Your Brain: The Missing Manual

304 Pages·2008·5.31 MB·English

by  Matthew MacDonald

Your Brain: The Missing Manual
Matthew MacDonald
Editor
Laurie Petrycki
Copyright © 2009 Matthew MacDonald
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The Missing Credits
About the Author
Matthew MacDonald is an author and programmer extraordinaire. He's the
author of Excel 2007: The Missing Manual, Access 2007: The Missing Manual,
Creating Web Sites: The Missing Manual, and over a dozen books about
programming with the Microsoft .NET Framework. In a dimly remembered past
life, he studied English literature and theoretical physics.
About the Creative Team
Peter Meyers (editor) is the managing editor of O'Reilly Media's Missing
Manual series. He lives with his wife, daughter, and cats in New York City.
Email: [email protected].
Nellie McKesson(production editor) is a graduate of St. John's College in Santa
Fe, New Mexico. She currently lives in Jamaica Plain, Mass., and spends her
spare time making t-shirts for her friends to wear
(mattsaundersbynellie.etsy.com). Email: [email protected].
Alison O'Byrne (copy editor) is a freelance editor from Dublin, Ireland. Alison
has provided editorial services for corporate and government clients at home and
internationally for over six years. Email: [email protected]. Web:
www.alhaus.com.
Julie Hawks (indexer) has degrees in mathematics and library and information
science. Much of her spare time is spent reading authors such as David Bohm,
Ramana Maharshi, and Sri Nisargadatta as well as dreaming of traveling
extensively through India. Email: [email protected].
Esther Chung (technical reviewer) is a student of the brain at Wellesley
College. She wishes to thank her good friend Shane Warden for his introduction,
and Dawn Frausto for all her help during the tech review process.
Timo Hannay (technical reviewer) is a director at Nature Publishing Group,
creators of Nature and other scientific journals, as well as a variety of online
scientific resources. Among other things, he is the publisher of Nature.com, a co-
organiser of Science Foo Camp, and a fluent Japanese speaker. He originally
trained as a neurophysiologist at the University of Oxford, and as a biochemist at
Imperial College London. Email:[email protected].
Jennifer Mangels (technical reviewer) is an associate professor of cognitive
neuroscience at Baruch College, a senior college of the City University of New
York, where she is principle investigator of the Dynamic Learning Lab
(www.baruch.cuny.edu/faculty/jmangels). She also serves as Chief Research
Officer for Lucid Systems Inc., a new company leveraging neuroscience
methods in the domain of market research (www.lucidsystems.com). Because
she has so much free time left over, she busies herself playing Balinese gamelan
music.
Acknowledgements
This is the part of the book where the author is supposed to tell you that nothing
would have ever been accomplished without the contribution of hundreds of
impressively credentialed people who did all the real work. Well, allow me to
depart from the script, because I could have done everything myself. However,
the resulting book would have been short, incoherent, and hand-written on the
back side of a paper towel roll. Fortunately, you don't have to read that book.
Instead, you can enjoy a book that's been cleaned up, illustrated, and reviewed
by some very sharp pencils. Best of all, it's been copied off the paper towels. In
other words, if you enjoy your reading experience, you have the following
people to thank.
First up are my big-brained reviewers, who contributed helpful insight and
plenty of trivia. They include Esther Chung, Jennifer Mangels, and Timo
Hannay, whose fascinating tidbit about the birthing practices of the hyena ranks
as the most interesting piece of information you won't get to read about in this
book. (You can get the exquisitely painful story at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotted_Hyena.) Curiously, Timo was not the only
reviewer to bring up the reproductive life of the hyena while reading this book.
This suggests something deep and profound about the connection between
cutting-edge neuroscience and randy animals, but I'm at a loss to say exactly
what it is.
Second, I thank my editor Peter Meyers, who helped to indulge all my authorly
desires (new sidebars, color pictures, fancy figures, you get the picture), and the
supremely talented Robert Romano, who created the illustrations for this book. I
also owe much gratitude to Akiyoshi Kitaoka, who graciously allowed us to use
his rotating snakes illusion (Your Shifty Eyes), Rhon Rorter, who created a few
images that were adapted for the figures in this book, Nellie McKesson, who
shepherded the book through its final stages, and the many people who worked
to get this book formatted, indexed, and printed.
Lastly, I thank my family—particularly my parents, who lost many a neuron in
their parenting years, and my wife's parents, who didn't fare much better. (In
Chapter 10 they can all find out what went wrong.) Finally, I'm eternally grateful
for my wife Faria and my daughter Maya, whose brains delight me in quite
different ways, and I promise not to hook either of them up to an MRI machine
to find out why.
—Matthew MacDonald
