Re: 50 Book Challenge 2008

The Owner’s Manual for the Brain: Everyday Applications from Mind-Brain 
Research, by Pierce J. Howard, Ph.D.. Bard Press, 2006



I don’t think I’ve ever had it take me as long to finish a book as it did 
this one. It’s a thousand pages, and  covers both the neurological and 
psychological aspects of the brain. Howard starts with how the brain is
put 
together and from there goes to how different forms of brain damage affect

how one functions and how male and female brains are different. Then it’s
on 
to how your brain ages, and how to keep it from doing so too fast. How
males 
and females *think* differently. Different learning styles. A very large 
section of the book is devoted to the workplace and how to get different 
types of people to work their best.



It can be a very useful book, and the author has updated it twice now. One

very helpful thing he has done is put in all the sources he’s used, so you

can find out more- the book is very wide but fairly shallow, and these 
sources allow the reader to easily find more on the subjects that interest

them. I think this book would be better used by dipping into the sections 
that interest one, rather than reading every page like I did, because
there 
was an awful lot in it I already knew (because he doesn’t go very deep
into 
any section) and a great deal that didn’t particularly interest me- namely

the workplace sections, because I’ll not be hiring or managing employees 
anytime soon.




-- 
Laurie Brown, Dark Phoenix
dark_phoenix@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"To destroy the Western tradition of independent thought, it is not 
necessary to burn books. All we have to do is leave them unread for a
couple 
of generations."
--Robert Maynard Hutchens.