The Idiot Brain

The brain may be the seat of consciousness and the engine of all human experience, but it’s also messy, fallible and disorganized. It’s undeniably impressive, but it’s far from perfect, and these imperfections influence everything that humans say, do and experience. In The Idiot Brain, Dean Burnett celebrates the downright laughable things our minds do to us, as well as exposing the fact that people are often way off in their thinking about how the brain works. For example, did you know that

• your memory is egotistical?
• stress can actually increase your performance at a task?
• conspiracy theories and superstitions stem from your brain’s insistence that the world isn’t random?
• the brain’s limitations mean you really can miss something that’s right under your nose?
• the way the brain’s processing works means that time really does fly if you’re having fun?
• alcohol can sometimes improve your memory?

Dean Burnett’s unpredictable and entertaining first book explores the unexpected side of everyday life, highlighting where conventional thinking is wrong and how our brains trip us up at every turn. This is lucid, funny and smart: in short, the best kind of popular science.