Marbles: The Brain Store - Your Daily Brain: 24 Hours in the Life of Your Brain

ALSO BY

BEND YOUR BRAIN

Copyright 2015 by Marble Holdings, Inc. d/b/a Marbles: The Brain Store

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Your Daily Brain : 24 hours in the life of your brain / Marbles: The Brain Store. First edition.
pages cm
1. Thought and thinkingMiscellanea. 2. AttentionMiscellanea. 3. IntellectMiscellanea. 4. Mental healthMiscellanea. 5. BrainMiscellanea. I. Marbles: The Brain Store.
BF441.T724 2015
153.4dc23 2015004795

ISBN9780804140119
eBook ISBN9780804140126

Cover design by Marbles: The Brain Store

v3.1

CONTENTS

PART 1

THE MORNING
Waking Up, Getting Ready, Getting Gone

PART 2

THE DAY
Work, Thinking Skills, and Willpower

PART 3

THE EVENING
Health, Family, Love, and Leisure

T he marimba has always been such a soothing soundcloth mallets against wood bars, perfect for making the sounds of raindrops in forest pools. Then the iPhone went and co-opted it for its default alarm. Now the sound of a marimba makes an entire train full of commuters check their jacket pockets.

Consider this book your marimba. Its time to wake up, jump-start your brain, and rip back the veils of habit, misperception, and irrationality that your neurons create between you and reality. But waking up is just the start. From the second the marimba sounds until your eyes close for the evening (and beyond!), you evaluate the world outside, evaluate the world inside, make choices and decisions, plan how to reach little goals like getting to work on time, and keep your eyes on bigger goals like being a good parent or partner, all amid a landscape of distraction and temptation. Every second of every day, you have the opportunity to use your brain for better or for worse. You have the opportunity to nail it or totally screw up. And when you nail these things or screw them up, you have the opportunity to learn.

The thing is, someone somewhere has studied each one of these teeny-tiny chunks in the day of your brain. From multitasking over your morning coffee to milking the semiconscious state before you sleep for flashes of insight, theres someone with a PhD in a white lab coator, more likely, jeans and a T-shirtwho knows how to do it better. This book collects sciences best understandings of how to maximize the use of your brain, generally organized by the situations in your day when youre likely to use these skills. Some of the entries are fun facts that you can use to dazzle in conversation over a platter of crudits, some offer understanding or a new way to look at the things you do and why you do them, and some suggest little actions or exercises that can help you use your brain to manage the challenges of your day and your life better.

Heres Your Daily Brain , a fun way to shine light into those dark corners of your mind usually penetrated only by cranial nerves, and a chance to explore how our evolving understanding of the brain can help you live a better life.

Youve heard of brain waves, and heres how they happen. Think of the eighty-six billion neurons in your head like crickets. When one cricket chirps, not much happensits not like the voice of one cricket can make you pour a cup of coffee or help you remember that snappy comeback. But your brain crickets dont just do their own thing. They synchronize in ways that create the pulsing cacophony of a summer night.

The thing is, crickets can come into synch in different rhythms. The neuronal crickets in your brain chirp more slowly when you are asleep than they do when you are awake. Just like a summer night, the brain waves created by your chirping neurons are like the background noise against which other things take place. When youre awake, everything you do or think happens against the backdrop of the pattern called beta waves. Deep sleep happens against delta waves. If you listened closely, the beta waves would sound like high-pitched chirps and the delta waves would sound like crickets bowing a section of orchestral basses. Between these two patternsthe beta waves of alertness and the delta waves of deep sleepare alpha waves of wakeful relaxation and theta waves of light sleep.

So there are many patterns of brain waves created by the synchronicity of your neuronal crickets, and each brain wave is associated with a level of sleep or consciousness. The purpose of an alarm is to mess with these crickets, forcing them to chirp in the pattern you want. Of course, you have a last line of defense against the dictatorship of your alarm clock: the snooze button! The desire to whack snooze competes only with the need to check Facebook while driving and with the overwhelming compulsion to scratch mosquito bites on your knuckles for the top spot on the human list of temptations. The question is, should you?