The Idiot Brain

Author: Dean Burnett
Publisher: Guardian Faber Publishing
ISBN: 1783350830
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
Why do you lose arguments with people who know MUCH LESS than you? Why can you recognise that woman, from that thing... but can't remember her name? And why, after your last break-up, did you find yourself in the foetal position on the sofa for days, moving only to wipe the snot and tears haphazardly from your face? Here's why: the idiot brain. For something supposedly so brilliant and evolutionarily advanced, the human brain is pretty messy, fallible and disorganised. For example, did you know that your memory is egotistical? That conspiracy theories and superstitions are the inevitable effects of a healthy brain? Or that alcohol can actually improve your memory?** In The Idiot Brain, neuroscientist Dean Burnett tours our mysterious and mischievous grey (and white) matter. Along the way he explains the human brain's imperfections in all their glory and how these influence everything we say, do and experience. Expertly researched and entertainingly written, this book is for anyone who has wondered why their brain appears to be sabotaging their life, and what on earth it is really up to. **Editor's note: please read the book before testing this conclusion.

The Happy Brain

Author: Dean Burnett
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 1783351314
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Book Description
'Funny, wise and absolutely fascinating.' Adam Kay, author of This Is Going to Hurt *** Do you want to be happy? If so - read on. This book has all the answers* In The Happy Brain, neuroscientist Dean Burnett delves deep into the inner workings of our minds to explore some fundamental questions about happiness. What does it actually mean to be happy? Where does it come from? And what, really, is the point of it? Forget searching for the secret of happiness through lifestyle fads or cod philosophy - Burnett reveals the often surprising truth behind what make us tick. From whether happiness really begins at home (spoiler alert: yes - sort of) to what love, sex, friendship, wealth, laughter and success actually do to our brains, this book offers a uniquely entertaining insight into what it means to be human. *Not really. Sorry. But it does have some very interesting questions, and at least the occasional answer.

Why Your Parents Are Driving You Up the Wall and What To Do About It

Author: Dean Burnett
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0241403154
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Book Description
'A wonderfully useful book, told with wit and wisdom' - Adam Kay, best-selling author of THIS IS GOING TO HURT "Get up or you'll miss the best part of the day!" "You treat this place like a hotel." "Can you just put that phone down for one minute?!" After years of reliable performance, has something recently gone wrong with your parents? Do you find yourself stressed out, arguing about the most ridiculous things? Is it like you're processing the same world with entirely different brains? Do you and your parents want to fix things? There are hundreds of books for them about how to deal with you. Now, for the first time, doctor of brains and international bestselling author, Dean Burnett has written a book for YOU to understand just what on earth is going on. Like, just WHY are your parents: - Obsessed with tidiness - Not letting you get enough sleep - Just generally not getting anything that's important to you! But don't worry. These are very normal parent malfunctions, and by understanding the science behind where they're coming from, you'll know exactly how to troubleshoot conflict when it occurs (and even fix it before it does). You'll never be able to remove arguments completely. But imagine what you'd be capable of if you weren't wasting all that time and energy arguing about tidying your room.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding the Brain

Author: Arthur Bard
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 144062576X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Book Description
You’re no idiot, of course. You know your own mind, but when it comes to understanding what’s really going on in your head—all those synapses! all those neurons!—you feel like you’re just about brain-dead. Don’t let it unnerve you! The Complete Idiot’s Guide® to Understanding the Brain proves that you don’t need to be a genius to be in the know—and gives you lots of fun stuff to think about, too. In this Complete Idiot’s Guide®, you get: • The history of human knowledge of the brain. • Insights into what causes brain disorders—and how best to treat them. • Thoughtful tips about the many different ways we learn new information. • Fascinating, little-known facts about the nervous system.

The Accidental Mind

Author: David J. Linden
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674076613
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 361

Book Description
You've probably seen it before: a human brain dramatically lit from the side, the camera circling it like a helicopter shot of Stonehenge, and a modulated baritone voice exalting the brain's elegant design in reverent tones. To which this book says: Pure nonsense. In a work at once deeply learned and wonderfully accessible, the neuroscientist David Linden counters the widespread assumption that the brain is a paragon of design--and in its place gives us a compelling explanation of how the brain's serendipitous evolution has resulted in nothing short of our humanity. A guide to the strange and often illogical world of neural function, The Accidental Mind shows how the brain is not an optimized, general-purpose problem-solving machine, but rather a weird agglomeration of ad-hoc solutions that have been piled on through millions of years of evolutionary history. Moreover, Linden tells us how the constraints of evolved brain design have ultimately led to almost every transcendent human foible: our long childhoods, our extensive memory capacity, our search for love and long-term relationships, our need to create compelling narrative, and, ultimately, the universal cultural impulse to create both religious and scientific explanations. With forays into evolutionary biology, this analysis of mental function answers some of our most common questions about how we've come to be who we are.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Baby Brain Games

