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Riveted: The Science of Why Jokes Make Us Laugh, Movies Make Us Cry, and Religion Makes Us Feel One with the Universe Audiobook
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Professor Jim Davies’s fascinating and highly accessible book, Riveted, reveals the evolutionary underpinnings of why we find things compelling. What we like and don’t like is almost always determined by subconscious forces, and when we try to consciously predict our own preferences we’re often wrong. In one study of speed dating, people were asked what kinds of partners they found attractive. When the results came back, the participants’ answers before the exercise had no correlation with who they actually found attractive in person! We are beginning to understand just how much the brain makes our decisions for us: we are rewarded with a rush of pleasure when we detect patterns, as the brain thinks we’ve discovered something significant; the mind urges us to linger on the news channel or rubberneck an accident in case it might pick up important survival information; it even pushes us to pick up People magazine in order to find out about changes in the social structure. Drawing on work from philosophy, anthropology, religious studies, psychology, economics, computer science, and biology, Davies offers a comprehensive explanation to show that in spite of the differences between the many things that we find compelling, they have similar effects on our minds and brains.
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"A fascinating analysis of what we find fascinating."
— Kirkus
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About Jim Davies
Jim Davies is a professor at the Institute of Cognitive Science of Carleton University, and director of the Science of Imagination Laboratory. He has been featured in Skeptic and Nautilus magazines, and has presented at Pecha Kucha Ottawa and TEDx on his theories of imagination. He lives in Ottawa, Canada.
About Matthew Josdal
Matthew Josdal is a voice-over and theater artist originally from a small town in southwest Saskatchewan. He obtained his BFA degree in drama from the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. He has narrated audiobooks in genres ranging from historical nonfiction to contemporary fantasy, along with most things in between. In addition to a fifteen-plus year career in acting for both stage and microphone, he completed all requirements for his honors degree in psychology.