Matthew MacDonald - Your Brain: The Missing Manual

This is the part of the book where the author is supposed to tell you that nothing would have ever been accomplished without the contribution of hundreds of impressively credentialed people who did all the real work. Well, allow me to depart from the script, because I could have done everything myself. However, the resulting book would have been short, incoherent, and hand-written on the back side of a paper towel roll. Fortunately, you don't have to read that book. Instead, you can enjoy a book that's been cleaned up, illustrated, and reviewed by some very sharp pencils. Best of all, it's been copied off the paper towels. In other words, if you enjoy your reading experience, you have the following people to thank.

First up are my big-brained reviewers, who contributed helpful insight and plenty of trivia. They include Esther Chung, Jennifer Mangels, and Timo Hannay, whose fascinating tidbit about the birthing practices of the hyena ranks as the most interesting piece of information you won't get to read about in this book. (You can get the exquisitely painful story at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotted_Hyena.) Curiously, Timo was not the only reviewer to bring up the reproductive life of the hyena while reading this book. This suggests something deep and profound about the connection between cutting-edge neuroscience and randy animals, but I'm at a loss to say exactly what it is.

Second, I thank my editor Peter Meyers, who helped to indulge all my authorly desires (new sidebars, color pictures, fancy figures, you get the picture), and the supremely talented Robert Romano, who created the illustrations for this book. I also owe much gratitude to Akiyoshi Kitaoka, who graciously allowed us to use his rotating snakes illusion (), Rhon Rorter, who created a few images that were adapted for the figures in this book, Nellie McKesson, who shepherded the book through its final stages, and the many people who worked to get this book formatted, indexed, and printed.

Lastly, I thank my familyparticularly my parents, who lost many a neuron in their parenting years, and my wife's parents, who didn't fare much better. (In they can all find out what went wrong.) Finally, I'm eternally grateful for my wife Faria and my daughter Maya, whose brains delight me in quite different ways, and I promise not to hook either of them up to an MRI machine to find out why.

Matthew MacDonald