Author: Lawrence E. Shapiro
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9781592577019
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Book Description
Play that stimulates young minds. Play is the language that babies know best. Here, readers will find over 300 games to play with infants from one week to eighteen months old. Divided into games that stimulate cognitive, language, emotional, and social development, this book will delight parents and babies as it helps foster mental and physical growth. Â• Written by an internationally recognized authority on brain games for babies Â• No other book on infant play has as many games or is as effective in linking games with their mental and physical health benefits Â• Focused on helping parents teach their babies how to learn, rather than pushing them beyond their developmental level

Phantoms in the Brain

Author: V. S. Ramachandran
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0688172172
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Book Description
Neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran is internationally renowned for uncovering answers to the deep and quirky questions of human nature that few scientists have dared to address. His bold insights about the brain are matched only by the stunning simplicity of his experiments -- using such low-tech tools as cotton swabs, glasses of water and dime-store mirrors. In Phantoms in the Brain, Dr. Ramachandran recounts how his work with patients who have bizarre neurological disorders has shed new light on the deep architecture of the brain, and what these findings tell us about who we are, how we construct our body image, why we laugh or become depressed, why we may believe in God, how we make decisions, deceive ourselves and dream, perhaps even why we're so clever at philosophy, music and art. Some of his most notable cases: A woman paralyzed on the left side of her body who believes she is lifting a tray of drinks with both hands offers a unique opportunity to test Freud's theory of denial. A man who insists he is talking with God challenges us to ask: Could we be "wired" for religious experience? A woman who hallucinates cartoon characters illustrates how, in a sense, we are all hallucinating, all the time. Dr. Ramachandran's inspired medical detective work pushes the boundaries of medicine's last great frontier -- the human mind -- yielding new and provocative insights into the "big questions" about consciousness and the self.

The Idiot

Author: Elif Batuman
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 014311106X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 465

Book Description
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book • Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction • Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction “Easily the funniest book I’ve read this year.” —GQ “Masterly funny debut novel . . . Erudite but never pretentious, The Idiot will make you crave more books by Batuman.” —Sloane Crosley, Vanity Fair A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself. The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary. Selin may have barely spoken to Ivan, but with each email they exchange, the act of writing seems to take on new and increasingly mysterious meanings. At the end of the school year, Ivan goes to Budapest for the summer, and Selin heads to the Hungarian countryside, to teach English in a program run by one of Ivan's friends. On the way, she spends two weeks visiting Paris with Svetlana. Selin's summer in Europe does not resonate with anything she has previously heard about the typical experiences of American college students, or indeed of any other kinds of people. For Selin, this is a journey further inside herself: a coming to grips with the ineffable and exhilarating confusion of first love, and with the growing consciousness that she is doomed to become a writer. With superlative emotional and intellectual sensitivity, mordant wit, and pitch-perfect style, Batuman dramatizes the uncertainty of life on the cusp of adulthood. Her prose is a rare and inimitable combination of tenderness and wisdom; its logic as natural and inscrutable as that of memory itself. The Idiot is a heroic yet self-effacing reckoning with the terror and joy of becoming a person in a world that is as intoxicating as it is disquieting. Batuman's fiction is unguarded against both life's affronts and its beauty--and has at its command the complete range of thinking and feeling which they entail. Named one the best books of the year by Refinery29 • Mashable One • Elle Magazine • The New York Times • Bookpage • Vogue • NPR • Buzzfeed •The Millions

Idiot Brain: What Your Head Is Really Up To

Author: Dean Burnett
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393253791
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Book Description
"Entertaining…[A] grand tour around modern cognitive science and psychology." —Wall Street Journal The brain is an absolute marvel—the seat of our consciousness, the pinnacle (so far) of evolutionary progress, and the engine of human experience. But it’s also messy, fallible, and about 50,000 years out of date. We cling to superstitions, remember faces but not names, miss things sitting right in front of us, and lie awake at night while our brains endlessly replay our greatest fears. Idiot Brain is for anyone who has ever wondered why their brain appears to be sabotaging their life—and what on earth it is really up to. A Library Journal Science Bestseller and a Finalist for the Goodreads Choice Award in Science & Technology.

The Idiot

Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
Publisher: Xist Publishing
ISBN: 1681959720
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 651

Book Description
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky from Coterie Classics All Coterie Classics have been formatted for ereaders and devices and include a bonus link to the free audio book. “Lack of originality, everywhere, all over the world, from time immemorial, has always been considered the foremost quality and the recommendation of the active, efficient and practical man.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot Dostoevsky’s The Idiot is an examination of human complexity by one of Russia’s masters.