A smooth accessible romp through the brain and its quircks. A very good introduction to some of the key Neuroscience findings presented in a fun accessible format. ( )

Not only is brain science trendy at the moment, but at least one author has been described by blurb-writers as “the poster-boy of neuroscience”. So thank heavens for Dean Burnett.
   His warts-and-all approach is refreshing: “Don’t get me wrong, there really is nothing as baffling as the human brain; it is incredibly interesting. But there’s also this bizarre impression that the brain is ‘special’, exempt from criticism, privileged in some way, and our understanding of it is so limited that we’ve barely scratched the surface of what it’s capable of. With all due respect, this is nonsense. The brain is still an internal organ in the human body, and as such is a tangled mess of habits, traits, outdated processes and inefficient systems. Bottom line: the brain is fallible. It may be the seat of consciousness and the engine of all human experience, but it’s also incredibly messy and disorganised despite these profound roles. You only have to look at the thing to grasp how ridiculous it is: it resembles a mutant walnut, a Lovecraftian blancmange, a decrepit boxing glove, and so on. It’s undeniably impressive, but far from perfect, and these imperfections influence everything humans say, do and experience”.
   The eight chapters here cover, in turn: routine maintenance (i.e. how the brain regulates things like appetite and sleep); memory; fear (from social anxiety to thrill-seeking behaviour); intelligence; the senses; personality; social behaviour; and, finally, how warped the world can look when this organ goes badly wrong. Some of the details are fascinating—a section on apophenia for example (“seeing” connections where there actually aren’t any, “perceiving” meaning and intentionality in randomness) covers superstitions and conspiracy theories. Perhaps most chastening (and to me depressing) is the chapter about groupthink, about humans en masse and the distorting effects being part of a group (clique, team, mob, belief-system, country, anything at all in fact) has on our picture of ourselves, our picture of other people and of the world and the way it works.
   This is detailed, well written and, despite some very good jokes, a serious look in the mirror, eyes wide open. ( )

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3840738.html

A good breezy book about the wiring system that makes us all function. Style maybe a little too chatty in places, but I guess it helps us to digest the complex subject matter (or at least it helped me to). Rightly excoriates Myers-Briggs and the like. Accepts the standard narrative on the Stanford Prison experiment, Milgram and Kitty Genovese, unlike Rutger Bregman. A lot of what Burnett says is also aligned with cognitive behavioural therapy, with the difference that he is at least as interested in physiology as psychology - which maybe actually makes it all easier to accept. ( )

Pop science with a sense of humor (or humour if you’re British like the author, neuroscientist Dr. Dean Burnett.) This brought together a wide range of topics about the brain's biological and psychological functions and explained how they work in everyday life. Such as: how we can always find room for dessert after a large meal, sometimes see a face in things like the burn marks on toast, and forget why we came into a room. The science was presented in an easy to understand manner but some of the British humor escaped me, which 'as the actress said to the bishop' was probably a blessing. ( )

This is an interesting collection of things the brain does in odd ways. Lots of decent explanation of how common ways in which we think about the brain are misleading if not completely false.
It's written in a very accessible language with great compassion for how damn odd we are as humans. Well worth reading for a better understanding of how people think and act, and in particular our own thoughts, feelings and actions.

As with a lot of these popular science books I found the level of information provided was never quite right. There were paragraphs which I would happily read a whole book on and chapters which could have been reduced to a few paragraphs. I often found myself either wanting more information or skipping whole sections. ( )