Book Review: New in Print

59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot

by Richard Wiseman
Knopf, 336 pp., $24

You need another self-help guide? Well, maybe we all do. Maybe such a thing will provide the solid foundation or the final polishing that we need as we strive for, what, perfection? Nirvana? Certainly for something a little improved over what we've personally achieved thus far.

But we could probably do without another volume of suggestions shored up by nothing more than anecdotal evidence, you think? We might hope for a manual loaded with guidance that's backed by scientific proof. After all, it wasn't wishful thinking or prayer that put humans on the moon and eradicated polio and built your neighbor's 72-inch Blu-ray-powered video monitor: It was cold, sweet, reproducible science.

Here's Richard Wiseman, author of The Luck Factor and Quirkology, offering a compilation of handy life-guidance exercises, of methods (and shall we say tricks, even) for improving your lot in life. The book is called 59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot, because the gambits suggested can be enacted in that time or less – which is always appreciated in this rushing world. And, boo-ya, this book does that hallowed One Minute Manager canon one second better. And, yes, these gambits the author has gathered, these here's-what-you-do pointers, are backed up by scientific research.

Well. How rigorous some of the tests and observations may have been, we can only assume, but Wiseman, wise man that he is, provides the particulars (if not the journaled abstracts) for each suggestion. That's positive reinforcement for any rational thinker right there: Unless you fall into a tiny percentile of resistant personalities or physiological mutants, these methods will likely do what you're being told they'll do. Your iPhone doesn't run on faith; why should your life-improvement strategies have to?

Want to improve your social life by making mistakes? Research by Elliot Aronson and colleagues at the University of California is cited to show you the how and why. Wonder if it's possible to think your way to lower blood pressure? Well-documented investigations by Harvard University's Alia Crum and Ellen Langer provide the answer. Wiseman includes several helpful charts and quizzes among the data, too, to aid you in reaching your goals.

The other benefit of having all this casual technical reinforcement in the book is that it becomes interesting in and of itself, as a sort of multifaceted window into human psychology.

We haven't tested this in the laboratory and have used no control groups for proper determination, but we'll take a semieducated guess here that 59 Seconds is a book that will provide more actual help and entertainment than many others of its kind.