[WT Sharpe]

I didn't see any information in the review with which I was unfamiliar, but it's nice to see it all in one book; although somewhere there's probably a better review for that book than the one Joe Quirk offers. I personally found his everyman style of writing to be off-putting. It was my first experience with him, although if Robert Burton's On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You Are Not is as good as Quirk says it is—and I have no reason to doubt it—this is a book which, in his words, "everyone with a strong opinion should read."

A little knowledge of how the mind actually stores, processes, and retrieves data can be humbling. It's not as exact a process as most people assume. Do you really recall where you were and what you were doing when the Challenger exploded? Those 106 students who wrote reports on their personal experience of the tragedy for psychologist Ulric Neisser thought they did, yet those reports, written in the immediate aftermath, contradicted their recalled memories of the event when interviewed 2.5 years later, to the point where one student actually said, "That's my handwriting, but that's not what happened."

I do believe in an external reality, but for each of us, our perception of it, and our recollections of past events that occurred in it, are in large part our own creation, and realizing that can go a long way toward making us more tolerant of human imperfections, both in ourselves and in those around us.