The Blind Spot Effect

May 28, 2018
This worthwhile debut from Boys, who helped launch Google’s “Search Inside Yourself” mindfulness program, lays out a self-help plan designed to address the personal “blind spots” that distort people’s thinking. “We are all like Hiroo in some way, blindly defending something that does not need defending anymore,” says Boys, referring to a Japanese intelligence officer who, stranded on an island in the Philippines after WWII, did not learn for decades that the war had ended. A blind spot can be a compulsion to be liked, a “recycled” or recurrent emotion like anxiety, or a feeling of unworthiness—any unconscious driver of self-destructive behaviors. The author draws on the work of prominent psychologists, such as Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (the
subjects of Michael Lewis’s 2016 book The Undoing Project), and mindfulness teachers, such as Jon Kabat-Zinn, to discuss how readers can get to “home base”—a state of honesty with oneself and access to one’s intuition. Boys’s prose does not sparkle, but it is persuasive, and readers will appreciate the series of meditation practices provided. This book takes a simple idea and drives it home.