Why read The Self Delusion?

Book cover of The Self Delusion

Book description

A New York Times–bestselling author reveals how the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves, are critical to our lives

We all know we tell stories about ourselves. But as psychiatrist and neuroscientist Gregory Berns argues in The Self Delusion, we don't just tell stories; we are the stories. Our self-identities…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Self Delusion as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Frank Rose

Author

The most basic, the most life-determining story is the one you tell yourself about yourself. Who are you? How did you get to be that way? And by the way, what is reality?

I reviewed this book for The Wall Street Journal and found it eye-opening. I was struck by Berns’s account of “how other people’s narratives worm their way into our brains,” creating a consensus version of reality he calls “a shared delusion.”

This delusion can become self-limiting, even self-destructive. And so we have counterfactuals, the narratives of possibiity that allow us to escape these constraints—to change our story,…

From Frank's list on The best books on pattern recognition and how we make sense of our random world.