"No fictional character is more renowned for his powers of thought and observation than Sherlock Holmes. But is his extraordinary intellect merely a gift of fiction, or can we learn to cultivate these abilities ourselves, to improve our lives at work and at home? We can, says psychologist and journalist Maria Konnikova, and in Mastermind she shows us how. Beginning with the "brain attic", Holmes's metaphor for how we store information and organize...

Logic is synonymous with reason, judgment, sense, wisdom, and sanity. Being logical is the ability to create concise and reasoned arguments-arguments that build from given premises, using evidence, to a genuine conclusion. But mastering logical thinking also requires studying and understanding illogical thinking, both to sharpen one's own skills and to protect against incoherent, or deliberately misleading, reasoning. Elegant, pithy, and precise,...

A psychology expert offers a tool kit for thinking more clearly and making better decisions, explaining how to reframe problems using simplified concepts from science and statistics, including the law of large numbers, statistical regression, cost-benefit analysis, and causation and correlation.

[This book] is a contrarian treatise on why we're not as good at thinking as we assume-- but how recovering this lost art can rescue our inner lives from the chaos of modern life. As a celebrated cultural critic and a writer for national publications such as The Atlantic and Harper's, Alan Jacobs has spent his adult life belonging to communities that often clash in America's culture wars. And in his years of confronting the big issues that divide...

We are bombarded with more information each day than our brains can process, especially in election season. It's raining bad data, half-truths, and even outright lies. Daniel J. Levitin shows how to recognize misleading announcements, statistics, graphs, and written reports revealing the ways lying weasels can use them. Outlines recommendations for critical thinking practices that meet the challenges of the digital age's misinformation, demonstrating...

Lectures by Dr. David Zarefsky, Professor of Argumentation and Debate and Professor of Communication Studies, Northwestern University, cover the history of rhetoric and debate as well as analysis of different types of arguments in various situations.

"Expanding upon his viral TEDx Talk, psychology professor and social scientist John V. Petrocelli reveals the critical thinking habits you can develop to recognize and combat pervasive false information that harms society in The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit. Bullshit is the foundation of contaminated thinking and bad decisions leading to health consequences, financial losses, legal consequences, broken relationships, and wasted time...

"MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan isn't one to avoid arguments. He relishes them, as the lifeblood of democracy and the only surefire way to establish the truth. Arguments help us solve problems, uncover new ideas we might not have considered, and nudge our disagreements toward mutual understanding. A good argument, made in good faith, has intrinsic value-and can also simply be fun. Arguments are everywhere-and especially given the fierce debates we're all embroiled...

"Examines 21 unquestioned assumptions that cloud our collective consciousness"--