Mind Hacks: Tips & Tricks for Using Your Brain (Paperback)

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.

 

Foreword  
Credits  
Preface  
Chapter 1. Inside the Brain 
       1. Find Out How the Brain Works Without Looking Inside  
       2. Electroencephalogram: Getting the Big Picture with EEGs  
       3. Positron Emission Tomography: Measuring Activity Indirectly with PET  
       4. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging: The State of the Art  
       5. Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation: Turn On and Off Bits of the Brain  
       6. Neuropsychology, the 10% Myth, and Why You Use All of Your Brain  
       7. Get Acquainted with the Central Nervous System  
       8. Tour the Cortex and the Four Lobes  
       9. The Neuron  
       10. Detect the Effect of Cognitive Function on Cerebral Blood Flow  
       11. Why People Don't Work Like Elevator Buttons  
       12. Build Your Own Sensory Homunculus  
Chapter 2. Seeing 
       13. Understand Visual Processing  
       14. See the Limits of Your Vision  
       15. To See, Act  
       16. Map Your Blind Spot  
       17. Glimpse the Gaps in Your Vision  
       18. When Time Stands Still  
       19. Release Eye Fixations for Faster Reactions  
       20. Fool Yourself into Seeing 3D  
       21. Objects Move, Lighting Shouldn't  
       22. Depth Matters  
       23. See How Brightness Differs from Luminance: The Checker Shadow Illusion  
       24. Create Illusionary Depth with Sunglasses  
       25. See Movement When All Is Still  
       26. Get Adjusted  
       27. Show Motion Without Anything Moving  
       28. Motion Extrapolation: The "Flash-Lag Effect"  
       29. Turn Gliding Blocks into Stepping Feet  
       30. Understand the Rotating Snakes Illusion  
       31. Minimize Imaginary Distances  
       32. Explore Your Defense Hardware  
       33. Neural Noise Isn't a Bug; It's a Feature  
Chapter 3. Attention 
       34. Detail and the Limits of Attention  
       35. Count Faster with Subitizing  
       36. Feel the Presence and Loss of Attention  
       37. Grab Attention  
       38. Don't Look Back!  
       39. Avoid Holes in Attention  
       40. Blind to Change  
       41. Make Things Invisible Simply by Concentrating (on Something Else)  
       42. The Brain Punishes Features that Cry Wolf  
       43. Improve Visual Attention Through Video Games  
Chapter 4. Hearing and Language 
       44. Detect Timing with Your Ears  
       45. Detect Sound Direction  
       46. Discover Pitch  
       47. Keep Your Balance  
       48. Detect Sounds on the Margins of Certainty  
       49. Speech Is Broadband Input to Your Head  
       50. Give Big-Sounding Words to Big Concepts  
       51. Stop Memory-Buffer Overrun While Reading  
       52. Robust Processing Using Parallelism  
Chapter 5. Integrating 
       53. Put Timing Information into Sound and Location Information into Light  
       54. Don't Divide Attention Across Locations  
       55. Confuse Color Identification with Mixed Signals  
       56. Don't Go There  
       57. Combine Modalities to Increase Intensity  
       58. Watch Yourself to Feel More  
       59. Hear with Your Eyes: The McGurk Effect  
       60. Pay Attention to Thrown Voices  
       61. Talk to Yourself  
Chapter 6. Moving 
       62. The Broken Escalator Phenomenon: When Autopilot Takes Over  
       63. Keep Hold of Yourself  
       64. Mold Your Body Schema  
       65. Why Can't You Tickle Yourself?  
       66. Trick Half Your Mind  
       67. Objects Ask to Be Used  
       68. Test Your Handedness  
       69. Use Your Right Brain-and Your Left, Too  
Chapter 7. Reasoning 
       70. Use Numbers Carefully  
       71. Think About Frequencies Rather than Probabilities  
       72. Detect Cheaters  
       73. Fool Others into Feeling Better  
       74. Maintain the Status Quo  
Chapter 8. Togetherness 
       75. Grasp the Gestalt  
       76. To Be Noticed, Synchronize in Time  
       77. See a Person in Moving Lights  
       78. Make Things Come Alive  
       79. Make Events Understandable as Cause and Effect  
       80. Act Without Knowing It  
Chapter 9. Remembering 
       81. Bring Stuff to the Front of Your Mind  
       82. Subliminal Messages Are Weak and Simple  
       83. Fake Familiarity  
       84. Keep Your Sources Straight (if You Can)  
       85. Create False Memories  
       86. Change Context to Build Robust Memories  
       87. Boost Memory Using Context  
       88. Think Yourself Strong  
       89. Navigate Your Way Through Memory  
       90. Have an Out-of-Body Experience  
       91. Enter the Twilight Zone: The Hypnagogic State  
       92. Make the Caffeine Habit Taste Good  
Chapter 10. Other People 
       93. Understand What Makes Faces Special  
       94. Signal Emotion  
       95. Make Yourself Happy  
       96. Reminisce Hot and Cold  
       97. Look Where I'm Looking  
       98. Monkey See, Monkey Do  
       99. Spread a Bad Mood Around  
       100. You Are What You Think  
Index  

描述：
大腦是一個極其複雜的信息處理環境，我們往往難以理解它。在任何時候，大腦都在收集、過濾和分析信息，並作出無數複雜的過程，其中一些是自動的，一些是自願的，一些是有意識的，一些是無意識的。認知神經科學是我們理解思維運作的一種方式。它是研究我們心智功能背後的大腦生物學的方法集，包括腦部掃描和計算建模等方法，結合對心理現象的觀察，發現大腦在何處、為何以及如何產生這些現象。想要了解更多嗎？《Mind Hacks》是一本關於大腦瞬間運作的探索集。利用認知神經科學，這些實驗、技巧和提示與視覺、運動技能、注意力、認知、潛意識知覺等相關，揭示了人類大腦的運作方式。每個“hack”都探討了大腦的特定操作。通過觀察大腦的反應，我們可以獲得有關大腦的結構和設計的線索，從而更多地了解大腦的組成。《Mind Hacks》從大腦本身開始探索思維，使用“顱內磁刺激：打開和關閉大腦的部分”和“遊覽皮層和四個葉片”等“hack”。此書中的100個“hack”中還包括：釋放眼球固定以加快反應速度、在靜止時看到運動、感受注意力的存在和喪失、檢測邊緣聲音的確定性、塑造身體模式、測試你的利手性、在移動的光中看到一個人、使事件可理解為因果關係、通過使用上下文提高記憶、了解細節和注意力的限制等。《Mind Wide Open》的作者史蒂文·約翰遜在本書的前言中寫道：“這些hack令人驚嘆，因為它們揭示了大腦的隱藏邏輯，它們照亮了我們的大腦對世界的欺騙、捷徑和潛在假設。”如果你想更多地了解你的大腦在做什麼，那麼《Mind Hacks》就是關鍵，讓自己與世界之間的界面玩耍。

目錄：
前言
致謝
前言
第1章 大腦內部
1. 不用看內部就了解大腦的運作方式
2. 腦電圖：用腦電圖獲得整體圖像
3. 正子發射斷層掃描：間接測量活動
4. 功能性磁共振成像：最先進的技術
5. 顱內磁刺激：打開和關閉大腦的部分
6. 神經心理學、10%的神話和為什麼你使用了全部大腦
7. 熟悉中樞神經系統
8. 遊覽皮層和四個葉片
9. 神經元

（以下省略）