Your Daily Brain: 24 Hours in the Life of Your Brain - Softcover

Marbles: The Brain Store, Marbles: The Brain Store

 
9780804140119: Your Daily Brain: 24 Hours in the Life of Your Brain
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0804140111 ISBN 13: 9780804140119
Verlag: Crown, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

Want to stop losing your car keys? Will a creative idea into existence? Have more productive arguments with your spouse?
 
In Your Daily Brain, the team behind Marbles: The Brain Store, a chain devoted to building better brains, shows you all the weird and wonderful ways your brain works throughout the day—even when you think it’s not working at all, like when you’re on the treadmill or picking the kids up from school.
 
Consider this book a wake-up call, a chance to take a closer look at and jump start your brain. From the minute your alarm clock buzzes in the morning until your head hits the pillow at night, your daily activities—everything from doing a crossword puzzle to parallel parking—are part of a process for how you evaluate the world, make choices and decisions, and reach short-term goals while keeping your eyes on the bigger ones. In each, you have the opportunity to use your brain for better or worse, whether it’s what to listen to you on your morning commute or avoiding mental traps at the grocery store.
 
Packed with information as well as useful tips and tricks, Your Daily Brain is the brain hack you’ve been looking for!

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

MARBLES: THE BRAIN STORE is in malls across the country. They and their branded products have been featured in Good Housekeeping, Real Simple, USA Today, and Wired, as well as on the Today show and Martha Stewart Living.
 
GARTH SUNDEM is the author of books including Geek Logik, The Geeks’ Guide to World Domination, Brain Candy, Brain Trust, and Beyond IQ. He lives and writes in Boulder, Colorado. 

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1

6:30am

Insight or Energy: Should You Hit the Snooze Button?

You’ve heard of brain waves, and here’s how they happen. Think of the eighty-six billion neurons in your head like crickets. When one cricket chirps, not much happens—it’s not like the voice of one cricket can make you pour a cup of coffee or help you remember that snappy comeback. But your brain crickets don’t just do their own thing. They synchronize in ways that create the pulsing cacophony of a summer night.

The thing is, crickets can come into synch in different rhythms. The neuronal crickets in your brain “chirp” more slowly when you are asleep than they do when you are awake. Just like a summer night, the brain waves created by your chirping neurons are like the background noise against which other things take place. When you’re awake, everything you do or think happens against the backdrop of the pattern called beta waves. Deep sleep happens against delta waves. If you listened closely, the beta waves would sound like high-pitched chirps and the delta waves would sound like crickets bowing a section of orchestral basses. Between these two patterns—the beta waves of alertness and the delta waves of deep sleep—are alpha waves of wakeful relaxation and theta waves of light sleep.

So there are many patterns of brain waves created by the synchronicity of your neuronal crickets, and each brain wave is associated with a level of sleep or consciousness. The purpose of an alarm is to mess with these crickets, forcing them to chirp in the pattern you want. Of course, you have a last line of defense against the dictatorship of your alarm clock: the snooze button! The desire to whack snooze competes only with the need to check Facebook while driving and with the overwhelming compulsion to scratch mosquito bites on your knuckles for the top spot on the human list of temptations. The question is, should you?

Here’s the reason you shouldn’t: maybe if you set the alarm five, ten, or fifteen minutes later, you wouldn’t need the alarm at all. If you kicked the snooze habit, you could sleep a little longer, and these few minutes might be all it takes for your brain to reach a natural state of wakefulness without being tossed into the ice-water bath that is the alarm clock. If you stick to a regular sleep schedule, your body knows exactly when it’s reached the final pass through what’s called N1 sleep, and you’ll wake up instead of taking another spin through the sleep cycle. If the fifteen minutes that you usually spend hitting the snooze button would let you get into this final N1, your brain and body would be better off using this time to sleep for real instead of snoozing in the half-light.

