In my part-time alternate life as a consultant, I have often pondered why a person chooses to buy a Billabong sweatshirt as opposed to a Quiksilver one. The choice is not an obvious one. The products themselves are essentially the same. The name is the only real difference. The gradient between one and the other is an infinitesimal pattern of grey, yet the decision — and millions more exactly like it — happen everyday.

Jonah Lehrer has emerged over the past few years as neuroscience’s strongest and most interesting voice. His Proust Was a Neuroscientist (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007) is as smart and fun a mix of the Two Cultures as you’re likely to find. With his spot as Seed Magazine’s Editor at Large and a contributing editor gig at Wired, Lehrer is poised and positioned to inform the public about brain science like few others ever have been.

With How We Decide (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), Lehrer turns his attention to the marketplace and how our brain power influences our buying power. Peter Merholz wrote that it was clear that Lehrer had “attended the Gladwell school of non-fiction writing, anchoring his facts in stories.” Maybe it was a compliment, but having recently read Gladwell’s latest book (the sometimes quite interesting but ultimately nearly pointless Outliers), I prefer Lehrer’s prose. It’s clear, concise, and lyrical, and at least I know there’s some science behind it.

The traditional wisdom says that we make important decisions by relying on the rationality of the logical brain to override the “animal stuff” (as Howard Bloom calls it) of our emotions and instinctual drives. In How We Decide, Lehrer contends that the process is a bit more nuanced than that. It’s a subtle dance, a process of bend and blend that depends on the situation. Well, it’s not quite that simple either, but Lehrer’s book often makes it all seem so. It ends with a “taxonomy of decision-making,” which helpfully applies many of the book’s anecdotal dilemmas to practical, real-world situations.

Coming to the brain and purchasing decisions from a different angle, Geoffrey Miller’s Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Customer Behavior (Viking, 2009) argues that it’s all just so many peacock feathers. Miller is an evolutionary psychologist, so his lens is longer than Lehrer’s, but doesn’t mean he sees the situation any clearer or in higher relief. Like Lehrer, he writes to be read, but where Lehrer;s prose is positive, Miller’s negativity seeps into his sentences. His wit is by turns playful and biting, veiling and betraying a deep-seated cynicism toward the consumer capitalism he’s analyzing.

Miller writes like he’s the first academic to discover the field of marketing, as if Stewart Ewen, Douglas Rushkoff, and Marshall McLuhan (!), among many, many others hadn’t already upturned similar soil. In addition, his arguments smack of psychoanalytic reasoning (i.e., many of our purchasing decisions are driven by the libido and thereby illustrate material sublimation, many others are driven by narcissism, etc.) dressed up in evolutionary garb: We buy stuff to advertise our potential to each other as possible mates, sexual and Platonic. It’s certainly not all bad or bland though. Miller’s idea of “fitness faking” (about which I’ve written before) makes a brief appearance, and his “Exercises for the Reader” (similar to Lehrer’s concluding taxonomy) are a nice touch of pragmatism more science books could use.

After having read both of these books, I don’t feel any closer to understanding the Billabong/Quiksilver dilemma, but as Miller writes on the very first page of Spent, echoing McLuhan, “consumerism is hard to describe when it’s the ocean and we’re the plankton.”

Roy Christopher has posted his annual Summer Reading List. Click on that link and all will be revealed. For those not inclined to click through here’s my contribution, followed below by Roy’s.

Dave Allen

I’ve traveled less this year than is normal for me. No Gang of Four activity anymore, so no more mind numbing journeys by train, plane, and automobile alleviated only by the power of a good book. If I was a humanist I could say that at least my carbon footprint is lower, but the Earth has plans for us, and we can’t do a damn thing about it.

That thought has always been at the forefront of my mind as I have tracked the environmental/green movements, and then followed the chattering classes’ attempts to reduce the United States’ energy dependence as they dropped into the arms of the more-than-willing Toyota Corp, helping to push sales of the Prius through more than one million.

