Riveted, Jim Davies
Riveted, Jim Davies
List: $17.99 | Sale: $12.59
Club: $8.99

Riveted
The Science of Why Jokes Make Us Laugh, Movies Make Us Cry, and Religion Makes Us Feel One with the Universe

Author: Jim Davies

Narrator: Matthew Josdal

Unabridged: 9 hr 15 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 08/15/2017


Synopsis

Professor Jim Davies's fascinating and highly accessible book, Riveted, reveals the evolutionary underpinnings of why we find things compelling.

What we like and don't like is almost always determined by subconscious forces, and when we try to consciously predict our own preferences we're often wrong. In one study of speed dating, people were asked what kinds of partners they found attractive. When the results came back, the participants' answers before the exercise had no correlation with who they actually found attractive in person! We are beginning to understand just how much the brain makes our decisions for us: we are rewarded with a rush of pleasure when we detect patterns, as the brain thinks we've discovered something significant; the mind urges us to linger on the news channel or rubberneck an accident in case it might pick up important survival information; it even pushes us to pick up People magazine in order to find out about changes in the social structure.

Drawing on work from philosophy, anthropology, religious studies, psychology, economics, computer science, and biology, Davies offers a comprehensive explanation to show that in spite of the differences between the many things that we find compelling, they have similar effects on our minds and brains.

About Jim Davies

Jim Davies is a professor at the Institute of Cognitive Science of Carleton University, and director of the Science of Imagination Laboratory. He has been featured in Skeptic and Nautilus magazines, and has presented at Pecha Kucha Ottawa and TEDx on his theories of imagination. He writes a Psychology Today blog called The Science of Imagination. He lives in Ottawa, Canada.


Reviews

Have you ever wondered why people are compelled to watch the news every night or why religion is such a powerful influence to so many? Why is discovering patterns so thrilling and solving puzzles so satisfying? Jim Davies, in his book Riveted: The Science of Why Jokes Make Us Laugh, Movies Make Us Cr......more

Jim Davies is a professor at the Institute of Cognitive Science and the director of the Science of Imagination Laboratory who has also been featured in Skeptic one of the few journals I still subscribe to. The inner jacket describes the book as being about what rivets our attention: "Why can't we lo......more

Goodreads review by Lynn

Riveted is a mass market science book much in the same vein as Inheritance which I've read earlier this year. I was given this book by Goodreads in the giveaway program. Riveted gives a lot of fun, quaint tidbits of statistics and information about why peace people do what they do. It can be fun but......more

Goodreads review by Nicki

First audiobook! This was such a fun one :)......more