The 50 most mind-blowing ideas in neuroscience; each explained in half a minuteGenre: non fiction, science
Pages: 160
Rating: 3.5/5
Goodreads
Summary
Are we all at the mercy of our brain chemistry? Do you think that the amygdala and the hippocampus are fantastical sea monsters? What can an MRI scan tell us? Could you explain to dinner-party guests why we don't giggle when we tickle ourselves? 30-Second Brain is here to fill your mind with the science of exactly what's happening inside your head. Using no more than two pages, 300 words and an illustration, this is the quickest way to understand the wiring and function of the most complex and intricate mechanism in the human body. Discover how the networks of 90 billion nerve cells work together to produce perception, action, cognition and emotion. Explore how your brain defines your personality, and what it gets up to while you are asleep. Illustrated with mind-bending graphics and supported by biographies of pioneers in the field of neuroscience, it's the book to get your grey matter thinking about your grey matter.
My thoughts
This popular science book is a nice introduction to many neurological topics. Since every page contains a different topic it does not go very deep into these topics, but in the back of the book there is a list for continued reading. Every topic is explained over one page and on the page next to it is an illustration that goes with the topic. Personally I really love these kind of bite-sized chunks of information, but the illustrations did not really add anything to the book. They did not help to understand the topics better and they also weren't that pretty.
The book is divided into seven sections, each starting with a page that explains the meaning of some words. Also a couple of biographies of people that were important for the development of neuroscience are included in the book. The explanations of the words were clear, but in some cases I found them to be unnecessary, since the words also became clear by reading the explanations of the topics. I thought the biographies were interesting. I wouldn't read a whole book on most of these people, but it was nice to get an idea of the people who really made a difference in de development of neurscience as a science.
This seems like a pretty straight forward book which can give you the gist of some things when it comes to how your brain works, but doesn't go into too much detail. Personally, I would want more detail so I don't think this book is for me, but I know others would much prefer this.
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