About this item
Several million years ago, natural selection equipped us with binary, black-and-white brains. Though the world was arguably simpler back then, it was in many ways much more dangerous. Not coincidentally, the binary brain was highly adept at detecting risk: the ability to analyze threats and respond to changes in the sensory environment -- a drop in temperature, the crack of a branch -- was essential to our survival as a species. Since then, the world has evolved -- but we, for the most part, haven't. Confronted with a panoply of shades of gray, our brains have a tendency to "force quit:" to sort the things we see, hear, and experience into manageable but simplistic categories. We stereotype, pigeon-hole, and, above all, draw lines where in reality there are none.
About the Author
Dr Kevin Dutton is a research fellow at the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford. He is an affiliated member of the Royal Society of Medicine and of the Society for the Scientific Study of Psychopathy. He is the author of the acclaimed Flipnosis: The Art of Split-Second Persuasion and The Wisdom of Psychopaths: Lessons In Life From Saints, Spies and Serial Killers. He lives in the Cotswolds.
