Puzzles and brain twisters to keep your mind sharp and your memory intact are all the rage today. More and more people -- Baby Boomers and information workers in particular -- are becoming concerned about their gray matter's ability to function, and with good reason. As this sensible and entertaining guide points out, your brain is easily your most important possession. It deserves proper upkeep. Your Brain: The Missing Manual is a practical look at how to get the most out of your brain -- not just how the brain works, but how you can use it more effectively. What makes this book different than the average self-help guide is that it's grounded in current neuroscience. You get a quick tour of several aspects of the brain, complete with useful advice about:

• Brain Food: The right fuel for the brain and how the brain commands hunger (including an explanation of the different chemicals that control appetite and cravings)

• Sleep: The sleep cycle and circadian rhythm, and how to get a good night's sleep (or do the best you can without it)

• Memory: Techniques for improving your recall

• Reason: Learning to defeat common sense; logical fallacies (including tactics for winning arguments); and good reasons for bad prejudices

• Creativity and Problem-Solving: Brainstorming tips and thinking not outside the box, but about the box -- in other words, find the assumptions that limit your ideas so you can break through them

• Understanding Other People's Brains: The battle of the sexes and babies developing brains

Learn about the built-in circuitry that makes office politics seem like a life-or-death struggle, causes you to toss important facts out of your memory if they're not emotionally charged, and encourages you to eat huge amounts of high-calorie snacks. With Your Brain: The Missing Manual you'll discover that, sometimes, you can learn to compensate for your brain or work around its limitations -- or at least to accept its eccentricities. Exploring your brain is the greatest adventure and biggest mystery you'll ever face. This guide has exactly the advice you need.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 17 Ratings

Erase this from my brain! - 2009-03-21
Reviewer Rating:
-==Pro's==-
-Quick intro/overview of the functional bits of the brain. Tells you where the cortex , limbik system, and cerebellum are, a bit about what they do, and a small bit about how they do what they do.

-I liked the chapter on perception. Perception is such an abstract thing, so the joking tone of the book was not so out of place here.

-==Con's==-
-This book seems like it is targeted at the "general audience". I think if this book had a more serious tone, and were a bit more specialized I could have enjoyed it much more.

-The book has a joking tone/makes lots of jokes. This gets annoying after the 2nd chapter. Most of the jokes are meaningless and out of context. For example, each chapter seems to start with "The brain, that squishy bit of pink goo in your head". Thats not funny or appreciated. I can appreciate the effort to make the book a little bit more lighthearted but ffs, this takes it to the point to where it almost sounds like a children book.

-The author does not cite his sources. This is very annoying! If the author writes about their opinions on a study done on a certain subject, but does not cite their sources, how can I read the study to form my own opinion? This brings me to the next con.

-No email addy. I searched the book for the authors email address. Hoping to ask some questions and get some sources for the study's he had mentioned. I was not able to find it.

-The author makes a lot of assumptions about the reader that I found mildly offensive. For example, more than once he assumes the reader sits around and watches tv in their free time. I don't own or watch tv, and I don't waste my free time doing mindless things.

-Some of the things in the book seemed biased. Some things said had an almost "Christian" feel to them.

-==summary==-
I could not finish this book. I think, to broaden ones perspective, that one should expose themselves to as much information as possible. BUT this information has to be of high quality. I have a personal rule not to take in things of questionable quality, or that could be damaging, by misinformation. For me this book falls under the questionable quality category. I would not recommend it to anyone.

Organized To Be Useful! - 2009-02-22
Reviewer Rating:
This delightful book presents a lot of technical but helpful information in a very accessible way.

While it is true that you could get roughly the same raw content by reading neuroscience articles in Scientific American and the like, this work provides unique value by organizing and formatting the material into a user manual. Brains like manuals!

Typical of this book's efficient design is that it not only includes citations and weblinks to more information,but maintains a webpage of these links so that (A) you don't have to copy them out of the book and (B) they can can be kept current:
[...]

The work is honest in that some of its insights are frankly speculative; there's a lot about the brain that we haven't figured out yet but we can still use some concept to experiment with our own brains. My favorite example of this is the concept of emotional "set point": the unproven idea that a brain may have a basic degree of happiness from which it temporarily varies according to circumstance, but generally returns to over time. Some people, the manual explains, may see being immobilized by kidney stones as an opportunity to catch up on crossword puzzles, while others see winning a multimillion dollar lottery as a sad burden. Rather than suffer distress and frustration when we keep returning to a set point, or continually seeking external explanations for our emotional states, we can more profitably try to acknowledge our emotional bias as something in our head and work from there on objectively useful behaviors.

Because it is so well organized, this work would be suitable for use not only by adults but by teens. If you can code or follow a shop manual, this is for you!

Finally! A manual for all of us. - 2009-07-12
Reviewer Rating:
This book, which was written in the style of the many other The Missing Manual books offers a slightly different angle than the rest of the series. Of the many other books I have read in this series, this one was the most gripping. The human brain is the most complex computer ever created and so much more. Covered in this manual are concepts in physiology, psychology, and philosophy. The structure is well thought out with ample side notes and references for further reading in other books and websites.

This book also offers a foray into some self-help concepts. There are a number of exercises the reader may use to fortify brainpower in memory, social interaction, and emotional well-being. It encourages interaction with quizzes the reader may complete, and offers more examples of more quizzes with Internet references.

I am a diehard computer geek, but I'm a medical professional by trade. Some of the didactic science behind the physiology is a bit simplified for people in the medical field, but it seems about right for the target audience of curious brain owners. I would have liked to have seen more sources cited. Some of the stories presented as examples can only be considered anecdotal, unless references are indicated. Footnotes would have been very nice, speaking as a scientist.

This book was an enjoyable read and hard to put down. There was just enough humor to balance the heavy content in some parts of the book.

Interesting Read - 2009-11-04
Reviewer Rating:
Book was interesting to read. Could have flipped through it in book store rather than buying it.

Clear, Interesting, Informative - 2009-09-07
Reviewer Rating:
In "Your Brain: The Missing Manual," Matthew MacDonald takes a lot of information from neuroscience and evolutionary psychology and distills it into a clearly written and informative book on how the brain works and how to keep it working. This book is neither enlightening nor compelling, controversial nor ground-breaking, and it does not purport to be any of these things. It is a good and concise summary of the current knowledge and understanding of the brain.

Because it is a good and concise summary, most of the information we've heard or read before. Consider the book's advice on how to keep the brain from degenerating: be a life-long learner, exercise, avoid stress, be engaged at work, take care of your body, and consider taking folic acid. Taking folic acid is a new one, but the rest are good and true but known and obvious advice.

The book covers an impressive amount of material in only 248 pages, and its color scheme of dividing information is smart and useful. It's a good read if you're new to neuroscience, and a good read if you just want a clear summary of all the books you've read.

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