Clearer, Closer, Better

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Seeing a New Way Forward

One summer, my research team asked more than 1,400 men and women from sixteen countries which one of their five senses they would least like to lose. Which would be the most difficult to live without if it were taken away? Regardless of where they were from, their age, or their gender, seven out of every ten people said that losing their sense of sight would be the worst. The majority thought that they couldn t live without vision. But actually, they could.

Let s take a step back and make sure we re on the same page with some of the fundamentals of vision science. We experience the sense of sight because of the connection our eyes have with our brains. We pick up on the brightness of the sun or register the hue of the sky with our eyes, but we only really experience seeing once our brains translate those sensations into something meaningful. Consider the following example. Linseed oil, mineral salts, bristle brushes, linen, and wood are products in their own right; but only when Claude Monet combined them in the right proportions and manner were we able to see the water lilies he painted outside his home in Giverny.

Alvaro Pascual-Leone is a neurologist at Harvard Medical School, and he s famous for discovering what happens in our brains when we lose our sense of sight. He found that the visual cortex the part of the brain at the back of our heads that specializes in making sense of the signals the eyes send it is incredibly quick to retool when something changes in how our eyes operate. He invited people with normal vision to experience life without sight for five days. The volunteers wore blindfolds. These weren t the kind you get in your travel kit when you fly internationally. They were high-tech and lined with photographic paper that would react to light exposure, so the researchers knew that none of the volunteers had seen the light of day (or bulb) since putting them on.

Pascual-Leone and

Emily Balcetis, PhD, is an associate professor of psychology at New York University. She received her PhD from Cornell University in 2006, and is the author of more than seventy scientific publications. Her work has been covered by Forbes, Newsweek, Time, Telemundo, National Public Radio, Scientific American, The Atlantic, Cosmopolitan, and GQ. She has received numerous awards, including from the Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences, the International Society for Self and Identity, the Foundation for Personality and Social Psychology, and the Society of Experimental Social Psychology. Balcetis has lectured at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago, among other renowned institutions, and she delivered a TEDx New York talk that has been viewed by several million people. She lives in New York City with her husband and their son.

Emily Balcetis  Clearer, Closer, Better is as entertaining as it is important a book that teaches you how to see the world, both literally and figuratively, in the service of cultivating a life of happiness, meaning, health, and prosperity. Balcetis writes with such verve that you ll forget you re learning, but along the way you ll discover how titans of business, the arts, sports, and fashion perceive the world to maximize their prospects of success. One of the most important and engaging books I ve read in a very long time. Adam Alter, New York Times bestselling author of Irresistible and Drunk Tank Pink

Clearer, Closer, Better offers an incisive analysis of the many ways we get things wrong misinterpret, don t look closely enough, see what we want to see, respond to the way things are phrased or positioned instead of the thing itself as well as a highly applicable road map to getting them right. Amy Cuddy, bestselling author of Presence

If you re staring down a goal that seems overwhelming, this book will give you a new way of looking at it. A rising star in the field of social psychology, Emily Balcetis gets real about the challenges of applying scientific insights to the messiness of daily life. In Clearer, Closer, Better, she offers sage, practical advice that I ve already incorporated into mine. Elizabeth Dunn, co-author of Happy Money: The Science of Happier Spending
 
  Ambitious . . . relatable and often thought-provoking. Kirkus Reviews

With insight, charm, and deep wisdom, Emily Balcetis wraps big ideas in sparkling prose to produce a book that s too good to miss. Daniel Gilbert, PhD, author of Stumbling on Happiness

Get ready for this book to change how you see everything you see. Emily Balcetis is a world-class expert on vision and perception, and her lucid language and striking