Review: The Influential Mind: What the Brain Reveals About Our Power to Change Others. By Tali Sharot. Henry Holt. 231 pages. 978-1627792653

Facts alone don’t change people’s minds or behavior. Emotions do. That’s the basic takeaway from cognitive neuroscientist Tali Sharot’s highly accessible exploration of why and how we succeed, or fail, in our quest to influence, persuade, or alter the opinions and actions of others.

Understand how the brain works, she argues in The Influential Mind: What the Brain Reveals About Our Power to Change Others, and you’ll have a leg up in successfully formulating and delivering the messages you want to get across to others. Such insights can certainly be useful for therapists, who need to seek out the most effective ways to effect change in clients. But in these highly polarized times, the ability to persuade those who disagree with us can be a valuable skill in general, and Sharot’s chief principle for doing so is one to always bear in mind. Begin by momentarily setting aside your own beliefs, she advises, so you can tune in to the concerns of those who may hold on as tightly to their assumptions as you do to yours.

That’s easier said than done, especially as I watch what I perceive to be sure-fire arguments fizzle out in the courts of public opinion. But I found Sharot’s explanation for why people dig in their heels against another’s rational point of view to be oddly comforting. Their stubbornness has nothing to do with their IQs, and everything to do with their brains. As she writes, “Many of our instincts about influence—from insisting the other is wrong to attempting to exert control—are ineffective because they’re incompatible with how the mind operates.”

This goes for anyone who assumes that cold facts alone will win out over the heat of emotional rhetoric. Indeed, Sharot, who directs the Affective Brain Lab at University College London, begins her book with a confession, revealing how she, a PhD, armed with medical information galore about the benefits of the childhood measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccination, and certain in her rejection of the long-debunked connection between the vaccine and autism, nonetheless found herself overwhelmed with anxiety for her two young children when she heard then presidential candidate Donald Trump discuss the issue during a Republican party primary debate. He had no facts, just an anecdote about a “beautiful baby” who’d been stuck with a needle, “a pump” that looks “like it’s meant for a horse, not a child,” and who got “a tremendous fever” and became autistic.

To continue reading this review by Diane Cole, go to: https://psychotherapynetworker...e-persuade-and-alter