I enjoyed Spinney's excellent discussion of brain imaging and decision making, but her account of game theory was a travesty. The strategic interaction between the superpowers during the cold war was more like a game of chicken than one of prisoner's dilemma. The worst pay-off for both players would have been mutual annihilation, whereas in the prisoner's dilemma the worst pay-off goes to a sucker who cooperates unilaterally.
Had the superpowers been playing the prisoner's dilemma, we still couldn't say that defecting was "the only rational course of action", because the interaction was repeated indefinitely. Cooperation is perfectly rational in an indefinitely repeated prisoner's dilemma, and human players do indeed cooperate. The game theorist John von Neumann knew all this, and it is laughable to claim that he "got it wrong".
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