The Argument Inside You : The psychology of brain and heart - and how to know, in any decision, which one to trust
Overview
Show someone a frightened face at the exact instant their heart beats, and they will judge it as more frightening than the same face shown a moment later.
Not metaphorically. Measurably - and the amygdala, the brain's threat detector, fires harder too. Nothing about the face has changed. What changed was the timing of a pulse.
Your head says one thing and your chest says another, and the advice you have been given is to follow your heart or to be rational. That is not advice. It is a coin toss with better branding.
This book takes a different route: what has actually been measured about how emotion and reasoning produce a decision, where each one reliably fails, and the two conditions that determine which of them deserves the final word.
The test at the centre of the bookAfter six years spent trying to disagree with each other, two of psychology's great rivals - one who believed intuition was largely unreliable, one who had spent a career documenting expert intuition in firefighters and intensive care - arrived at the same answer. It came down to exactly two conditions.
Two questions. About ninety seconds to run. Answer yes to both and your intuition is compressed experience worth acting on. Anything less and it is a feeling wearing the costume of knowledge. The book gives you both questions, how to answer them honestly, and what to do when the answer is close.
Inside- What the heart's nervous system really does, and what it cannot do
- Where the famous findings are weaker than they are usually reported - including one of this book's own
- The Trust Test, and the three tie-breakers for when it is close
- Twenty traps: ten ways the head misleads you, ten ways the heart does
- Twenty-four named decisions across work, love, danger and meaning, with who should lead in each
- Nine practices to run when the two will not agree
- A decision log that turns decisions into evidence you can actually learn from
Every study is named, and every limit is stated. Where a finding rests on eighteen people, the book says eighteen. Where a celebrated result has failed to replicate cleanly, it says that too - including about the finding it opens with.
For anyone who has been told to trust their gut by someone who had no idea whether their gut had ever been right.
This item is Non-Returnable
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9798173839695
- ISBN-10: 9798173839695
- Publisher: Independently Published
- Publish Date: September 2026
- Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.17 inches
- Shipping Weight: 0.27 pounds
- Page Count: 84
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