Your Brain, Explained: What Neuroscience Reveals About Your Brain and its Quirks

Written by Marc Dingman

Narrated by Jonathan Todd Ross

Sleep. Memory. Pleasure. Fear. Language. We experience these things every day, but how do our brains create them?



Your Brain, Explained is a personal tour around your gray matter. Neuroscientist Marc Dingman gives you a crash course in how your brain works and explains the latest research on the brain functions that affect you on a daily basis.



You'll also discover what happens when the brain doesn't work the way it should, causing problems such as insomnia, ADHD, depression, or addiction. You'll learn how neuroscience is working to fix these problems, and how you can build up your defenses against the most common faults of the mind.



Along the way you'll find out: why brain training games don't prevent dementia; what it's like to remember every day of your life as if it were yesterday; which popular psychiatric drug was created from German rocket fuel; and how you might unknowingly be sabotaging your sleep.



Drawing on the author's popular YouTube series, 2-Minute Neuroscience, this is a friendly, engaging introduction to the human brain and its quirks from the perspective of a neuroscientist. Your brain is yours to discover!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Sep 24, 2019
• ISBN: 9781515944164

Marc Dingman

Marc Dingman received his Ph.D. in neuroscience in 2013 from the Pennsylvania State University. Since then, he has been a faculty member in the Biobehavioral Health Department at the Pennsylvania State University, where teaches courses in neuroscience and the health sciences. He received the Teaching Excellence Award from the College of Health and Human Development in each of the past four years, the Health and Human Development Alumni Society Excellence in Teaching Award in 2017, and the Biobehavioral Health Outstanding Teaching Award in 2015.

Reviews for Your Brain, Explained

[Andrea Author · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This isn't so much an overview of neuroscience as a series of case studies that illustrate how different parts of the brain work. It was fascinating and easy to read. I was sorry when it ended. I hope the author will produce a second book on the subject.

Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.

[porte01 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It’s fascinating to think that everything we know, everything we feel, our entire sense of self, our connection to humanity and the insights from the generations that have come before us, is the result of electrical activity spiking in a wrinkled 3 pound mass of cells that lives in the dark and cushioned recesses provided by our skulls.

More accessible than most of the books that are available on this subject, the author of “Your Brain, Explained” - neuroscientist and professor Marc Dingman, PHD- does a fabulous job at unpacking some of the deepest mysteries behind our brains and how they do their magical work.

The book is organized in chapters based on core brain functions, casting a very wide net including: language, memory, sleep, sadness, fear, pain, pleasure, movement, vision and attention. Drawing on the latest scientific knowledge, the author covers brain structure, neurotransmitters, and the networks and connections required to support each function, as well as debunking related myths along the way. Each chapter is augmented by interesting, (and sometimes downright eerie) case studies of patients with specific brain injuries caused by stroke or illness that have helped scientist identify and correlate affected brain areas to corresponding loss of function. Similar to a tiny version of the wonderful works of Oliver Sacks, (who was and still is, one of my literary heroes) I found these case histories incredibly engaging, not to mention perfectly suited to serve as the introduction to the scientific insights provided on the topic.

We are learning much about the brain, and at the same time learning more about what we still need to learn. Dingman’s basic premise is that the brain is much more complex than originally thought, and early theories that attempted to simplify brain functions to a single neurotransmitter or brain network are rapidly losing favor. Even this book, with its well-crafted and expert smattering of research and insight will likely prove itself obsolete before too long.

I loved this book, and found its well written and easily digestible content in a subject that is typically so impenetrable a breath of fresh air. I recommend it highly to anyone who is interested in a fascinating tour of current neuroscience, written entirely for the layperson.

A big thank you to NetGalley, the publisher and the author for an advance review copy of this book. All thoughts presented are my own.

Note re Trigger Warnings: Unfortunately, many early brain studies were structured around pinpointing impact after the creation of horrific brain injuries in animals, a process which is thankfully no longer deemed ethical. The results of most of these studies are covered at only a high level in this book, however the author provided a warning for one section of this book involving motor cortex experiments on dogs which was several pages long, and at his direction, I skipped this section. The book also contains one case study involving child abuse, as well as a detailed discussion on depression.