Your Brain: The Missing Manual by
Matthew MacDonald
Excellent Accessible Presentation
This is a book about that wet mass of cell tissue called the brain, and why
its responsible for everything from true love to getting you out of bed in the
morning. One part science guide, one part self-help concierge, its
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 brains constant rewiring of neuronal
connections. A: True: Theres 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,
youll 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 youre 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
Personal Review: Your Brain: The Missing Manual by Matthew
MacDonald
This delightful book presents a lot of technical but helpful information in a
very accessible way.
While it is true that you could get roughly the same raw content by reading
neuroscience articles in Scientific American and the like, this work provides
unique value by organizing and formatting the material into a user manual.
Brains like manuals!
Typical of this book's efficient design is that it not only includes citations
and weblinks to more information,but maintains a webpage of these links
so that (A) you don't have to copy them out of the book and (B) they can
can be kept current:
[...]
The work is honest in that some of its insights are frankly speculative;
there's a lot about the brain that we haven't figured out yet but we can still
use some concept to experiment with our own brains. My favorite example
of this is the concept of emotional "set point": the unproven idea that a
brain may have a basic degree of happiness from which it temporarily
varies according to circumstance, but generally returns to over time. Some
people, the manual explains, may see being immobilized by kidney stones
as an opportunity to catch up on crossword puzzles, while others see

winning a multimillion dollar lottery as a sad burden. Rather than suffer
distress and frustration when we keep returning to a set point, or
continually seeking external explanations for our emotional states, we can
more profitably try to acknowledge our emotional bias as something in our
head and work from there on objectively useful behaviors.
Because it is so well organized, this work would be suitable for use not
only by adults but by teens. If you can code or follow a shop manual, this is
for you!
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