| Overview
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.
Editorial ReviewsProduct DescriptionPuzzles 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 Review This is a book about that wet mass of cell tissue called the brain, and why it's responsible for everything from true love to getting you out of bed in the morning. One part science guide, one part self-help concierge, it's grounded in the latest neuroscience, psychology, and nutritional wisdom. The result? An essential guide for the modern brain owner, filled with ready-to-follow advice on everything from eating right to improving your memory.
10 Easy Brain-Enhancing Questions
Q: Turkey is one of the best things to eat if you want to promote sleepiness.
A: False: Turkey may be loaded with tryptophan, the amino acid that can cause drowsiness, but it has no more of it than many other high protein food items like chicken, beef, and soybeans. Plus, eating high protein meals without a corresponding truckload of carbohydrates ensures that tryptophan will never enter the blood-brain barrier.
Q: The REM (for "Rapid Eye Movement") stage of sleep, when the most vivid dreaming usually happens, occurs during the deepest stages of the dream cycle.
A: False: REM sleep actually occurs at the very end of the sleep cycle, when the brain returns to a much lighter stage of sleep.
Q: Contrary to conventional wisdom, memories are not "stored" in the brain as recordings or as discrete "data", but are instead the result of the brain's constant rewiring of neuronal connections.
A: True: There's no static "memory storage" in the brain, but instead a fluid, constantly readapting process of establishing, reinforcing, and fading links between neurons.
Q: Despite huge life changes that temporarily create radical shifts in personal fortune (either good or bad), the brain will always drift back to an inborn "happiness" set point.
A: True: Regardless of whether you win the lotto or suffer catastrophic tragedy, you'll always return to the same chipper or grumpy temperament that sustains throughout your life.
Q: With most traits, heritability (the influence of genetics) decreases through childhood and adolescence, reaching its lowest point in adulthood.
A: False: The reverse is true--genetic links actually get stronger with age (meaning you're more similar to your parents as an adult than as a child), though there is no scientific consensus as to why this is so.
Q: T/F: IQ scores are highly heritable
A: True, page 242
Q: Your brain’s energy use is roughly:
a.) 20 watts
b.) 40 watts
c.) 75 watts A: 20 watts—enough to power a dim light bulb, page 29
Q: Microsleep is a phenomenon that occurs when the brain?
A: Shuts off for a second or two usually due to lack of sleep, page 52
Q: The art of improving memory is called?
A: Mnemonics, page 107
Q: T/F: Chronically sleep-deprived individuals have a greater incidence of obesity?
A: True, page 40
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Reader Reviews From Amazon (Ranked by 'Helpfulness') Average Customer Rating: based on 14 reviews. 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! | excellent accessible presentation, 2009-01-20 Reviewer rating: Written in style that makes a complex subject simple to grasp yet doesn't dumb it down. Interesting choices of topics to present that make it an easy but thoughtful read. lots of references that are provided for more in depth reading or experiencing. | Could Be Worthwhile If You Know Nothing About The Brain, 2009-01-13 Reviewer rating: Your Brain: The Missing Manual is an okay book. It seems to have gotten a lot of positive reviews, but if you're anyone who is keeping up on any sort of reading on the brain, the information contained in this book is not new. If you've not read anything on the brain before, this book might be more worthwhile to you.
Much of the practical information in Your Brain: The Missing Manual is repeated from books like Mind Performance Hacks: Tips & Tools for Overclocking Your Brain (a book I highly recommend). With prosaic tips like "get enough sleep" and "eat correctly", the information in this book is not particularly novel or even all that worthwhile. (Who doesn't know to do that in general, let alone that it might help your brain?)
Most of the book is devoted to how the brain interprets or comes up with various things, from perception to emotion to reason to personality. The chapter on the developing brain (chapter 10) was interesting, and the chapter on the difference between the sexes (chapter 9) picks up on the "controversial" view that men's and women's brains work differently for different things. (Duh.) I don't know whether that was because they were hoping to generate books sales or because the author thought it was really pertinent, but as with the rest of the book, it's information that's not new. | Learn About the Best Computer in the World, 2008-12-16 Reviewer rating: I am sure everyone will learn something new about the brain from this great book (at least those of us who are not neuroscientists). In Your Brain you can learn why illusions work on us and how to be alert to and prevent the manipulation of our minds by others. This book contains great stuff for memory improvement and other practical advice for everyday living. |
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