A Field Guide to Lies and Statistics: A Neuroscientist on How to Make Sense of a Complex World

Winner of the Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction

Winner of the 2017 National Business Book Award

Shortlisted for the 2016/2017 Donner Prize

From the bestselling author of The Organized Mind, the must-have book about how to analyze who and what to trust in the age of information overload.

It's becoming harder to separate the wheat from the digital chaff. How do we distinguish misinformation, pseudo-facts, distortions and outright lies from reliable information? In A Field Guide to Lies, neuroscientist Daniel Levitin outlines the many pitfalls of the information age and provides the means to spot and avoid them.
     Levitin groups his field guide into two categories--statistical infomation and faulty arguments--ultimately showing how science is the bedrock of critical thinking. It is easy to lie with stats and graphs as few people "take the time to look under the hood and see how they work." And, just because there's a number on something, doesn't mean that the number was arrived at properly. Logic can help to evaluate whether or not a chain of reasoning is valid. And "infoliteracy" teaches us that not all sources of information are equal, and that biases can distort data.
     Faced with a world too eager to flood us with information, the best response is to be prepared. A Field Guide to Lies helps us avoid learning a lot of things that aren't true.

Daniel J. Levitin, PhD is the James McGill Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal and is dean of the College of Arts and Humanities at the Minerva Schools at KGI. He is the author of This Is Your Brain on Music, The World in Six Songs, and The Organized Mind. He divides his time between Montreal, Quebec, and the San Francisco Bay area.