Idiot Brain

What Your Head Is Really up To

By: Dean Burnett

Narrated by: John Keating

A delightful tour of our mysterious, mischievous gray matter from neuroscientist and massively popular Guardian blogger Dean Burnett.

The brain may be the seat of consciousness and the engine of all human experience, but it's also messy, fallible, and disorganized. For example, did you know that your memory is egotistical? That conspiracy theories and superstitions are the inevitable effects of a healthy brain? Or that alcohol can actually improve your memory? (Editor's note: Please listen to the book before testing that last conclusion.)

In Idiot Brain, Dr. Dean Burnett celebrates blind spots, blackouts, insomnia, and all the other downright laughable things our minds do to us while also exposing the many mistakes we've made in our quest to understand how our brains actually work. This is the best kind of popular science - lucid, funny, and whip smart - from a debut author who will be tickling funny bones and firing neurons for a long time to come.

©2016 Dean Burnett (P)2016 Audible, Inc.

Very insightful book. A lot of knowledge on brain

I was fascinated by the inner chemical workings of the brain and how that relates to our perception of the real world. However I still don't understand our way of thinking and environment impacts the chemical "reality" of our brain or its the other way round.

content yes/whoever read this-no

This book is worth reading, but I would strongly suggest finding the time to read it yourself, or finding a different reading of it as the reader is hard to listen to.

actually pretty nice

Though it can get hard to follow or it takes time to understand and process things, you make even have to do outside research to better understand (if you’re that interested). I actually enjoy the book.

Great book, tough accent

This book is at a terrific level for either an early academic in the field of neuroscience, or an advanced layman in a field of biology. It serves as an overview of brain science that doesn't take itself too seriously. There are maybe a dozen paragraph throughout the book that are densely written, but most readers will be able to quickly identify them, And either ignore them or use them to find more specialized material. In some ways, the dense paragraphs are almost like the author is using hashtags to give people explicit connections to other works.

As far as the performance of the audiobook is concerned, I would recommend it for people whose hearing works best in the mid range of sound. I would not recommend it for people who struggle interpreting accents different from those on television. On more than one OK Asian, vocabulary terms were incorrectly pronounced-this could be a big deal for the advanced layman.

Great book!

I loved it! It was very easy to listen to, amusing, engaging, and informative. I recommend it.