Tina's review
Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life
by Steven Johnson
Tina's review
Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life by Steven Johnson
Tina's review
rating:
bookshelves:
non-fiction
This is a pretty fascinating book. It gets a little annoying whenever Johnson tries to pimp it out as a self-help book ("learning about your brain can help you!" blah blah), but luckily, it's NOT a self-help book -- it's an informative book about how your brain functions and how he went about exploring (via MRI and neurofeedback, etc.) about how his brain works. (I'm guessing he thought trying to pass it off as self-help would increase his audience?)
The chapter on attention was a tiny bit dull for me in some parts, but this might have been b/c I was already pretty familiar with most of the info. (This is pretty much the extent of the usefulness of my psych degree.) But the info about the connections between emotion and memory, and the evolutionary purpose behind laughter and play -- stuff like that was really interesting. It's also a fairly quick, easy, layperson-targeted read, so you get to learn great stuff without giving yourself a headache. I recommend this one to my ...more
The chapter on attention was a tiny bit dull for me in some parts, but this might have been b/c I was already pretty familiar with most of the info. (This is pretty much the extent of the usefulness of my psych degree.) But the info about the connections between emotion and memory, and the evolutionary purpose behind laughter and play -- stuff like that was really interesting. It's also a fairly quick, easy, layperson-targeted read, so you get to learn great stuff without giving yourself a headache. I recommend this one to my ...more
