A mind of its own: How your braing distorts and deceives by Cordelia Fine

I quote:"Your brain is vainglorious. It deludes you. It is pigheaded, emotional and secretive. Oh, and it's also a bigot. If your brain were a person you definitely wouldn't invite it to parties, and it would probably be a politician". And thats how Ms Fine attempts to tranform loads of cognitive psych journals into a witty & succint compilation of how our brain messes with us for the laymen. 

Divided into 6 segments: The Vain Brain, The Emotional Brain, The Deluded Brain, The Pigheaded Brain, The Secretive Brain, & The Bigoted Brain, the author illustrates with past literature (though phrase in a very pop psych way) and daily examples or how our brain is wired to delude us. 

If you are familiar with psych jargons or are well read terms like stereotypes, stereotype threat, subliminal priming, neurons and such, then at least a portion of the material will not sound absolutely foreign to you.

Whilst reading the book, i thought of what examples i would quote when reviewing it...but my response to most of her examples were "no surprise there" thanks to the generous dose of social and cognitive psych we had in college...so i can't say for sure what would interest you. 

But i guess priming is probably one of the more interesting stuff she wrote about, on how people when primed will tend to react within the boundaries of the primed schema. For example, if you were waiting at the doctor's and all the mags were health mags, soon after when casually offered either a apple or a chocolate bar, you are more likely to choose the apple. But lets not forget there is also subliminal priming which is the harmful of the two, since it happens beyond the awareness of our conscious. I'm sure you have already heard how they can flash words like buy XX brand during ads, and your brain, because of its efficiency would pick it up...and this inturn would influence your choices of purchase on your next trip to the supermarket.  

The other example was actually from a rather popular research, how they primed young people with words related to old people, then compared their walking pace to the control group after leaving the experiment. If you can't already guess, these people walked more slowly than the other group. 

Oh..there is also a general message running throughout the book, that suggest that our brain basically assist in boosting our self esteem so that we can live with ourselves, otherwise we might be reduced to mere animals..but don't worry...she does suggest ways to counter this!

So if you haven't heard me say it already, they should really stream psych students more carefully...if you think about it, if such knowledge are misuse, educational institutions can be accused for breeding con mans, serial killers, ...you get the idea. 

This book is worth a read, if scientific journals bore you, and you want to have a few intelligent things to say about a the brain in the nutshell, ok..but seriously, you can learn a few important facts about your brain via reading this book, only that for a research-wired brain like my...or rather throughout your tertiary education when you are constantly taught to question the reliability and validity of research + intrinsic motivation to question the research design, sample size and what not, then the mere summaries of rather prominent research will not satisfy your curiousity (or perhaps thats how i felt). Then again, i had prior knowledge of alot of these experiments and since i did it just 1 semester ago...there are still rather fresh in the memory..soo....yeah.

On to the next book now... on the immune system and how it relates to mental health =P the lady who wrote it works for the National institute of Mental Health (NiMH), which if you don't already know, should be one of your primary source of references on the www if you want to learn more about any mental disorders be it personality disorders, eating disorders, etc.

I'm not going through a mind-related book phase...just so happen its the 2 new books in my house..and since i'm home...i'm trying to read if before i head back to KL =P And really i do miss learning new stuff that are psych related, just a wee bit =P [i can soooo hear my classmates going N***]..but seriously...if only subscription to psych magazines were cheaper....the shipping itself is sooooo $$$ yeah..so i have to settle for the online versions...which seriously doesn't do the real mag justice (and i know because my psych dept used to subscribe to them)...thats all 4 now!