Then again, there’s something to be said for hanging out at this N1 transition between alpha and theta waves. Have you ever been floored by an idea? Has insight ever hit you like a falling piano? When did it happen? Was it in a warm shower or in the middle of the night? The reason is that a brain coasting on the cushion of theta waves is primed for insight—when you relax in the shower or slip into the boundary between alpha and theta waves in N1, you make your brain ready to receive messages from the beyond. There you are between sleep cycles in an N1 phase or staring out the window cross-eyed at a rainy day, and wham!—it’s insight (which looks like a burst of high-frequency gamma waves in your brain).

If you need energy, forget the snooze button and work toward a regular sleep cycle that lets you wake up naturally. But if you need insight, try smacking snooze and surfing the cusp between theta waves and alpha waves—the line that separates asleep from awake. You may find your brain infusing the certainty of insight into what had been stubbornly murky before.

6:35am

The Difference Between Asleep and Awake

Why are we here? Are we alone in the universe? What is consciousness? Why do cat pictures go viral on Facebook? A satisfactory answer exists for exactly one of these questions—namely, the consciousness thing. And it explains what happens when you come back into your body in the morning.

The understanding comes from a long line of research by Francis Crick (of discoverer-of-DNA fame) and Christof Koch at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. They started with a simple question: Is there one area of the brain that lights up during all the tasks of consciousness? If all these sensory and motor and cognitive things were circles of a Venn diagram, where would they overlap?

What they found is the claustrum, a one-millimeter-thick sheet of neurons that divides the hemispheres of the brain. All mammals have it. And it’s connected to all the major players in your skull, including the prefrontal cortex, auditory cortex, visual cortex, primary motor cortex, premotor cortex, and many other areas of functioning. So Crick and Koch went into people’s heads and zapped their claustrums to see if it would mess with their consciousness. Actually, they didn’t—due to troublesome things like ethics and morality, you can’t just fry people’s brains and see what happens. That is, outside of very special circumstances.

One of those circumstances is in the treatment of epilepsy. In epilepsy, an area of the brain misfires in a way that lets electricity “leak” into surrounding tissues, rebounding through the brain like a gunslinger’s bullet in a rib cage—sometimes with equally devastating consequences. To treat cases of severe and debilitating epilepsy, doctors explore inside the brains of conscious patients to discover the source of the problem, at which point they can sometimes cure or diminish symptoms by inserting a sophisticated electrical pacemaker. The thing is, epilepsy can live pretty much anywhere in the brain, and so discovering its source sometimes takes significant exploring.

That’s what Mohamad Koubeissi and colleagues did with a fifty-four-year-old with what they describe as “intractable epilepsy.” In a study published in Epilepsy and Behavior in 2014, they recount what happened during what’s called electrical stimulation mapping, when the surgeons just happened to be poking around her claustrum. “Stimulation of the claustral electrode reproducibly resulted in a complete arrest of volitional behavior, unresponsiveness, and amnesia without negative motor symptoms or mere aphasia,” they write. In English, this means that when Koubeissi zapped this woman’s claustrum, she became unconscious. When they turned off the juice, she was again immediately conscious. During brain mapping, patients usually read aloud or do some other kind of brain task that can show doctors how their prodding affects function. In this case, as Koubeissi introduced high-frequency electrical impulses into his patient’s claustrum (i.e., “frying”), she would stop reading and stop responding to her surgical team, and her body would gently slow into a state of deep relaxation. When the signals stopped, she would open her eyes and be able to continue reading.

In a Forbes article, Koubeissi called the claustrum the “sleep switch” and likened it to turning the key in a car’s ignition. The understanding of this difference between asleep and awake, conscious and unconscious, is still in its early stages, and opportunities to double-check the finding don’t come around so often. But here’s a cool part: now that we are beginning to understand the location and function of human consciousness, it might make it possible to not only understand the roots of our own consciousness but also replicate this consciousness. Knowing the difference between asleep and...

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Verlag
Crown
Erscheinungsdatum
2015
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0804140111
ISBN 13 
9780804140119
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
192
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

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Hamburg
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