
A Brief Guide to Smart Thinking
From Zeno's Paradoxes to Freakonomics
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Narrated by:
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Roger Davis
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By:
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James M. Russell
About this listen
Each book is summarised to convey a brief idea of what each one has to offer the interested listener, while a 'Speed Read' for each book delivers a quick sense of what each book is like to read and a highly compressed summary of the main points of the book in question.
The titles covered include thought-provoking classics on psychology, mindfulness, rationality, the brain, mathematical and economic thought and practical philosophy. Books about self-improvement as well as historically interesting accounts of how the mind works can also be found.
Titles go back as far as the Epictetus classic The Enchiridion and Bertrand Russell's charming The ABC of Relativity, and proceed through classics such as Edward de Bono's Lateral Thinking and into the digital era with titles such as The Shallows and Big Data. The books are arranged chronologically, which draws attention to some of the interesting juxtapositions and connections between them.
Other titles included are: Freakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt; Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell; Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari; The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, by Daniel J. Levitin; The Descent of Man, by Grayson Perry; How the Mind Works, by Steven Pinker; Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do, by Matthew Syed; We Should All Be Feminists, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond; The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb; Man's Search for Meaning, by Viktor E. Frankl; The News: A User's Manual, by Alain de Botton; Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking, by Richard E. Nisbett; The ABC of Relativity, by Bertrand Russell; The Psychopath Test, by Jon Ronson; The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life, by Michael Puett; A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking; Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives, by Tim Harford; Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think, by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger; Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis; The Survivors Club: The Secrets and Science That Could Save Your Life, by Ben Sherwood; Black Box Thinking, by Matthew Syed; Chaos: Making a New Science, by James Gleick; A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson; The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr; Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality, by Scott Belsky; The Enchiridion, by Epictetus; Gödel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas R. Hofstadter; What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, by Haruki Murakami; and Lateral Thinking, by Edward de Bono.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Thinking outside the box means applying existing knowledge in new, unexpected ways to come up with new ideas and solutions. This is an essential skill in today’s fast-changing world. But saying “think outside the box” isn’t enough - you have to be aware of the box before you can think outside it. The scientific name for this imaginary box is “mental model”. Mental models are useful because they help you learn. They help you make sense of new information and attach it to your existing knowledge. But, at the same time, they can limit your thinking.
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What listeners say about A Brief Guide to Smart Thinking
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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- Jay Quintana
- 09-20-22
Great List of Books to Read...
... with summaries of what they're about. You'll definitely be inspired to pick up a bunch of them to read/listen in their entirety. As long as you know that this is all the book provides, you should get this. If you expect anything more -- info on the authors, how well the books sold, the impact the books had on the zeitgeist -- you'll be disappointed.
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