July 14, 2008

Mind Hacks

I finished this book up quite some time ago and must admit that it took me forever to finish. You see, the subtitle of this thing "Tips & Tricks for Using Your Brain" led me to believe that the book would be a bunch of cool tricks you could learn to make better use of your brain (better memory/recall, etc). In reality, the book is more like a technical guide to the hacks used by the brain to function in the day-to-day of the world.

Which is interesting, in and of itself. It just wasn't at all what I thought I was buying. And the writing is, well, a little dry. Thorough, to be sure. But dry. Man, it sounds like I'm coming down on this book when that's not really my intent. I learned a lot of neat things about the brain, about exploiting some of the hacks it uses to cope with life to achieve some interesting (if not quirky) results, and about why Psychology as a field is such a crap shoot.

I will say that there were lots of interesting pieces of information for anyone who does 'user interface' or 'user experience' work. In fact, I recommended this to our UEx person repeatedly.

Yeah, so, take that for what it's worth, I guess. Go read the user reviews on Amazon and you'll see that my sentiments are echoed by just about everyone there. A good book, in all, but not what you probably thought this book was.

Posted in at 07:37:25