Anthony Abbott

Summary

Key Insights

Cognitive biases and self‑deception

• Confirmation bias: We seek evidence that confirms our views.
• Self‑serving bias: We claim more credit for success than failure (“I have an excellent reputation—with myself”).
• Sunk cost fallacy: We persist in failure because of past investment.
• Apophenia: Seeing patterns that aren’t there—the seedbed of superstition.

Changing perspectives

• Shifting baseline syndrome (Daniel Pauly): Each generation accepts a degraded environment as “normal,” forgetting the past abundance (e.g., the Grand Banks cod fishery).
• Path dependence: Practices persist simply because “we’ve always done it that way” (like the QWERTY keyboard).
• Inference to the best explanation: Focus on explanations that best fit the facts, not the ones that feel comfortable.

Scientific curiosities

• The axial tilt of the Earth is stabilised by the Moon.
• Bats see with sound, rattlesnakes sense infrared, and bees see ultraviolet—reminding us that our perception is narrow.
• Scaling laws: Larger animals need disproportionately thicker legs (Galileo’s 3/2 ratio).
• Women call their fathers less when fertile—a subconscious evolutionary safeguard against incest.

Learning and attention

• Walter Mischel’s marshmallow test: The secret of self‑control was not brute willpower but distraction.
• We have a learning instinct: Chicks only learn songs if parents are present to imitate.
• Attention is finite: What we notice and read (full articles vs. headlines) shapes how smart we become.

Humility before evidence

• Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
• The plural of anecdotes is not data; the plural of opinions is not facts.

Strengths

Wide range of ideas: A treasure trove of concepts from multiple disciplines.

Digestible format: Each essay is short, often a page or two, making it easy to dip in and out.

Occasional gems: Some insights—like shifting baselines or apophenia—stick in the mind and genuinely sharpen awareness.

Weaknesses

Fragmented and uneven: The book is a collection, not a course. Insights appear randomly without building on each other.

Variable quality: Some contributions are brilliant, others are little more than trivia or self‑promotion.

Over‑promising title: Reading the book alone will not make you “smarter”; at best, it broadens your conceptual vocabulary.

Reflections

I found the book stimulating in small doses but frustrating as a whole. There is pleasure in browsing an idea and thinking “I didn’t know that,” but little stays with you unless you make the effort to extract and apply the concepts. My strongest takeaways were the reminders about cognitive bias and attention: that smart thinking comes from deliberate awareness of how easily we fool ourselves, and that curiosity must be paired with evidence.

Still, I was left wishing for more structure and synthesis. A curator’s introduction connecting the essays into a coherent map of “thinking tools” would have made the collection far more powerful.

Conclusion

This Will Make You Smarter is best treated as a book to browse, not to study. Read a few pages at a time, highlight the concepts that resonate, and perhaps add them to your own thinking toolkit. It will expand your sense of what counts as a “scientific idea,” but it will not replace deliberate practice in reasoning or learning.

Rating: ★★★☆☆ (3/5)

Book Details

Title: This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking (Edge Question)
Author: John Brockman
Publication Year: 2012
Genre: Basic Science, Neuroscience
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