Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average

For instance, many of us have fallen for those ultra-low interest-rate teasers that credit-card companies send through the mail. And, all of us have probably forgotten an important password, or hidden something in a secret place only to forget, hours later, where we put it.

These are exactly the kinds of mistakes the author investigates in this book. We all make them, and now we can find out why we make them. The author presents countless scientific studies, puzzles, and case studies to back up what he says.

In fact, the bibliography is 18 pages long, which is longer than the entire last chapter. It seems highly unlikely the author cherry-picked his data for this book. The thoroughness of his research, and the wide variety of sources he used, is impressive.

Perhaps that's to be expected. The author, Joseph Hallinan, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a former writer for The Wall Street Journal.

So, who should read "Why We Make Mistakes"?

Well, anyone who's curious about how their mind works will enjoy this book. And all of us could use the lessons in humility that are scattered through these chapters. So, whether you're a seasoned CEO or just entering the workforce, you'll definitely learn something of interest from this book.

At the very least, "Why We Make Mistakes" will provide some really fascinating conversation starters.

So, keep listening to find out why you should ask your doctor to check your X-rays twice, how you can start remembering people's names more easily, and why multitasking can get you killed if you're not careful.

The first chapter covers a really big and common mistake: how we look at something but don't really see it. The most striking example of this is also the most horrifying.

First, it's important to understand that most of us have what scientists call a quitting threshold. This means that we'll only look for something for so long until we give up. And that makes sense. We can't look for something that's missing forever, right?

And it's not because we're lazy. Scientists have proven that our minds are literally hardwired to quit early when a target isn't there.

But what happens when it's your job to look for things that are rarely there? Like, say, a radiologist?

Think about it. A radiologist's entire job centers around looking for tumors, fractures and other anomalies. And, those anomalies are almost never there.

For instance, routine mammograms reveal tumors only 0.3 percent of the time. This means that for the other 99.7 percent of the time, radiologists are looking for something they know they're probably not going to find.

Because of our natural quitting threshold, there are considerable error rates in the field of radiology. Because radiologists so rarely find what they're looking for, they subconsciously quit looking.

The horrifying aspect of this is the numbers. The Mayo Clinic did a study where they went back and looked at previously normal X-rays of lung cancer patients. They found that 90 percent of the tumors were visible months or even years before the cancer was diagnosed. But the radiologists just hadn't caught them.

This is a frightening example of how easy it is for us to look without seeing. And it's proof positive that you should always ask your doctor to double-check your X-rays.

The next chapter goes into why we tend to search for meaning in everything we do. It's this quirk that makes us forget people's names, our crafty hiding places, and our pin numbers.

Surely most of us have wondered about this at one point or another. Why can we remember someone's face so well, but forget their name minutes, or even seconds, after they tell it to us?

Well, part of the answer lies in how we remember things. Our brains automatically search for meaning. And names mean nothing to us. After all, what difference does it make if your name is Ann or Susan or Cathy?

To prove his point, the author quotes an interesting British study here. Years ago, scientists asked volunteers to study the profiles of fictitious people. Each profile contained the person's name, their hometown, their jobs, and their hobbies.

And what did people remember? Well, occupations were remembered 69 percent of the time. Hobbies were remembered 68 percent of the time. But the fictitious names were remembered only 30 percent.

Again, the reason is that names are just a label. It means something to us that someone enjoys photography, or that they work as a baker, and that enables those facts to stick with us. They're richer details than a person's name.

The author suggests that if we want to remember those less interesting details, like a person's name or a series of dates, we have to make them meaningful to us. If we can make a name or a date personal in some way, we're far more likely to remember it.

Like all the chapters in this book, this one is chock-full of scientific studies and examples that clearly illustrate how forgetful we really are. Here, we learn why we forget our hiding places, why crimes hanging on witness identification are so unreliable, and why so many of us can have information on the tips of our tongues but not remember it when we need to.

If you want to find the answers to some of these interesting conundrums, you'll have to pick up the book.

Chapter five is particularly compelling. It covers how disastrous our attempts at multitasking can be. You may already have heard that people actually accomplish less when they're multitasking. After all, our brains can only really focus on one thing at a time. Any gains we think we get from multitasking are an illusion.

