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, andencourages 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.
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
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 5.0 / 5.0
An Informative and Practical Guide to the Brain:
Opinion I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. After purchasing this book, I briefly skimmed through the pages of the book to get an idea of what it would be like. I was surprised to find the book was full of pictures and diagrams. It seemed like the book would be very lacking in actual scientific facts and more geared towards a shallow description of the brain. Surprisingly the book has a good foundation in science. The book is designed more as a practical guide to understanding and improving brain... more info
Science meets self-help:
Science meets self-help in a survey for general-interest readers which covers everything from brain function to quirks, aging changes, boundaries between physical brain activity and psychology, and more. YOUR BRAIN is studded with color sidebars of information and plenty of color illustrations for maximum impact, making this a pick not just for high school to college level health and science collections, but for the general-interest library, as well. Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch
You don't need to be a brain surgeon to understand your brain...:
When you think about it, the thing we think *with* is one of the biggest mysteries to us. In Your Brain: The Missing Manual by Matthew MacDonald, you'll gain some level of understanding about how the brain works, what makes it tick, and how you can manipulate it to work better. Even better, you don't have to be a brain surgeon to understand it all. Contents:
Part 1 - Warming Up: A Lap Around the Brain; Brain Food - Healthy Eating; Sleep - Taking Your Brain Offline
Part 2 - Exploring Your... more info
Quite interesting:
Was initially drawn in by the title of the book actually. Some portions are pretty interesting. On a number of occasions, gives you a quick laugh and makes you think "oh, that's why i feel that sometimes". Though i find couple of sections are abit tough to digest cos they introduced a number of medical terms, but overall it's still quite good. I would describe it as a good factual book (interesting facts that you don't even realise even as you do some of those stuff everyday)... and which at... more info
