A Trick of the Mind: How the Brain Invents Your Reality

One of Next Big Idea Club’s Best Books of 2025

From a groundbreaking neuroscientist, a book that will reshape the way we understand how our brain perceives the world around us--for readers of Adam Grant’s Think Again and Lisa Genova’s Remember.

How does your brain decide what it’s seeing, from the physical world to other people? For decades, scientists have tried to understand how our brains work, not realizing that the answer lies much closer to home. New research in neuroscience and psychology suggests that the brain is doing the same thing that the scientists are: using past experiences to build theories of how the world works, and using these models to predict and make sense of it. Through this process, your brain constructs the reality that you live in.

Daniel Yon takes the research one step further, uncovering how your brain colors your perception of the world, the judgements you make about other people, and the beliefs you form about yourself. These mental processes help us navigate the world--but can also lead us astray, causing us to believe outlandish conspiracy theories or to see things that aren’t really there. By understanding the ways each of our brains construct our realities, we can better engage with other communities and make more informed approaches about mental illness. With cutting-edge research and transformative practical applications, A Trick of the Mind will revolutionize the way you think.

Daniel Yon is an experimental psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Birkbeck, London, where he studies how our brains build models of ourselves and the world around us, and how those models shape our perceptions, actions and decisions. He has written on these subjects for Aeon and Psyche and has been published in a number of his field’s leading journals. He lives in London.