Matthew Hutson shows that all of us, even the staunchest skeptics, engage in magical thinking all the time--and that we can use it to our advantage, if we know how to outsmart it. Drawing on cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, and anthropology, Hutson shows us that magical thinking has been so useful to us that it's hardwired into our brains. It encourages us to think that we actually have free will. It helps us believe that we have an underlying purpose in the world. It can even protect us from the paralyzing awareness of our own mortality. In other words, magical thinking is a completely irrational way of making our lives make sense.

Scientists have colluded in the most successful cover-up of modern times. They present themselves as cool, logical, and level-headed, when the truth is that they will do anything--take drugs, follow mystical visions, lie, and even cheat --to make a discovery. They are often more interested in starting revolutions than in playing by the rules. In Free Radicals, bestselling author Michael Brooks reveals the extreme lengths some of our most celebrated scientists--such as Newton, Einstein, and Watson and Crick--are willing to go to, from fraud to reckless, unethical experiments, in order to make new discoveries and bring them to the world's attention.

Human intelligence is among the most powerful forces on earth. It builds sprawling cities, vast cornfields and coffee plantations, complex microchips; it takes us from the atom to the limits of the universe. Understanding how brains build intelligence is among the most fascinating challenges of modern science. How does the biological brain, a collection of billions of cells, enable us to do things no other species can do? In this book, John Duncan, a scientist who has spent 30 years studying the human brain, offers an adventure story--the story of the hunt for basic principles of human intelligence, behavior, and thought.