Anna Airoldi, the translator of Mind Hacks into Italian has noticed a fantastic error in the published book. She writes
(170) 1st paragraph of “How it works”;
I’m not entirely sure this is a real typo, considering the topic discussed in the paragraph, but “conservations” shouldn’t just be “conversations”?
She’s absolutely right – it should be ‘conversations’ not ‘conservations’. But although it is an error, in this case it is an appropriate error, because it appears in Hack #52 ‘Robust Processing Using Parallelism’ which discusses how we can read errorful or ambiguous sentences using multiple interacting levels of information to construct meaning. Normally this is a good thing, but it appears that in this particular instance the meaning was so obvious that our normally diligent editing process didn’t spot the mistake (my mistake in origin, incidentally)!
Mind Hacks 