Enlightening and highly amusing, Inevitable Illusions by Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini (John Wiley, £12.99/$15.95, ISBN 0 471 15962 X) is about “mental tunnels”. If you fly due south from Detroit, you will be flying over Canada. Amazed? Then you are a sufferer from illusions and have a wrong mental picture of the map. Such biases, or cognitive illusions, are somehow built into the mind and affect the way we think. The author tracks them down in surprising numbers and with a discomforting but never less than entertaining style.
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