Your Daily Brain: 24 Hours in the Life of Your Brain

145 Pages·2015·1.7 MB·English

by  Marbles: The Brain Store

A L S O B Y
BEND YOUR BRAIN
Copyright © 2015 by Marble Holdings, Inc. d/b/a Marbles: The Brain Store All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a
division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Your Daily Brain : 24 hours in the life of your brain / Marbles: The Brain Store. —First edition.
pages cm
1. Thought and thinking—Miscellanea. 2. Attention—Miscellanea. 3. Intellect—Miscellanea. 4.
Mental health—Miscellanea. 5. Brain—Miscellanea. I. Marbles: The Brain Store.
BF441.T724 2015
153.4—dc23 2015004795
ISBN 9780804140119
eBook ISBN 9780804140126
Cover design by Marbles: The Brain Store
v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
PART 1
THE MORNING—
Waking Up, Getting Ready, Getting Gone
6:30 a.m.: Insight or Energy: Should You Hit the Snooze Button?
6:35 a.m.: The Difference Between Asleep and Awake
6:45 a.m.: Use the Power of Newness to Wake Up Your Senses
7:00 a.m.: Do You Crow with the Roosters or Hoot with the Owls?
7:15 a.m.: Here’s What Your Brain Likes for Breakfast
7:30 a.m.: Morning! Panic! Multitask!
7:40 a.m.: The (Reverse) Power of Positive Thinking
7:45 a.m.: How to Plan Your Day
8:00 a.m.: The Problem with Puzzles
8:05 a.m.: How to Remember Where You Put Your Car Keys
8:15 a.m.: Setting Your Positivity Clock
8:30 a.m.: Why You Can’t Remember Street Names or Directions
8:35 a.m.: How to Pick a Car Radio Station
8:45 a.m.: Why American Brains Commute Alone
8:50 a.m.: Should You Make Out While Driving?
8:55 a.m.: How to Parallel Park
PART 2
THE DAY—
Work, Thinking Skills, and Willpower
9:05 a.m.: How to Pay Attention
9:15 a.m.: Fourteen Ways You Are a Puppet to Your Unconscious
9:30 a.m.: If You Believe You Have More Willpower, You Have More
Willpower
10:00 a.m.: How to Step Up, Not Fade Away, in the Face of Workplace
Stress
10:30 a.m.: Should You Paint Your Office Red or Blue?
11:00 a.m.: If Not IQ, Then What? Practical Intelligence Helps You Surf
Work Dilemmas
Noon: What Is Your Learning Style?
12:30 p.m.: How to Make a Creative Idea Pop into Existence
1:00 p.m.: Should You Do Today What Could Be Put Off Until
Tomorrow?
1:15 p.m.: Pack Your Working Memory
2:00 p.m.: It’s Only Two o’Clock. Are You Burned Out Already?
2:30 p.m.: How to Read Your Coworkers’ Minds
3:00 p.m.: The Secret to Solving All Your Problems
3:30 p.m.: How to Find What You Need on the Internet
4:00 p.m.: How to Be an Innovator
PART 3
THE EVENING—
Health, Family, Love, and Leisure
5:00 p.m.: Does Your Brain Like One Drink a Day?
5:15 p.m.: Pump Up Your Brain!
5:20 p.m.: Your Brain vs. the Grocery Store
5:30 p.m.: Why Kids Punch Each Other in the Backseats of Cars
5:45 p.m.: How Parenting Changes the Brain
6:00 p.m.: Love Is a Heady Chemical Cocktail
6:15 p.m.: How to Know If Your Relationship Will Last
6:45 p.m.: Should You Argue with Your Spouse When You’re Angry?
How About When You’re Sad?
7:00 p.m.: A Tiny Piece of Evidence That Suggests You Still Have the
Brain of a Caveperson
7:20 p.m.: How to Read Your Significant Other’s Mind
7:30 p.m.: Happiness, Well-being, and Twinkies
8:00 p.m.: Don’t Diss the Placebo Effect
8:30 p.m.: Technology Is Eating Your Brain
9:00 p.m.: Why You Should Stop Reading and Go to Sleep
I N T R O D U C T I O N
The marimba has always been such a soothing sound—cloth mallets
against wood bars, perfect for making the sounds of raindrops in forest
pools. Then the iPhone went and co-opted it for its default alarm. Now the
sound of a marimba makes an entire train full of commuters check their
jacket pockets.
Consider this book your marimba. It’s time to wake up, jump-start your
brain, and rip back the veils of habit, misperception, and irrationality that
your neurons create between you and reality. But waking up is just the start.
From the second the marimba sounds until your eyes close for the evening
(and beyond!), you evaluate the world outside, evaluate the world inside,
make choices and decisions, plan how to reach little goals like getting to
work on time, and keep your eyes on bigger goals like being a good parent or
partner, all amid a landscape of distraction and temptation. Every second of
every day, you have the opportunity to use your brain for better or for worse.
You have the opportunity to nail it or totally screw up. And when you nail
these things or screw them up, you have the opportunity to learn.
The thing is, someone somewhere has studied each one of these teeny-
tiny chunks in the day of your brain. From multitasking over your morning
coffee to milking the semiconscious state before you sleep for flashes of
insight, there’s someone with a PhD in a white lab coat—or, more likely,
jeans and a T-shirt—who knows how to do it better. This book collects
science’s best understandings of how to maximize the use of your brain,
generally organized by the situations in your day when you’re likely to use
these skills. Some of the entries are fun facts that you can use to dazzle in
conversation over a platter of crudités, some offer understanding or a new
way to look at the things you do and why you do them, and some suggest
little actions or exercises that can help you use your brain to manage the
challenges of your day and your life better.
Here’s Your Daily Brain, a fun way to shine light into those dark corners of
your mind usually penetrated only by cranial nerves, and a chance to
explore how our evolving understanding of the brain can help you live a
better life.