Your daily brain: 24 hours in the life of your brain, by Garth Sundem

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Garth Sundem

I received this book from Netgalley for review.

Your daily brain shows us how our brain works and why it does it that way as it makes us go through a typical working day. Because let’s be honest: your brain is in charge.

The book addresses the different brain functions stopping by certain hours in the day in which we have different needs, from the first chapter at 6:30 am, “Should you hit the snooze button?”, to the last at 9:00 pm, “Why you should stop reading and go to sleep”, passing by many daily tasks and routines and the way we approach every one of them.

The author talks about memory, multitasking, willpower, positivity, etc. To be honest, I knew a lot about some of these subjects thanks to the previous books I have read on these matters, some by authors mentioned in Your daily brain. Besides, the book talks briefly about every topic (about 5-6 kindle pages per chapter), so you won’t get a profound scientific knowledge by reading it, but the format (many subjects, summarized) is approachable because it is easy to follow, avoiding scientific nomenclature, and keeps your interest.

I went over many things I already knew about, like multitasking (the ability to switch fast between two or more tasks, NOT about doing two things at once), and I also found new information: I liked to learn, for instance, about creativity; the special needs of the teenage brain; the different studies about willpower (I only had read about one of the theories about this skill); or the changes in parent’s brains – they get a different circuit when they hear a baby crying that tells them to worry about the baby’s needs (even if it’s not their baby!), whereas for we, the childless, it goes directly to the “annoying noises” neurons  😛

Altogether, this is an interesting book written for the public with humor, examples on everyday life anybody can identify with, and topics I’m always keen to learn about; after all, we’d love to understand this bossy organ we have in our heads!

Your daily brain
Garth Sundem
Ebook, 194 pages
Collection: Marbles: The brain store
Published by Three Rivers Press
Book on Goodreads

 

A short history of nearly everything, by Bill Bryson

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Bill Bryson

I have little to say about this book, except for leave whatever you are doing and read it. Now.

If you want to know a little bit more, let’s say this is a book about every branch of science, which explains what we know, how we got to know it, and what is still ahead of our actual knowledge, including brief biographies of great scientific men and women who studied issues and made discoveries we now take for granted. And all that is told in a humorous and concise manner, which not only does it make you get involved in all the mysteries of our world, but also be willing to learn more.

Because we all have studied books about the distance between the Earth and the Sun, or the age of the Universe, etc. and, nevertheless, we don’t know how they actually measure it! Those processes that leaded the way to the facts that we now find in textbooks involved incredible adventures and epic disagreements among scientists, and knowing about it makes science far more interesting.

Believe me: this is a book to read and re-read. To learn about men and women who tried to find answers. To think about everything that is awaiting for us to discover.

A short history of nearly everything
Bill Bryson
Published by Broadway, 560 pages
Non-fiction November
Non-fiction reading challenge: 10/10

My brief history, by Stephen Hawking

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Stephen Hawking

One of my bookish resolutions for the last year was to read more non-fiction books, and since I’m a science girl, I mainly thought of authors like Isaac Asimov or Stephen Hawking, who have done a great job by explaining science concepts to the general public. I saw this autobiography of the latter on Netgalley and I thought that it would be a great chance to get to know him better.

In My brief History, Hawking tells us the story of his life from the very beginning, since he was a little boy, and ends up explaining briefly – everything in this book is brief – how he came to the conclusions and equations of the physics of the Universe. He also talks about his books and his illness, which I thought he suffered from when he was a kid, but in fact it was developed when he was twenty-something, and how his personal life was affected since then, but curiously not his professional life.

What I liked most is how he explains the way scientists work and science is carried out. People like to imagine a crazy old man who spends his entire life alone in a laboratory until something is discovered, more or less by chance; but reality is quite different. Hawking says something in the book like “I had an eureka moment and then I spent X years working with these colleagues until we got to know the theory of the black holes”, so everybody can notice thanks to this book that you actually need to work very hard, and usually with a group of people, and also that science doesn’t happen by chance; sometimes that eureka moment came just by asking yourself the right question.

I recommend this book to those who are interested in science and how it is developed, as well as to the readers who want to know more about Stephen Hawking, of course. The book is very short; he could have talked longer about his work and his illness, but it’s a summary and he actually covers all the aspects of his life that we are curious about.

PS: I don’t want to rate non-fiction books, for the moment.

Book on amazon.com ♦ Book on GoodReads

My brief history

Stephen Hawking

Publisher: Bantam

ISBN: 0345535286

Hardcover, 144 pages