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Your Brain: The Missing Manualx$13.77
 (10 reviews)
Best Price: $24.99 $13.77
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
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Customer Reviews
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Interesting, Fun Read
By A2TVJ0YDW3QO63 on 2008-06-19
'Your Brain: The Missing Manual' is a different book than most of the fare that Pogue Press puts out, but this doesn't mean that it's not a good read!
The Missing Manual line of books is simply one of the best publishers I have ever had the PLEASURE to read. I stress the word pleasure because TMM books truly are what they say they are. Incredibly laid out, easy to follow, and enjoyable to read and hold in your hand, most of The Missing Manual books I have read I give 5 stars and it's no mistake.
With 'Your Brain' this book looks at how the brain works from all different perspectives: logic, eating, aging, sex, stress, pleasure. It examines how the brain interacts with these subjects and why things work they way they do.
If you like previous Missing Manual books or are curious how the brain works, you owe it to yourself to pick up this book. Jam packed with color pictures and a small footprint with a small size of 250+ pages, this is a great weekend read that will entertain and TEACH you something as well!!
***** RECOMMENDED
Your Brain: The Missing Manual
By A38NSX5Q4L8MF5 on 2008-07-16
I read a lot of books on science and the human body, so I expected the usual on this book. Matthew MacDonald's book, "Your Brain, The Missing Manual" blew me away. In this book MacDonald covers the entire brain from neurons, to glands, to emotions. The book starts out covering the brains biological workings. It covers neurons, synapses, the Endocrine system and the Nervous system. Next he covers how the brain uses energy and how it gets its food. In this section MacDonald includes the Brain-Friendly Diet and explains how Protein, Fat and even Chocolate affect the brain. There is a great explanation on how the Human Appetite works. In one chapter he discusses the brain and sleep. He writes how the human brain needs light and dark to regulate the sleep cycle. In the book, MacDonald, state how sunlight or bright lights can wake you up fasters. I tried it for myself, I got out of bed early one morning and stepped outside and faced the morning sun. I was amazed at how fast my mind woke up and how clear my mind was.
The Sections on the mind's visual perception and memory were extremely interesting. I enjoyed the Optical Illusions that he included in the book. One thing I would like to point out is that MacDonald references several websites throughout the book were you can get additional information. I found this very useful and learned a lot on these websites. In addition, the section on how to improve your memory helped me significantly. There MacDonald lists several methods on how to boost your memorization powers, don't skip this section trust me.
The author goes on to cover such topics as Emotions, Reason, Personality and more. MacDonald lays all the information out in an easy to understand format. This is one of those books that you're skeptical on getting, but once you've read it you know it was well worth the purchase price. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to better understand the brain, or just wants to improve their memory. This books is a must have on every book shelf, you won't be disappointed with "Your Brain, The Missing Manual".
You don't need to be a brain surgeon to understand your brain...
By A3R19YKNL641X3 on 2008-08-10
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 Brain: Perception; Memory; Emotions; Reason; Your Personality
Part 3 - Understanding Other People's Brains: The Battle of the Sexes; The Developing Brain
Index
The thing I appreciate most about the Missing Manual series is the way they are designed to be readable for a "normal" person. Part 1 takes you through more of the "hardware" part of the brain... what the different parts are, the roles they serve, and how they interact with each other. Couple clear writing with plenty of illustrations, and you end up with a firm foundation in Brain 101. From there, MacDonald starts digging into more of the "software" aspect of the brain, as in how are memories stored. He uses the most current studies and findings to explain what makes you, you. The items that made this exceptionally interesting to me are the examples of people who, through some abnormality in the brain, don't quite process things the same way we do. For instance, "Henry M." had his hippocampus removed in 1953 to prevent seizures. The side-effect was that he lost his ability to form long-term memories. Imagine your mind stuck in a time warp, where your last memory is as it was before your surgery. Anything presented to you since then only lasts a few minutes before you have absolutely no recollection of it. By tracking what he could and couldn't do in this state, researchers were able to draw conclusions as to what role the hippocampus played in memory. That kind of stuff is something that amazes me, and confirms the fact that we still only have a fraction of a clue as to how the mind works.
If you're at all interested about your mind, or if you're simply curious about how such things as optical illusions work, this would be a great book to read.
Reasons why I recommend this book
By AQJT8OPE1GN8J on 2008-07-05
There are a number of reasons why I can recommend this book.
Matthew MacDonald displays a great sense of humor in Your Brain: The Missing Manual.
He covers a complex subject as complex as the human brain in simple easy to understand language and does it in about a third the number of pages needed to cover a much simpler computer operating system.
He includes summaries of the information that can help you to use this understanding for your own brain maintenance.
At this point in my initial review I was wrong when I wrote "I also believe that his own brain fooled him into including a probability example from a 1990 Parade magazine article." I had read about this before and the author repeated what I had read - that hundreds of math professors wrote in with faulty logic to "correct" the solution that was given in the Parade article. At least I was not alone in being wrong.
A person is to pick the one of three doors that leads to the prize. After he picks the door, the host then eliminates one of the remaining doors that does not contain the prize. What I missed and what Mathhew MacDonald clearly showed in his diagram was that there was just one chance in 3 that the first pick would lead to the prize. There was a two thirds chance that the prize was behind the other two doors. The host provided information that says which of the other two doors it would have to be behind. Switching is a better choice two out of three times. I believe that having read a poorer explanation of this before and being upset by what I thought was faulty logic may have blinded me to Mr. MacDonald's correct explanation. I was only able to understand my error after reading a third report and then re-examining Mr MacDonald's diagram.
I recommend reading "Your Brain: The Missing Manual" to learn more about how our brains and others words lead us to incorrect conclusions, and about ways we might better maintain the way our brains function.
This is a five star book that I will read more than once.
A very enlightening book
By A21Y1MTKVGZD6I on 2008-07-22
I heard of "Your Brain: The Missing Manual" from the technical podcast "The Java Posse". I wasn't disappointed.
This book gives the casual reader a detailed exposition of the brain, its parts and their functions. It mixes in quite a bit of fun facts about the brain functions, such as optical illusions, with practical ways for how to better use them, such as memory improvement tips.
This is a thin book, and can be read over a weekend.
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