TITLE: Your Brain, Explained: What Neuroscience Reveals About Your Brain and Its Quirks

AUTHOR: Marc Dingman

EXPECTED PUBLICATION DATE:  19 September 2019

FORMAT:  Paperback

ISBN-13: 9781473696556

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NOTE: I received a copy of this book from NetGalley. This review is my honest opinion of the book.

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DESCRIPTION:

"Sleep. Memory. Pleasure. Fear. Language. We experience these things every day, but how do our brains create them?

Your Brain, Explained is a personal tour around your gray matter. Neuroscientist Marc Dingman gives you a crash course in how your brain works and explains the latest research on the brain functions that affect you on a daily basis.

You'll also discover what happens when the brain doesn't work the way it should, causing problems such as insomnia, ADHD, depression or addiction. You’ll learn how neuroscience is working to fix these problems, and how you can build up your defenses against the most common faults of the mind.

Along the way you'll find out:
· Why brain training games don't prevent dementia
· What it's like to remember every day of your life as if it were yesterday
· Which popular psychiatric drug was created from German rocket fuel
· What triggers sleep loss or lapses in concentration

Drawing on the author's popular YouTube series, 2-minute Neuroscience, this is a friendly, engaging introduction to the human brain and its quirks from the perspective of a neuroscientist - using real-life examples and the author's own eye-opening illustrations. Your brain is yours to discover!"

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REVIEW:

Dingman has written a book that introduces the current state of neurosciene and what we know about the brain to readers that have no science or neuroscience background. The book is divided into ten chapters that cover a different function of the brain:  fear; memory; sleep; language; sadness; movement; vision; pleasure; pain; and attention.  Each chapter includes case studies, a brief summary of the function and specific area of the brain involved in that function and how that function was determined (i.e. experimental results), and a brief discussion of what happens when things go wrong in that section of the brain (e.g. Alzheimer's disease).  The writing style is straight-forward with minimal technical jargon, which is explained and illustrated where necessary.  The subject matter is interesting.  However, I felt the book was somewhat dull (and rather superficial) and didn't convey the excitement the author felt about the subject.      

NOTE:  As a bonus, Dingman has a Youtube series (2-Minute Neuroscience) for additional information.

Early in - not even up to chapter 2 yet, but so far, it's really good.  I have a vested interest in the subject, but the author states up front that the book is aimed at investigating general sleep disorders, not just narcolepsy, and so far, this is proving to be the case.

“I’m of two minds,” we say. Or, “I changed my mind.” These phrases roll casually off the tongue, but we don’t mean them literally. Maybe we should, according to two new books that explore the fascinating history and tantalizing future of neuroscience.

COGNITIVE WONDERS
Are you primarily right-brained or left-brained? You might think you know, but Michael S. Gazzaniga is here to tell you it’s not that simple. Gazzaniga pioneered split-brain research with his colleagues at the California Institute of Technology in the 1960s. In Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience, he details the experiments that led us to talk about the brain’s two hemispheres in the first place. Filled with scientific luminaries like psychobiologist Roger W. Sperry and theoretical physicist Richard Feynman, Tales from Both Sides of the Brain takes us back to the intellectually energetic laboratories of Caltech. In scenes that read like episodes of “The Big Bang Theory”—intellectual energy abounds—we sit in on experiments done with split-brain patients, whose brains’ hemispheres had been surgically separated to treat epilepsy.

More at BookPage: http://bookpage.com/features/17772-making-up-your-mind-brain-body-working-together#.VOi0qy4YEm0

Added to a few books that I've read and like. Which either confirmed that these books are the new list of must read, or that just are most popular books the writer could remember.

Nevertheless, these are really good books. Most of them I read, few are on my to-read pile.

A year already. And I still got a few dozens books that need to read. But these are going to jump the queue and go on the front of line.

Why? Human need to understand better about human and the system we live in. We could no longer afford to be ignorant. 

Time is pressing.