Review: 7.5 Lessons About the Brain

7.5 Lessons about Your Brain is a delightfully short collection of essays about the human brain. Each essay is short enough to read in about 15-20 minutes, but they build on each other, so you're best off reading them in order.

The main point of the book is that your brain's job isn't actually thinking. (That's why thinking is so hard!) It's primary job is to manage resources, and in order to do so it has to be able to predict the future. The essays cover how memory works (nothing's actually stored, more like experiences are recreated), how infants learn, and how the human brain's ability to do abstraction can allows the construction of social reality.

What's interesting is that unlike many others, the author believes that you do have choices and free will, but doesn't specify how and why. There's a great section about how the old myths about the reptile brain and the neo-cortex is wrong, and that:

"Sometimes we're responsible for things not because they're our fault, but because we're the only ones who can change them." (Page 81).

It's rare to read a book so well written that a few short pages can cover so much. Recommended!