Yzabel / March 10, 2020

Your Brain, Explained: What Neuroscience Reveals about Your Brain and its Quirks by Marc Dingman
My rating: ★★★★☆

Blurb:

Sleep. Memory. Pleasure. Fear. Language. We experience these things every day, but how do our brains create them?

Your Brain, Explained is a personal tour around your gray matter. Neuroscientist Marc Dingman gives you a crash course in how your brain works and explains the latest research on the brain functions that affect you on a daily basis.

You’ll also discover what happens when the brain doesn’t work the way it should, causing problems such as insomnia, ADHD, depression or addiction. You’ll learn how neuroscience is working to fix these problems, and how you can build up your defenses against the most common faults of the mind.

Along the way you’ll find out:

• Why brain training games don’t prevent dementia
• What it’s like to remember every day of your life as if it were yesterday
• Which popular psychiatric drug was created from German rocket fuel
• What triggers sleep loss or lapses in concentration
  

Drawing on the author’s popular YouTube series, 2-minute Neuroscience, this is a friendly, engaging introduction to the human brain and its quirks from the perspective of a neuroscientist – using real-life examples and the author’s own eye-opening illustrations. Your brain is yours to discover!

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

A pretty informative read on what’s going on in our brains, I found this book to be a good introduction to the topic: it doesn’t go too deep into complex science, but it also provides enough to be interesting even if, like me, you already know a little. What I already knew was there, so that’s consolidated knowledge for me, and what I didn’t, well, now I have new things to mull over.

On top of anatomy, the author also covers current (and past) research about the brain—apparently, there was a time when people found it OK to experiment on dogs’ brains without anaesthetising the poor pups—as well as brain chemistry and pharmacology. Several case studies, usually found at the beginning of each chapter, illustrate each topic, the latter ranging from language to memory, from addiction to fear, and more. The part about sleep especially interested me, due to my own difficulties with that—I knew that I shouldn’t drink coffee too late in the day (in my family, we used to say “never after 1 pm”) but now I also know that it’s because of caffeine’s long half-life, and putting numbers on this definitely helps enforce the point.

One mistake I made with this book, though, was to not always read it at the right moments. So don’t be like me, don’t read it right before bed when you’re already half-asleep. It won’t do it justice. (I basically had to read a couple of chapters again the next day to make sure I’d get everything. It’s not complicated writing or concepts, but that’s on a fully awake brain, right!)

Conclusion: A strong “introduction”, that actually also has good nuggets for people who have some knowledge on the topic.