Compelling ... If you're only going to buy one brain book ever, you could do worse than investing in this one
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Make way for the thinking man's gym, where the brain is the new biceps and sculpting your grey matter rather than downsizing your backside is the ultimate aim of those who sign up for membership.
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Before consulting with customer service, it's always a good idea to read the manual. Psychiatrist John Ratey has condensed years of research on one of the most intimidating yet ubiquitous pieces of hardware in the world into the ever-handy User's Guide to the Brain. More intellectually stimulating than day-to-day practical, the Guide uses tales from Ratey's practice and other clinical venues, titbits from neuroscientific research, and plain common sense to suggest how the brain develops and manifests personality and behaviour. With section titles like "Free Will and the Anterior Cingulate Gyrus" many readers will feel intimidated, but Ratey is careful to direct his explanations to all
even those without PhD's in neuroanatomy. His four-theatre theory of mental function is interesting and the most directly practical section of the book, incorporating the author's years of experience with patients into a sensible framework that readers can use to better tune their own systems. Describing the changing of the guard from psychoanalysis to a more biological paradigm, Ratey writes:
Neuroscientists have, in a sense, simply taken over the elite, almost clerical office once held by analysts. The language used to describe the brain is, if any thing, more opaque than any of the old psychoanalytic terminology, which was itself so obscure
Determined to help us overcome our sense of helplessness in matters cranial, he has shown that we can understand ourselves better and can learn quite a bit from the nerds.
Rob Lightner, AMAZON.CO.UK REVIEW
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