Your Brain: The Missing Manual (Missing Manuals) [Paperback]

Matthew MacDonald (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 5, 2008 | Series: Missing Manuals

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, and encourages 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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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

About the Author

Matthew MacDonald is a developer, author, and educator in all things Visual Basic and .NET. He's worked with Visual Basic and ASP since their initial versions, and written over a dozen books on the subject, including The Book of VB .NET (No Starch Press) and Visual Basic 2005: A Developer's Notebook (O'Reilly). He has also written Excel 2007:The Missing Manual, Excel 2007 for Starters: The Missing Manual, Access 2007:The Missing Manual, and Access 2007 for Starters: The Missing Manual, all from O'Reilly. His website is http://www.prosetech.com.

Product Details

• Paperback: 280 pages
• Publisher: Pogue Press; 1 edition (June 5, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596517785
• ISBN-13: 978-0596517786
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #235,897 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Matthew MacDonald is an author, educator, and MCSD developer who has a passion for emerging technologies. He is a regular writer for developer journals such as Inside Visual Basic, ASPToday, and Hardcore Visual Studio .NET, and he's the author of several books about programming with .NET. In a dimly remembered past life, he studied English literature and theoretical physics. Send e-mail to him with praise, condemnation, and everything in between, to [e-mail].

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

49 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Your Brain: The Missing Manual, July 16, 2008

By 

Randy A. Lakin "Ranstar" (Spring Hill, FL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Your Brain: The Missing Manual (Missing Manuals) (Paperback)

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".

28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You don't need to be a brain surgeon to understand your brain..., August 10, 2008

By 

Thomas Duff "Duffbert" (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Your Brain: The Missing Manual (Missing Manuals) (Paperback)

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.

29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Could Be Worthwhile If You Know Nothing About The Brain, January 12, 2009

By 

Thomas J. Quinlan (McLean, VA USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Your Brain: The Missing Manual (Missing Manuals) (Paperback)

Your Brain: The Missing Manual is an okay book. It seems to have gotten a lot of positive reviews, but if you're anyone who is keeping up on any sort of reading on the brain, the information contained in this book is not new. If you've not read anything on the brain before, this book might be more worthwhile to you.

Much of the practical information in Your Brain: The Missing Manual is repeated from books like Mind Performance Hacks: Tips & Tools for Overclocking Your Brain (a book I highly recommend). With prosaic tips like "get enough sleep" and "eat correctly", the information in this book is not particularly novel or even all that worthwhile. (Who doesn't know to do that in general, let alone that it might help your brain?)

Most of the book is devoted to how the brain interprets or comes up with various things, from perception to emotion to reason to personality. The chapter on the developing brain (chapter 10) was interesting, and the chapter on the difference between the sexes (chapter 9) picks up on the "controversial" view that men's and women's brains work differently for different things. (Duh.) I don't know whether that was because they were hoping to generate books sales or because the author thought it was really pertinent, but as with the rest of the book, it's information that's not new.