The Idiot Brain: A Neuroscientist Explains What Your Head is Really Up To, by Dean Burnett

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Have you got everything you need for your child's upcoming birthday party? Is the big work project going as well as it could be? Will your gas hill be more than you can afford? When did your mother last call, is she OK? That ache in your hip hasn't gone away; are you sure it's not arthritis? That left-over mince has been in the fridge for a week; what if someone eats it and gets food poisoning? Why is my foot itching? Remember when your pants fell down in school when you were nine; what if people still think about that? Does the car seem a bit sluggish to you? What's that noise? Is it a rat? What if it has the plague? Your boss will never believe you if you call in sick with that. On and on and on and on and on and on.

A good breezy book about the wiring system that makes us all function. Style maybe a little too chatty in places, but I guess it helps us to digest the complex subject matter (or at least it helped me to). Rightly excoriates Myers-Briggs and the like. Accepts the standard narrative on the Stanford Prison experiment, Milgram and Kitty Genovese, unlike Rutger Bregman. A lot of what Burnett says is also aligned with cognitive behavioural therapy, with the difference that he is at least as interested in physiology as psychology – which maybe actually makes it all easier to accept. Not a lot more to say, but you can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2018. Next on that pile is Wandering Scholars, by Helen Waddell.

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