Best known outside the world of legal scholarship as co-author of the influential Nudge with Nobel Prize-winning economist Richard Thaler, Harvard law professor Cass R. Sunstein has returned to the field of human behavior, this time with Tali Sharot, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London and MIT. In their engaging Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There, Sunstein and Sharot explore habituation--our psychological adaption to our environment--and how a consciousness of the subtle ways this phenomenon influences human thoughts and actions can help people lead a more examined, and more fruitful, life.
Combining stories drawn from life and literature with accounts of controlled experiments, some conducted in Sharot's own laboratory, the authors make it clear that habituation is an inescapable, and in many ways essential, fact of human existence. Through numerous examples, they illustrate why "to survive, your brain must prioritize what is new and different." Nonetheless, in considering a broad range of everyday experiences that include social media, creativity, risk assessment, and our adaptation to climate change, they offer useful approaches for awakening from what often amounts to a cognitive fog, to refresh and renew our lives. Whether it's breaking up positive experiences into small chunks, or offering tips to enhance our awareness of pervasive misinformation, their suggestions for eliminating the psychological blind spots that are the product of overfamiliarity are numerous and useful.
Look Again is a worthy addition to literature at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience, and economics, making them accessible to the general reader. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer