Mind Hacks begins your exploration of the mind with a look inside the brain itself, using hacks such as "Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation: Turn On and Off Bits of the Brain" and "Tour the Cortex and the Four Lobes." Also among the 100 hacks in this book, you''''ll find: Release Eye Fixations for Faster Reactions See Movement When All is Still Feel the Presence and Loss of Attention Detect Sounds on the Margins of Certainty Mold Your Body Schema Test Your Handedness See a Person in Moving Lights Make Events Understandable as Cause-and-Effect Boost Memory by Using Context Understand Detail and the Limits of Attention
[...]... “me” feeling of the mind and the automatic nature of the brain the division between voluntary and automatic behavior is more of an ebb and flow, and we wield our cognitive abilities with unconscious flourishes and deliberate movements much as we wield, say, our hands, or a pen, or a lathe In a sense, we’re trying to understand the capabilities that underpin the mind Say we understand to what extent... development of perspective-taking and motor imagery She is also interested in phenomenology and philosophy of mind and is involved in public understanding of science Vaughan Bell is a clinical and research psychologist interested in understanding brain injury, mental distress and psychological impairment He’s currently at the Departmento de Psiquiatra in the Universidad de Antioquia and the Hospital Universitario... technical editors and advisors have been absolute stars Thanks for watching out for us And of course, James Cronin, who, in Helsinki, provided both the wine and conversation necessary to conceive this book Many thanks to the BBC for being flexible and employing us both (in different capacities) parttime over the past few months Thanks also to our colleagues and friends there and for Radio 4 Amongst...party tricks So that is the inward adventure that lies before you May it mess with your head in all the right ways —Steven Johnson Brooklyn, New York Steven Johnson is the author of Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life (Scribner) Credits About the Authors Tom Stafford likes finding things out and writing things down Several years of doing this in the Department... with classic papers and with recent papers, which the authors may have put on their publications page A good query to use at Google ( http://www.google.com ) for papers online in PDF format using a query like: "What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain" filetype:pdf Alternately, search for a researcher’s name followed by the word “publications” for papers, demonstrations, and as-yet-unpublished research,... all this work? As one brain speaking to another, here’s a secret: it isn’t easy The brain is a fearsomely complex informationprocessing environment Take the processing involved in seeing, for instance One of the tasks involved in seeing is detecting the motion in every tiny portion of vision, in such and such a direction and at such and such a speed, and representing that in the brain But another task... Automatic and voluntary actions are highly meshed, often inextricable Parts of vision that appear fully isolated from conscious experience suddenly report different results if conscious expectations change The information transformations in the brain are made yet more complicated by the constraints of history, computation, and architecture Development over evolutionary time has made it hard for the brain. .. Cognitive neuroscience is the study of the brain biology behind our mental functions It is a collection of methods (like brain scanning and computational modeling) combined with a way of looking at psychological phenomena and discovering where, why, and how the brain makes them happen It is neither classic neuroscience—a low-level tour of the biology of the brain nor is it what many people think of... things, visiting stone circles and playing in a band ( http://www.stray-light.co.uk ) Iain Price ( http://www.iain-price.com ) studied the neurosciences for his bachelor and doctorate degrees at Cardiff University He is now pursuing science communication projects in conjunction with his continued fascination with the philosophies of the human mind Recently he has helped to develop and present the BBC’s community... information designer living in the United States, specializing in information graphics, mapping/ wayfinding, and design strategy His work involves making complex ideas simple and accessible through structure Will holds a master of design degree in the fields of communication planning and information design from Carnegie Mellon University, and a B.A in English from Kenyon College; he has studied information . Mind Hacks™: Tips & Tools for Using Your Brain Tom Stafford Matt Webb Published by O’Reilly Media Beijing ⋅ Cambridge ⋅ Farnham ⋅ Köln ⋅ Sebastopol ⋅ Tokyo “What to do with too much information. Webb and Tom Stafford have assembled here a collection of tricks-of-the -mind that will astound you, and give you a new appreciation for the way your brain shapes the reality you perceive. But it’s. new form of introspection is on the rise, what I’ve called, in another context, “recreational neuroscience.” I think the idea of a brain hack is a wonderful one, and Matt Webb and Tom Stafford