Dear Colleagues:

We are very excited to be writing this letter. For most of our adult lives, the three of us have been studying the human mind and teaching our students what we and other psychologists have learned. We’ve each written articles in professional journals to convey our findings and ideas to our colleagues, and we’ve published books to communicate with the general public. For each of us, though, there has been something important missing: a text written specifically for students. We’ve been hard at work on that for the past few years, and we anxiously await the upcoming publication of the book. That’s why we’re so excited.

We each have rather different special interests in psychology that cover a broad range of the field, including cognitive psychology, social psychology, clinical psychology and neuroscience. But we all share a common fascination with “mind bugs”: mental mistakes that reveal how the mind works and helps us to understand its many strengths. Schacter studies the errors that people make when remembering their pasts – mistakes that can create major problems in everyday life, but also provide insights into why memory generally works as well as it does. Gilbert examines how well people can look into the future and predict what will make them happy. Just as people make systematic errors when they mentally travel backward in time, so too do they make errors when they mentally travel forward. Wegner has shown that trying not to think about something, even a white bear, can make us think about it more, which turns out to be important for understanding how people can become obsessed with thoughts of forbidden foods, lost loves, and feared situations.

Our experience with teaching students tells us that they are every bit as fascinated by mind bugs as we are.  So we’ve chosen to organize our text around this theme. We think that it serves to relate seemingly different topics to one another, highlights the strengths of the human mind as well as its vulnerabilities, and also helps to make our book enjoyable to read. Reading a textbook should be just as engaging as reading a popular book, and we’ve worked hard to make sure that happens.

There’s a lot more to our text than just mind bugs. We hope our text conveys the passion for psychology that continues to inspire each of us.

Please contact us at thedans@worthpublishers.com if you have any questions or comments.  We would love to hear from you.

Best regards,

Dan Schacter

Dan Gilbert

Dan Wegner