And yet we still do it. We talk on our cell phones while we're filling out forms. We attempt to finish a report while listening in on a conference call. We send an email while talking to a colleague.

Yes, we can do these things. But not well. Every time we have to juggle tasks, our brain slows down. So instead of doing one thing well, we do two things poorly.

Multitasking also makes us more forgetful. Our brains are equipped with something called working memory. This is what enables us to keep that running 'to-do list' in our heads. We know, for instance, that we need to send an email, call a client, and make an appointment, all before one o'clock.

But every time our concentration is disrupted, it takes us longer to access that information again. If we get interrupted in the middle of the first task – sending the email – there's a 40 percent chance that we're going to completely forget the second task: calling our client.

Another major cost to multitasking is downtime. If we get a phone call while working on a report, it's going to take up to 15 minutes for us to regain the full concentration we need to write it well. Talk about wasted time.

Okay, so this is probably information we've all heard before, at least on some level. But it should still serve as a reminder about the importance of doing only one thing at a time.

And what about the real world? You know, the one that's outside the office. Does multitasking make much of a difference out there?

Well, here's another scary fact. The author says it's even more dangerous to multitask outside the office. After all, if you take a call while writing a report, you're probably not going to die. But take one while you're driving? Your chances of having an accident just doubled the moment you looked down for your cell phone.

Researchers with the United States National Highway Traffic Safety Administration gathered some pretty frightening statistics in a study they did on accidents. They discovered that 78 percent of all crashes were the result of drivers either looking away or multitasking. They were doing things like sending text messages, emailing work, fiddling with their GPS devices, answering their cell phones – everything but driving the car responsibly.

The best way to drive safely is to follow your mother's advice. You know, eyes on the road and hands on the wheel.

Now at this point, you might be wondering what you should do with this information. Does the author give us bullet point suggestions at the end of every chapter? Does he tell us how to stop making so many mistakes?

Well, the answer to that is no, and this is our only piece of criticism. "Why We Make Mistakes" is very well researched, and the author gives us countless studies and cases that prove every point he brings up in the book. In fact, there are so many that the book almost feels scattered.

But there's not much in the way of helpful suggestions until the very last chapter, where the author attempts to assess this mountain of information and give us some advice about what we can actually do with it all.

To give him credit, there is some good advice in there. For instance, one insightful tip has to do with people's mindset. Psychologists believe we make decisions from two levels, either rational or visceral. And, these two operating modes are constantly switching back and forth.

Most of our mistakes happen when we're operating in one condition, but think we're operating in the other. A good example of this is when we take out a bank loan. We may think we're getting the loan because we need the money at that moment. But the reality is that the bank's ad featured an attractive model, and that's really what pulled us through the door.

And when we take out a loan and can't afford the interest payments, we blame the wrong cause. We think we might have done the math wrong, when it was really clever advertising that got us hooked.

Blaming the wrong cause makes it hard for us to really learn from a lot of our mistakes.

So, there are some good tips here. But some readers may find there just aren't enough. This final chapter is very short, and it feels a bit like it was tacked on as an afterthought. More information here would have been very welcome.

Does this detract from the book overall? We didn't think so. Sure, it would be nice to have helpful suggestions listed at the end of each chapter. As it is, the author leaves it mostly up to us to take this information and run with it. But, "Why We Make Mistakes" is still worth your time to read.

Because of the almost overwhelming number of scientific studies and case examples, some readers might find this book easier to digest in bits, reading one chapter at a time. But don't think it's a boring read. It's not.

In someone else's hands, all this information could have resulted in a very dry, disjointed look at our less flattering tendencies. Instead, "Why We Make Mistakes" is fun and highly readable. Once you're done, you'll not only have a better understanding of how your mind works, you'll have plenty of interesting stories to tell at your next meeting or dinner party.

So, if you'd like to know why your local market can sucker you into buying a more expensive wine just with the music they're playing, or why sports teams wearing black get penalized more than other teams, you'll want to buy this book. And for the record, that won't be a mistake.

"Why We Make Mistakes", by Joseph Hallinan, is published by Broadway Books.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights.