Neurobiology of everyday life

A three-hobby publishes another review of Asi Kazantseva’s book “How the brain makes us make nonsense” (Corpus, 2014) [1, 2]. Its author is Pavel Besvnutnov , a psychiatrist, a psychotherapist, a well-known blogger (LJ Stelazin).

If you cannot explain something to a six-year-old child, then you yourself do not know that. ” The famous Enshtein phrase, wiped from endless mention. Like most known aphorisms, this statement is more beautiful than meaningful. Of course, not everything can be clearly explained to the child. Or, moving from a metaphorical language to an ordinary, modern scientific picture of the world, it is so complicated that it cannot be retold in simple and understandable phrases. But this does not mean that you should not try. And this is the task of a good scientific scientist is entertaining to tell complex concepts.

“Who would have thought” Asi Kazantseva perfectly holds this balance. A dry scientific review can be squeezed out of this text, with which at least now at the conference or in a reviewed magazine. From this text, you can get a lot of shoes and funny stories for optional trep in the kitchen or behind the bar. It is correct in content, entertaining in form and stretches in all directions. This is exactly what is required of a good, high-quality popular science book.

I would designate the genre of the book as "Neurobiology of everyday life." Why are we doing what we are doing? Why do we overeat and why is it so difficult to lose weight? Why are we losing our heads from love? Why do we fall depending on, and why is it difficult for us to get rid of them? Why is it bad for us, dreary, sad, anxious? Why does our brain make us do nonsense, and why does he need it? By analogy with the well -known book of the dolnik “Naughty Biosphere Child”, the text of Asi Kazantseva could be called the “obedient child of the biosphere”. Evolution is a cynical and pragmatic lady and does nothing just like that, without any biological benefit. The way our head is arranged and how we behave: everything has reasons.

People often make stupid things, people often make decisions, which they themselves are sorry then, people often behave, it would seem, to their harm. And there are reasons for this. We do a lot of things on the stream that we don’t even think about. And there are evolutionary mechanisms embedded in us that make us behave like that. Moreover, the fact that we don’t really think about our behavior - there are also reasons for this and our own brain does not just hide mental mechanisms in a “blind spot”, away from our inquisitive gaze.

This, first of all, is the book "Who would have thought." The usual everyday life of earnest primates from the point of view of a neurobiologist. There are many good books where experts are interesting and fascinating about their science, but there are very few books where scientists are interesting and fascinating about us.

Why are we just such, why is our brain arranged in this way, and not otherwise, what neurobiological causes and patterns lie behind many ordinary and everyday phenomena of our life. Good competent texts on this subject are a rarity even in the world market non-fiction of literature, and the book of Asi Kazantseva in this regard is indisputable luck, all the more pleasantly, which belongs to the pen of a domestic author.

Now, to the question "What would be advised to read about the brain and behavior?" There is a ready -made answer: “who would have thought” to date - the best (if not the only) text on the topic of “neurobiology of everyday life”.

1. Asya, write more! TRV-hunger, No. 151, April 8, 2014
   http://trv-science.ru/2014/04/08/asya-pishi-eshhe
2. Read more about the book see.
   www.corpus.ru/products/how-the-brain-makes-us-do-stupid-things.htm