Book Review - Welcome to Your Brain - Aamodt and Wang

This book is sub-titled "Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive, and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life".

The authors are two Ph.D. neuroscientists.

This book is right down my alley. By that I mean it has plenty of good solid science, but not a lot of complex verbiage that just slows down the reader. It is arranged in 31 chapters that tackle the typical myths and misunderstandings that pervade popular culture.

One of these misunderstandings or myths is the idea that we only use 10% of our brain.

Unfortunately, this is not true. If it were true, then 90% of car crashes involving head injury would result in no harm done to the person involved. Perhaps my logic is slightly flawed, but I think you see the point. Even minor head injury seems to result in permanent consequences in terms of lost memories, lost coordination, motor skill defects, or personality changes. So, I think we can clearly see that we use all of our brain.

The authors debunk a large number of myths, but they also give a lot of good information based on thorough research, such as how to best avoid jet lag (the opposite of what I did on my recent trip to Manila) or how to make dieting easier.

Just to whet your appetite, here's what to do to make dieting easier:

1) make sure you keep your metabolism up high, through diet or careful food choice
2) do something to keep your stress level down - yoga, massages, a hobby
3) spread your eating out as much as possible - six slices of pizza eaten at six different times is much better for you than eating six slices all at the same time
4) eat breakfast - this kind of goes with #3, but basically it kick starts your metabolism first thing in the morning

In the book, the authors go through the hormonal and metabolic reasons that these strategies work. All of the bodies hormones are controlled by the brain and its mechanisms.

There are plenty of additional valuable insights in this book - for this reason, I recommend it to everyone. It is easy to read, written for the lay person, and fun as well.

The book is published by Bloomsbury USA, and distributed by Macmillan.

Book Review - Dreams from My Father - Barack Obama

This is Barack Obama's first book, written before he became Senator, while he was in law school, and after he had become the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review.

He talks about his childhood and teenage experiences, and his trip to Kenya. He also talks about his experiences as a community organizer. I was reminded of another book that I've read - "The Color of Water", by James McBride.

I don't know what to say about this book. It made me uncomfortable - with how much race has divided us as a country and a planet. It made me more comfortable with Mr. Obama - with how his experiences have helped prepare him to be President, and more importantly, with how they have prepared him to be a good leader.

I think I understand race better as a result of reading this book. I think I understand why people feel divided and discriminated against even when they aren't. And, I can see how they are discriminated against extensively.

And the book has a number of episodes that I can relate to, such as the one of page 104-105, from Mr. Obama's first year of college at Occidental:

Her voice evoked a vision of black life in all its possiblity, a vision that
filled me with longing - a longing for place, and a fixed and definite history.
As we were getting up to leave, I told Regiona I envied her.
"For
what?"
"I don't know. For your memories, I guess."
Regina looked at me and
started to laugh, a round, full sound from deep in her belly."What's so
funny?"
"Oh Barack, " she said, catching her breath, "isn't life something?
And here I was all this time wishing I'd grown up in Hawaii."

I can relate to this quote. I think all of this envy others, or feel left out for one reason or another. In this case, Mr. Obama didn't feel like he fit in with whites or blacks, because he didn't share their experiences, when in some cases others envied him for his experiences.

I think it is impossible to sum up this book, for you need to read it to really absorb the message in a way that will stick with you. Mr. Obama does a good job of summarizing, or at least concluding, in his epilogue, page 439:

"In my legal practice, I work mostly with churches and community
groups, men and women who quietly build grocery stores and health clinics in the
inner city, and housing for the poor. Every so often I'll find
myself working on a discrimination case, representing clients who show up at my
law firm's office with stories that we like to tell ourselves should no longer
exist.

... at some point both plaintiff and witness decide that a
principle is at stake, that despite everything that has happened, those words
put to paper over two hundred years ago must mean something after all (referring
to the bill of rights - my comment inserted). Black and white, they make
their claim on this community we call America. They choose our better
history."

That, I believe, is what leadership is all about - all of us choosing our better history, and making our better future. Choose what is right about our history, and choose to carry that right forward into our own future, and our children's future.

Mr. Obama is a good writer, and the book is easy to read, but thought provoking. It is published by Three Rivers Press, a part of Crown Publishing, http://www.crownpublishing.com/, which is in turn a part of Random House, Inc.