More than one million new vehicles added to the world’s roads. Well done. A bicycle and public transport would have actually made a difference.

That brings me to the book that affirmed my thoughts on our epic — but inevitably useless — human battle to change the course of the Earth. John Gray’s Straw Dogs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) published in 2002 is a book that I keep returning to. As the UK author, Will Self says, “Straw Dogs is that rarest of things, a contemporary work of philosophy devoid of jargon, wholly accessible, and profoundly relevant to the rapidly evolving world we live in.” Gray simply and concisely slices through the human conceit that we are radically different from other animals.

Otherwise I rediscovered Philip Roth especially his wonderfully depressing Exit Ghost (Houghton Mifflin). I also finally got around to reading Roth’s The Plot Against America (Vintage). Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) was a great read on long trans-continental flights and Robert Hughes’ memoir Things I Don’t Know (Vintage) was a fascinating read from the man who brought me two favorites, Barcelona (Vintage) and Culture of Complaint (Grand Central Publishing).

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Roy Christopher

David Mitchell Cloud Atlas (Random House): This collection of nested-doll stories from 2004 is like exploring an abandoned building via descending staircase, stopping on each floor to read some left-behind letters, a travel journal, or a mystery novel. Like Mitchell’s previous novel, Ghostwritten (Vintage) [also recommended], each section of this one refers to the others. It’s like reading pieces of several quasi
-related books that somehow add up to an engaging whole. I snagged this at Powell’s during my last few days in Portland based on its cover alone.

Sherry Turkle Falling for Science: Objects in Mind (MIT Press): One of the largely unsung voices of the digital revolution, Sherry Turkle has been hard at work for over two decades trying to keep tabs on technology’s influence on our lives. Inspired in the early eighties by Seymour Papert’s essay on an interest in the inner-workings of gears and how it lead him to study math (included in this volume), Turkle has assigned her students at MIT to write a similar piece. Falling for Science collects fifty-one of these essays — by her students and colleagues over the past twenty-five years — explaining how certain physical objects influenced them to pursue a life of science. Legos, bicycles, erector sets, computers, and other usual suspects get their due, but so do shirts, walls, bubbles, and keys (among many other things, both exp
ected and surprising). It’s an interesting look at the subtleties of design, influences (often unintended), science, and inspiration.

Mary Roach Bonk (W. W. Norton): Mary Roach has a knack for finding intriguing book topics (and writing interesting books about them, of course). They’re all slightly askew, but one can easily see how anyone would be interested in them. In Stiff she followed the afterlives of cadavers, in Spook she followed the afterlife of afterlives (ghosts), and in Bonk she, ahem, gets science laid. It’s everything you always wanted to know about sex — if you’re a science geek.

Mikita Brottman The Solitary Vice: Against Reading (Counterpoint): If there were a Bibliophiles Anonymous, this would be its bible. Brottman isn’t actually averse to reading, quite the opposite, but in The Solitary Vice, she explores the reasons that attitudes toward reading have been so historically conflicted. Coincidentally, her book is a damn good read.

James D. Watson Avoid Boring People (Knopf): As marginally interested as I am in James Watson’s Nobel-winning scientific work, I’m finding his memoirs completely enthralling. Here’s one of the co-discoverers of the building blocks of life breaking down his academic career into first-person narratives and — true to its title — easily digestible lists of practical advice, unwritten protocols, and lessons learned. This book proves that Watson’s gift for scientific inquiry is well matched by his wily way with words.

I’m also currently reading and re-reading the following: Gilbert Ryle The Concept of Mind (University of Chicago Press), Jack O’Connell Word Made Flesh (Perennial) [Thanks, Ashley], Terry Eagleton The Gatekeeper (St. Martin’s), Christopher Vogler The Writer’s Journey (Michael Wiese Productions), Etienne Wenger Communities of
Practice (Cambridge University Press), Rebecca Solnit Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Penguin), and Andrew Ortony (editor) Metaphor and Thought (Cambridge University Press).