The Guinea Pig Diaries by A. J. Jacobs Page B

into all the pageantry, so he was grateful I was there at the Oscars to represent him. He figured better me than him.

    Part of my quest: Find the most rational toothpaste on earth.

Chapter Five
The Rationality Project
    My brain is deeply flawed. And no offense, but so is yours.
    Your brain is not rational. It’s packed with dozens of misleading biases. It’s home to an alarming number of false assumptions and warped memories. It processes data all wrong and makes terrible decisions. Problem is, the brain didn’t come to us fully formed from a lab at MIT. The brain is merely an ad hoc collection of half-assed solutions that have built up over millions of years of evolution. It’s Scotch tape and bubble gum. If it were a car, it would not be a Porsche; it’d be a 1976 Dodge Dart with faulty brakes and a missing headlight.
    As one scientist puts it, we’ve got Stone Age minds living in silicon-age bodies. Our brains were formed to deal with Paleolithic problems. When my brain gets scared, it causes a spike in adrenaline, which might have been helpful when facing a mastodon but is highly counterproductive when facing a snippy salesman at the Verizon outlet.
    And yet we remain enamored of our ancient responses. These last few years have been a golden age for our most primal impulses. We recently had a president who spent eight years leading from his gut, and look where we are: a financial meltdown and a world filled with America haters. We’ve got Malcolm Gladwell’s
Blink,
a best seller with a subtle thesis that has unfortunately been boiled down to the pro-intuition message “Don’t think, blink.” It’s given birth to a million stupid decisions.
    I’ve had enough. I’m going to try to revamp my brain. Bring it into the modern era. I’m going to root out all the irrational biases and Darwinian anachronisms one by one and retrain my brain to be a perfectly rational machine. I will be the most logical man alive, unswayed by unconscious impulses. I’ll use any means necessary—vigilance, repression, science. I’ll also use duct tape, forty tubes of toothpaste, and a shroud over my cereal bowl. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
    THE LAKE WOBEGON EFFECT
    I came up with Project Rationality a couple of months ago. I’d always considered myself pretty logical, more Spock than Homer, more ego than id. But then I read a book called
Nudge,
by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, which details the alarming number of built-in irrational quirks of the brain. Then I read another recent book called
Predictably Irrational.
Then another. And another. Turns out brain-bashing is an exploding genre, right up there with tomes about inspirational dogs and atheism.
    If you read these books all in a row, you will feel like amputating your head. You learn your brain is programmed to be bigoted and confirm stereotypes. It’s easily fooled by anecdotal evidence. Or a pretty face. Or a guy in a uniform. It’s a master of rationalization. It believes what it hears. It overreacts. It’s hopelessly incompetent at distinguishing fact from fiction. There are scores of “cognitive biases” identified by researchers (Wikipedia lists more than ninety of them).
    When I told my brother-in-law, Eric, a behavioral economist at Columbia, about my plan to eliminate all cognitive errors from my brain for a month, he chuckled. He said I was suffering from the Lake Wobegon Effect: Our brains are delusively cocky. We all think we’re better-looking, smarter, and more virtuous than we are. (It’s named for Garrison Keillor’s fictional town, where “all the children are above average.”)
    “You’re vastly overestimating your abilities,” he said.
    THE AVAILABILITY FALLACY
    I wake up on the first morning of Project Rationality. I’ve come armed. I’ve got a folded three-page list of cognitive errors, more than one hundred of them that I’ve cobbled together from books and Wikipedia. My method will be this: I’ll analyze every activity