Forward / Wray Herbert -- Introduction: Hacking the cognitive compass -- Certainty and the seduction of chance -- Drifting, discounting, and escaping -- Motivation, restraint, and regret -- Social ebbs and influential flows -- Memory and modeling -- Nothing so pure as action

Years of neuroscience research have led to the current understanding of the brain as a prediction machine. The problem is that our brains' evolved capacity for avoiding and defending against threats has a slew of by-products, all tightly woven into our day-to-day thinking and behavior, that ensnare us while making our threat-anticipating brains "happy."