smarter presents brilliant but accessible cutting-edge ideas that will improve everyone's decision-making, with contributions by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Richard Dawkins, Brian Eno, Steven Pinker and more.

What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?

This is the question John Brockman, publisher of Edge. org, posed to 150 of the world brightest and most influential minds. Their paradigm-changing answers are collected in This Will Make You Smarter, the stunning follow-up to This Will Change Everything, Is The Internet Changing the Way You Think and other books in this illuminating series from Edge. org. Brockman invokes the term "scientific" to hone in on the most reliable ways of gaining knowledge about anything-whether it be qualities of human spirit, the role of great figures in history, or the structure of DNA-and the concepts approached by his battery of thinkers includes explorations into philosophy, logic, economics, jurisprudence and other broad analytic enterprises with the potential to help humanity better engage with and understanding the world around us.

Contributors include:

Steven Pinker on positive-sum games; Nassim Nicolas Taleb on anti-fragility; Richard Dawkins on the double-blind control experiment; Nobel Prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman on the "focusing illusion"; plus entries from music producer Brian Eno, Nudge author Richard Thaler, Phantoms in the Brain author V. S. Ramachandran, Lisa Randall, J. Craig Venter, Martin Rees, Kevin Kelly, Clay Shirky, Daniel Goleman, Frank Wilczek, Jaron Lanier, Daniel C. Dennett and others.