The Missing Manual Series
Missing Manuals are witty, superbly written guides to computer products that
don't come with printed manuals (which is just about all of them). Each book
features a handcrafted index; cross-references to specific pages (not just
chapters); and RepKover, a detached-spine binding that lets the book lie
perfectly flat without the assistance of weights or cinder blocks.
Recent and upcoming titles include:
Access 2007: The Missing Manual by Matthew MacDonald
AppleScript: The Missing Manual by Adam Goldstein
AppleWorks 6: The Missing Manual by Jim Elferdink and David Reynolds
CSS: The Missing Manual by David Sawyer McFarland
Creating Web Sites: The Missing Manual by Matthew MacDonald
Dreamweaver 8: The Missing Manual by David Sawyer McFarland
Dreamweaver CS3: The Missing Manual by David Sawyer McFarland
eBay: The Missing Manual by Nancy Conner
Excel 2003: The Missing Manual by Matthew MacDonald
Excel 2007: The Missing Manual by Matthew MacDonald
Facebook: The Missing Manual by E. A. Vander Veer
FileMaker Pro 9: The Missing Manual by Geoff Coffey and Susan Prosser
Flash 8: The Missing Manual by E.A. Vander Veer
Flash CS3: The Missing Manual by E.A. Vander Veer and Chris Grover
FrontPage 2003: The Missing Manual by Jessica Mantaro
Google: The Missing Manual, Second Edition by Sarah Milstein, J.D.
Biersdorfer, and Matthew MacDonald
Google Apps: The Missing Manual by Nancy Conner
The Internet: The Missing Manual by David Pogue and J.D. Biersdorfer
iMovie '08 & iDVD: The Missing Manual by David Pogue
iPhone: The Missing Manual by David Pogue
iPhoto '08: The Missing Manual by David Pogue and Derrick Story
iPod: The Missing Manual, Sixth Edition by J.D. Biersdorfer
JavaScript: The Missing Manual by David Sawyer McFarland
Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Leopard Edition by David Pogue
Microsoft Project 2007: The Missing Manual by Bonnie Biafore
Office 2004 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual by Mark H. Walker and
Franklin Tessler
Office 2007: The Missing Manual by Chris Grover, Matthew MacDonald, and
E.A. Vander Veer
Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual by Jim Elferdink
Photoshop Elements 6: The Missing Manual by Barbara Brundage
Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac: The Missing Manual by Barbara Brundage
PowerPoint 2007: The Missing Manual by E.A. Vander Veer
QuickBase: The Missing Manual by Nancy Conner
QuickBooks 2008: The Missing Manual by Bonnie Biafore
Quicken 2008: The Missing Manual by Bonnie Biafore
Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Leopard Edition by David Pogue
Wikipedia: The Missing Manual by John Broughton
Windows XP Home Edition: The Missing Manual, Second Edition by David
Pogue
Windows XP Pro: The Missing Manual, Second Edition by David Pogue, Craig
Zacker, and Linda Zacker
Windows Vista: The Missing Manual by David Pogue
Word 2007: The Missing Manual by Chris Grover
Introduction
This is a book about that wet mass of crumpled-up cell tissue called the brain,
and why it's responsible for everything from true love to getting you out of bed
in the morning. It's a book about how we think, how we feel, and why it's so
difficult to stay away from that second piece of triple-chocolate cheesecake. It's
a book that teaches you how to get a good nap, warns you never to trust a
memory, and explains why—as successful as you may be—you'll probably
never be much happier than you are right now (see Chapter 6).
There are many excellent books that explore the brain's anatomical inner
workings. But in this book, biology takes a back seat to practical advice. In other
words, you won't just focus on how the brain works, but on how you can use it
more effectively. After all, your brain is easily your most important possession
(or arguably a strong second place after that slick iPhone or those hot new
shoes). It deserves proper upkeep.
Learning how to use your brain means delving into its quirks—and as you'll see
in this book, the brain is full of quirks. Unwritten rules shape how the brain
interprets a scene, reconstructs a memory, and solves a problem. Most of the
time, these rules work to your advantage. After all, if it took you several minutes
of conscious thought to separate a traffic sign from a sanitation truck, you'd have
an unhappy time crossing the street. But other times your brain's automatic
assumptions can mask reality or encourage exactly the wrong reaction.
In this book, you'll learn to work around some of your brain's limitations. You'll
also learn to enjoy the quirks you can't change (some of which make for great
party tricks). Either way, by the time you've finished the last chapter, you'll have
an entirely new understanding of the cauliflower-shaped organ that rules your
life.
About This Book
This book is intended to be a practical look at how to get the most out of your
brain. What makes it different from the average self-help guide is the fact that
it's grounded in modern-day neuroscience.
This book has one advantage over most other books in the Missing Manuals
series, which focus on computer software and cool gadgets: Unlike the headline-
grabbing products of the high-tech world, your brain won't become obsolete
anytime soon. Despite its weaknesses (such as slow calculation speed), its