Henry Hagnäs

Book review: 59 Seconds

As mentioned in my review of "Finding Flow" (http://www.henryhagnas.com/book-review-finding-flow ) I prefer self-help books that are based on actual science and gives real, practical, suggestions on what to improve. Professor Richard Wiseman's book, "59 Seconds - Think a little Change a lot," most definitely belongs in the science-based self-help section. It is in fact a study in what parts of what self-help books tend to tell you are actually based on science.

Instead of concentrating on one or a few topics of improvement, Professor Wiseman takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of all kinds of little nifty and scientifically proven ways to think and act to improve your mood, creativity, cognitive ability and motivation among other things. He has condensed hundreds of articles into an easy and fun to read format of just over 300 pages, naturally with all the footnotes and source-information necessary. Each chapter has a general theme, "Happiness," "Persuasion," "Motivation" and "Creativity" just to name the first four. Every chapter begins with an overview of what modern science thinks of the subject, before going into more details about some of the main research and then ends with a "59 second"-howto on what you can do. If you are a busy person you can just skip to this part and read his suggestions.

As an added bonus, Professor Wiseman also touches upon the most popular myths of psychology that you might have read about or heard from someone - such as playing Mozart to your baby will make it smarter (sorry, won't help) and so on. It's really interesting how some things just end up in the popular zeitgeist without being based on much facts at all.

Very interesting topics in a fast and easy to read format, I would recommend this to anyone who likes to know more about psychology and the world around us. Myself? I moved my favorite potted plant to my desk for a 15% increase in creativity.