Read it through. Now to go back, slowly, and do the exercises in the book. Many look especially promising. I expect my rating to change upward once I've done that.

Thank you Sounds True Publishing and Netgalley for an ARC of this book in return for my honest review.

I initially read this book many weeks ago and recently came back it the passages I had highlighted and the exercises throughout. This book is fantastic for reminding us that we filter incoming information to fit with our biases, and how to recognise this as it occurs and live in a more open, non judgemental manner. A wonderful book to remind us to live more mindfully and from a less ‘I’ centric place.

The book draws on research referred to in many respected books, one example being ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’.
I enjoyed the initial read and enjoyed returned to all my highlighted places just as much.

A highly recommended book, thank you for the opportunity to read and review it.

The Blind Spot Effect is a book that essentially teaches how to pay attention to your thoughts and improve your observation of the world around you in order to find your blind spots. the end game of this is to enable you to make better decisions.

WHO WOULD ENJOY IT?
Anyone looking to improve their decision making.

IS IT WORTH READING?
There are a lot of real-life examples in this book, with quotations from experts that deal with the mind and brain. If you do not mind going through all this, then you will enjoy this book. The content is valuable and if you read carefully, could change the way you perceive things.

SAMPLE PASSAGE
Stories don’t always steer us in the right direction. Having a coherent narrative about something, no matter what it is, from “I’m fat” to “Immigrants are taking all our jobs” to “Our company is the best and will never be beat,” may all be easy on the brain, but are they true? We are generally accurate with our stories — at least enough to keep from bumping into walls while walking, to agree that a red light means stop, and to remember people’s names and the capital of Nebraska. So we tend to think all our stories are true. This is important to understand. Questioning our ideas and assumptions is hard. That’s why we dupe ourselves; we confirm our own ideas so quickly, based on the assumption that we are accurate, that we miss the chance to see whether we missed something. Our need to create coherent stories and have them feel believable (and hence unquestioned) leads us to form and protect blind spots.

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The Blind Spot Effect: How to Sto Missing What's Right in Front of You by Kelly Boys is available to buy on all major online bookstores from July 2018. Many thanks to Sounds True Publishing for review copy.

The studies were interesting (and there were some things I hadn't read elsewhere) but some parts of the book were slower and I just couldn't get that into them. Lots of my reading is done late at night or in between other things, so it has to be riveting -- so it may be my fault for not having the attention span for the slower parts.

I've been meaning to try out a nonfiction book, and this one just happened to appear in my field of vision. There's something about self-awareness and improving general life living that calls me to self-help works, which is odd because reading is usually meant to get me out of my head and away from myself.

Here's the part where I either talk about how life changing this book is or how there's nothing "new" to the information it presents to its audience. Not exactly going to do either of those things.

I think the reason I kept reading The Blind Spot Effect was the discussion of the various psychological studies that were mentioned every once in a while. I'm assuming credibility is okay, but I guess I could google out one of the ones I liked if need be. They were definitely pretty fun to learn about; human behavior is just so weird, you know?

In terms of the actual discussion itself, the whole advice giving part was generally on the drier side for me. While it's understandable that generalizations were unavoidable and everything, it kind of got to me that assumptions upon assumptions were being made, many of which didn't exactly apply for my life.

One of the big things that the author played off of was mindfulness. Personally, apps like Headspace kind of work for me, but especially since a significant amount of the book involved the importance of presence and whatnot, I think the author could have really tried to elaborate more on what mindfulness could be for people as opposed to what it could do–if that makes sense. I felt like I was missing something as I read, which was definitely a tad unsettling.

All this talk about blind spots was intriguing, but I don't think this book was quite what I was looking for in my quest for self-discovery and my already questionable mental state. Just a thought: the target audience may or may not be what it appears to be, as the advice seems to be(?) geared toward relatively stable people looking for something that could be life changing.

Best of luck in publishing, and my thanks to Netgalley and Sounds True Publishing for the interesting read!