A review by inquiry_from_an_anti_library
The Neuroscience of You: The Surprising Truth about How Every Brain Is Different and How to Understand Yours by Chantel Spring Prat

adventurous emotional hopeful informative inspiring fast-paced

5.0

Is This An Overview?

Thinking and behavioral responses are shaped by a mixture of biology and experience, a mixture of nature and nurture.  Influenced by how the brain works, the design of the brain.  Each brain can better handle problems that its more suited for.  Each brain is different, which means that each brain processes information differently.  Leading to different understandings.  Different ways that information is interpreted within the broader context.  Different interpretations of the same information, creates difficulty in trying to understand other people.  Not only do different people respond differently to the same external stimuli, but the same individual can respond differently to the same external stimuli.  It takes a lot of effort to understand other individuals. 

 

How Does The Brain Influence Thinking?

The brain was evolutionary designed to adapt.  To learn and adapt to the changing environment.  The brain reconfigures its operations to do different tasks.  The brain constantly fills in incomplete and ambiguous information.  Different brains, interpret information differently.  Creating different experiences of reality.  The individual is an active creator of reality. 

The brain causes thinking, feeling, and behavior.  Those response were not determined at birth, and are capable of change.   Responses that are a combination of biology and experiences.  Every experience changes the brain.  Sometimes the changes are inconsequential or incremental.  Sometimes a single event changes a person’s life forever. 

There are many neurotransmitters that drive thinking, feeling, and behaving.  The various chemical messages can create a lot of noise.  Each can influence the individual, but their influence depends on the environment, and how other communication systems are working in the brain.

Different parts of the brain work together to understand information.  Brain parts specialize and adept, allowing better performance. 

 

What Is Normal?

As every brain is different, it is very difficult to identify what is considered normal or typical.  One criteria of what is typical, can be described as the frequency a brain feature occurs.  Another criteria is functionality, defined by how the design feature works for a person in an environment.  What matters is what can be done with the brain. 

No individual fits into an average representative.  Failure to understand difference leads to incomplete data and incorrect conclusions about brain design.

 

Caveats?

The book does not provide definite answers.  Rather, the book raises more questions about the ideas.  There are various critiques of how phycological experiments were done before, and how they changed and improved.  Providing various limitations about what is known about the brain.  The purpose of the book is to provide a background to understanding the brain, to provide basic information needed for the reader to understand their own brain.