Your Brain: The Missing Manual
Where to buy Your Brain: The Missing Manual books online?
- ISBN13: 9780596517786
- Condition: New
- Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
Product Description
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 apt concerned about their gray matter’s ability to function, and with excellent reason. As this sensible and entertaining guide points out, your brain is easily your most vital 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, perfect 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 excellent night’s sleep (or do the best you can lacking it)
- Memory: Techniques for improving your recall
- Reason: Learning to defeat common sense; logical fallacies (including tactics for winning opinion); and excellent reasons for terrible prejudices
- Creativity and Problem-Solving: Brainstorming tips and thinking not outside the box, but about the box — in additional words, find the assumptions that limit your thoughts so you can break through them
- Understanding Additional 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 vital facts out of your memory if they’re not emotionally charged, and encourages you to eat huge amounts of high-calorie food and drink. With Your Brain: The Missing Manual you’ll learn 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 largest 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 reliable for everything from right like 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 Simple Brain-Enhancing Questions
Q: Turkey is one of the best things to eat if you want to promote sleepiness.
A: Fake: Turkey may be loaded with tryptophan, the amino acid that can cause drowsiness, but it has no more of it than many additional high protein food items like chicken, beef, and soybeans. Plus, eating high protein meals lacking 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 plain dreaming usually happens, occurs during the deepest stages of the dream cycle.
A: Fake: REM sleep really 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 as a replacement for the result of the brain’s constant rewiring of neuronal relations.
A: Right: There’s no static “memory storage” in the brain, but as a replacement for a fluid, constantly readapting process of establishing, reinforcing, and fading links between neurons.
Q: Despite huge life changes that temporarily make radical shifts in personal chance (either excellent or terrible), the brain will permanently drift back to an inborn “happiness” set point.
A: Right: Regardless of whether you win the lotto or suffer catastrophic tragedy, you’ll permanently 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: Fake: The back is right–genetic links really 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: Right, 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: Right, page 40
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Written in style that makes a complex theme simple to grasp yet doesn’t dumb it down. Appealing choices of topics to present that make it an simple but thoughtful read. lots of references that are provided for more in depth reading or experiencing.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
The book first caught my sight, when I was checking out new stuff at Fry’s. After purchasing it from Amazon, I started to immerse my time in reading the book with fascination. It provides fundamental, commonsense facts about brain, neurotransmitters, eating behaviors, sleeping pattern, emotion and whatnot. I wouldn’t say that it’s all that, but it’s certainly a brain booster and a jump-starter if you haven’t got a chance to read about brain and human body functions. As a psychology major, I have already gained small insights into neurotransmitters in the brain, sleeping patter as well as eating behavior. So, I am not so stunned about some of the chapters in the book. Overall, it helps me dive deeper into the breadth of human body and how to live my life to the fullest.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
-==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 tiny 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 “all-purpose audience”. I reflect if this book had a more serious tone, and were a bit more specialized I could have loved 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 having no effect 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 amusing or appreciated. I can appreciate the effort to make the book a small bit more lighthearted but ffs, this takes it to the point to where it nearly sounds like a children book.
-The leader does not cite his sources. This is very annoying! If the leader writes about their opinions on a study done on a certain theme, 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 take up. Hoping to question some questions and get some sources for the study’s he had mentioned. I was not able to find it.
-The leader makes a lot of assumptions about the reader that I establish 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 nearly “Christian” feel to them.
-==synopsis==-
I could not end this book. I reflect, 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.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
This book is very simple written with a lot of appealing information. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in learning more about how we, as human beings work.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
I am sure everyone will learn something new about the brain from this fantastic book (at least persons 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 fantastic stuff for memory improvement and additional practical advice for everyday living.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5