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Mind Hacks Tips & Tricks for Using Your Brain

By Tom Stafford, Matt Webb
First Edition November 2004
Pages: 394
Series: Hacks
ISBN 10: 0-596-00779-5 | ISBN 13: 9780596007799

Book description

This exploration into the moment-by-moment works of the brain uses cognitive neuroscience to present experiments, tricks, and tips related to vision, motor skills, attention, cognition, and subliminal perception. Each hack examines specific operations of the brain. By seeing how the brain responds, you'll learn more about how the brain is put together. If you want to find out what's going on in your head, then Mind Hacks is the key.
Full Description

The brain is a fearsomely complex information-processing environment--one that often eludes our ability to understand it. At any given time, the brain is collecting, filtering, and analyzing information and, in response, performing countless intricate processes, some of which are automatic, some voluntary, some conscious, and some unconscious. Cognitive neuroscience is one of the ways we have to understand the workings of our minds. It's the study of the brain biology behind our mental functions: 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. Want to know more? Mind Hacks is a collection of probes into the moment-by-moment works of the brain. Using cognitive neuroscience, these experiments, tricks, and tips related to vision, motor skills, attention, cognition, subliminal perception, and more throw light on how the human brain works. Each hack examines specific operations of the brain. By seeing how the brain responds, we pick up clues about the architecture and design of the brain, learning a little bit more about how the brain is put together. 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

Steven Johnson, author of "Mind Wide Open" writes in his foreword to the book, "These hacks amaze because they reveal the brain's hidden logic; they shed light on the cheats and shortcuts and latent assumptions our brains make about the world." If you want to know more about what's going on in your head, then Mind Hacks is the key--let yourself play with the interface between you and the world.

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Media reviews

"Mind Hacks is far from being a book filled with medical mumbo-jumbo and technical wizardry. Instead, Mind Hacks takes the time to explain to the reader just how the mind perceives certain tricks to be reality, and why the mind does so. Each hack in the book is actually some sort of a trick or illusion that the reader can perform to better understand how the brain works. At the end of each hack is a section highlighting how the illusion works and why... Mind Hacks is an interesting book to have for those who are interested in how the brain perceives everything around us...a great book for a novice to explore the world of cognitive neuroscience."
--Brian Boudreau, MELUG-Central (MainE Linux Users Group), July 2005

"In the foreword, neuroscientist Steven Johnson notes that computer folks use the work 'hack' to mean 'something we do to an existing tool that gives it some new aptitude that was not part of its original feature set.' He goes on to say that that sense of the word is not useful here. Rather, what we have here is a collection of tricks of the mind... There are 100 hacks in all in the book. That’s 25 cents a hack. So, hack away and learn something about the human CPU (not an apt metaphor, we are told, for the human mind). Read more to find out why."
--Rick Fischer, The Bridge, Memphis PC User Group, May 2005

"[Mind Hacks] makes a wonderful annotated bibliography, with a light touch of hackish humour that inspires further reading."
--Mike Holderness, New Scientist, February 2005

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