It is 11:47 at night. You are standing in the kitchen in the blue glow of an open fridge, holding nothing, wanting something you can no longer name. Ninety seconds ago you were upstairs with a mission.

This book is about that moment.

We Don't Talk About This explains 100 of the strangest things that happen to you every day — the ones you have never dared ask anyone about. Every one of them has an explanation. Most of them are not the one you were told.

THE CHAPTERS

MIDNIGHT THOUGHTS & EVERYDAY EVOLUTION

Why walking into a new room erases your memory. Why your phone buzzes when it is sitting still. Why thousands of strangers share the same impossible memory.

THE MEATBAG MYSTERIES

Why you twitch violently just before falling asleep. Why you cannot switch off a yawn. Why squiggly worms drift across your vision.

GLITCHES IN THE MATRIX

Why time crawls during a near-miss and then vanishes on an empty road. Why a spinning wheel appears to turn backwards. Why your reflection in dim light is not quite your face.

THE NIGHT SHIFT

Why you become wired the instant you try to sleep. Why an explosion goes off inside your skull as you fall asleep. Why you wake up inside the dream, certain you are awake.

THE GLITCH IN THE MIRROR

Why you are convinced everyone is staring at your flaw. Why an almost-human face is worse than an obviously fake one. Why your eyes change what your ears hear.

THE INVISIBLE STRINGS

Why a crowd freezes when one person needs help. Why a bigger team means less effort from each person. Why ordinary people obey orders they know are wrong.

THE TIME WARP

Why your childhood is burned in and last Tuesday is not. Why your most vivid memories are the least accurate. Why a smell from a kitchen can put you back thirty years.

THE SOCIAL MATRIX

Why everyone finds you more annoying than they actually do. Why nobody can tell you are nervous. Why asking for a favor works better than giving one.

THE INVISIBLE PRICE TAG

Why losing twenty dollars hurts more than finding twenty feels good. Why you finish a bad meal you have already paid for. Why a medium size exists only to make you buy the large one.

THE BODY ELECTRIC

Why your fingers wrinkle in the bath. Why the sun makes you sneeze. And what tears are actually doing, which is not what anyone believes.

THE NAMES IN HERE

Milgram. Asch. Zimbardo. Kahneman and Tversky. Dunning and Kruger. Loftus. McGurk. Iyengar. Bargh and Chartrand, and a mood study run on 689,000 people.

Cited by name and by year — and where a finding has been contested since, the book says so.

HOW THE BOOK WORKS

Every entry ends with one block: the thing worth remembering, the research attached, the caveat kept in. Not one of them is unexplained. That is the entire point.

It is not a self-help book and will not tell you what to do tomorrow morning. What it gives you lasts longer: the ability to look at an explanation you have been handed and ask where the number came from.

You are not broken. You are running superbly, on hardware nobody chose, solving problems your species has not had for a hundred thousand years.

Book 1 of 5 — four more volumes cover other people, the machinery behind the decisions, what your body keeps records of, and the room you are standing in.

We Don't Talk About This

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