How history gets things wrong : the neuroscience of our addiction to stories / Alex Rosenberg.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 261-272) and index.

Besotted by stories -- How many times can the German Army play the same trick? -- Why ever did Hitter declare war on the US? That's easy, too easy! -- Is the theory of mind wired in? -- The natural history of historians -- What exactly was the Kaiser thinking? -- Can neuroscience tell us what Talleyrand meant? -- Talleyrand's betrayal: in inside story -- Jeopardy answer: it shows the theory is completely wrong. Jeopardy question: what does neuroscience teach us about the theory of mind? -- The future of an illusion -- Henry Kissinger mind reads his way through the Congress of Vienna -- Guns, germs, steel and all that -- The Gulag Archipelago and the uses of history back-non-story.

"This trade book takes on the widely-shared belief that learning the history of something always contributes to understanding it, is often the best way to do so, and sometimes is the only way. The aim is to explain away these three beliefs, to show why historical narrative is always, always wrong, not just incomplete or inaccurate or unfounded, but mistaken the way Ptolemaic astronomy or Phlogiston chemistry is wrong. The resources employed to do this are those of evolutionary anthropology, cognitive science, and most of all neuroscience. Much of the book reports Nobel Prize winning advances in neuroscience in ways that are accessible to the non-specialist and reveals their relevance for our fatal attraction to stories. Although framed as a searching critique of historical narrative as path to understanding and knowledge, the book also provides a report of the current state of play of research in cognitive social psychology, evolutionary anthropology, and the study of the brain at the level of neural detail"-- Provided by publisher.