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.