Essentials: How Your Brain Works & Changes

Trauma can stem from abuse to a severe car accident to wartime combat—and cause a lifetime of flashbacks, nightmares, isolation, insomnia, hypervigilance, and rage. In The Body Keeps the Score, the author explores how diagnosing and treating trauma has evolved as new technologies, research, and fields of science emerged.

Trauma’s impact is not only mental, emotional, and neurological, but also physiological: Trauma rewires the brain to put people in a constant state of stress or numbness, leading to a host of physical problems.

In this summary, you’ll learn:

• Why trauma survivors feel like their trauma is never-ending
• How flashbacks make parts of the brain shut down and others to go into overdrive
• Why some trauma survivors can’t recognize themselves in the mirror
• How activities like choral singing, yoga, and theater can be therapeutic

In Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain, neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett sheds light on the inner workings of the brain and how they impact feelings, behaviors, and relationships. While providing an entertaining peek behind the curtain, she argues that by understanding the basics of how your brain works, you can take a more active role in deciding how to think and behave.

Barrett’s book is a collection of eight informal essays—one for each lesson. Our guide explores those lessons through four themes: how the brain is organized, how the brain operates, how the brain develops, and how brains collaborate. Along the way, we compare Barrett’s explanations of the brain to those of other experts in neurology and offer practical applications for the insights she shares.

Our brains are uniquely complex information processors, yet most people know little about how they work. In Brain Rules, John Medina writes that when we understand how our brains have evolved, we can use their natural impulses and tendencies to our advantage, improving our thinking and learning in all aspects of our lives.

John Medina is a molecular biologist who focuses on psychiatric disorders. Medina wrote this book in order to help the general public understand in a simple, accessible way how brains work and how the functions of the brain affect how we interact with the world. In this guide, we discuss the 12 rules he’s identified that summarize the brain’s core functions, abilities, and limitations. We also offer ways to apply Medina’s principles in your daily life and discuss scientific and cultural ideas related to his brain rules.

Your thoughts play a crucial role in shaping your experiences: They influence how you perceive, interpret, and respond to your environment. It follows then, that if you want to change something in your life—such as your mindset, habits, career, or relationship status—you first need to change your thoughts.

In NLP: The Essential Guide to Neuro-Linguistic Programming, NLP Master Practitioners Tom Hoobyar, Tom Dotz, and Susan Sanders explain what thoughts are, how they influence you, and what steps you can take to align them with what you want out of life.

In this guide, we’ll explain:

• How thoughts form and impact you—which will clarify why you tend to think, feel, and behave in certain ways
• How to intentionally change your thoughts—and, subsequently, your feelings and behaviors—to enhance all your experiences

Additionally, we’ll build on Hoobyar, Dotz, and Sanders’s ideas with research, advice, and actionable methods from psychologists and self-improvement practitioners.

If you’ve ever pushed a “pull” door or accidentally flipped the wrong light switch, you’ve experienced the impact of bad design. You may have blamed these mistakes on yourself, but in reality, the way we interact with the physical world is often driven by design. From smartphones to stovetops, faucets to fighter jets: Every object we encounter on a daily basis is designed. Good design streamlines our lives and makes everyday tasks easier. Bad design, on the other hand, causes frustration, errors, and even dangerous accidents.

In order to tell the difference, we need to understand how we perceive the objects all around us, and how our brains make sense of that information. Combining the principles of cognitive psychology and engineering makes all of us smarter consumers and helps designers create products that work with users, rather than against them.

Although we live longer today and have more material wealth than ever, many people feel anxious rather than happy. In Flow, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi offers an antidote. People are happiest when they feel in control of their inner thoughts and feelings and experience a “flow state”: a sense of enjoyment, purpose, and meaning.

Csikszentmihalyi explains: how controlling and ordering your consciousness brings flow and enjoyment, which personality characteristics produce flow, and how to find flow in your work and relationships.

Your brain is always changing. As you’re reading right now, your brain is rearranging itself to process the information you’re taking in so you can understand and retain it. In The Brain That Changes Itself, psychoanalyst and best-selling author Norman Doidge uses case studies and centuries of research to provide a thorough but understandable explanation of the concept of neuroplasticity—the phenomenon of the changing brain.

In our guide, we’ll examine the development of the concept of neuroplasticity, how the brain changes itself in response to stimuli, how this impacts our functioning, and how we can use it to our advantage—as well as how it can sometimes work against us. We’ll also examine more recent research into the topic, plus how new technologies and treatments are using neuroplasticity to improve outcomes for people with neurological diseases and brain damage.

Although people spend their entire lives learning, most of them are doing it wrong. Strategies like rereading and drilling a skill over and over to commit it to memory take a lot of time and ultimately don’t work.

Make It Stick teaches you the strategies that help you achieve the two primary goals of learning: To understand and remember what you learn so you can use your knowledge in future situations. In this summary, learn how a little forgetting helps you remember, and why you’re not a good judge of how much you know.

According to Barbara Oakley, anyone can master any subject by applying good study techniques. You don’t have to be gifted or have natural abilities in a particular subject to excel at it. And Oakley should know: She failed math in high school, but later overcame her fear of numbers and eventually earned a doctorate degree in engineering.

In this book, Oakley and co-author Terrence Sejnowski explain study tactics that you can use to excel in whatever you’re learning. To make them immediately applicable, we’ve organized this guide as a list of actionable study tips, and we’ve cross-referenced the authors’ advice with other sources, such as Why We Sleep, which discusses the importance of sleep to learning, and the work of psychologist Edward de Bono, who advises on how to alternate between modes of thinking to get the most out of your learning.

You’re probably getting less sleep than you should be. Many people are more chronically sleep-deprived than they realize, and the punishments for this are severe—reduced productivity and happiness, and an increased risk of a panel of diseases. In Why We Sleep, “sleep diplomat” Matthew Walker, Ph.D. unlocks some of the mysteries of sleep based on research from both in and outside his Center for Human Sleep Science.

In this guide, we’ll explore how sleep happens, its major benefits, and the best ways to get better sleep. We’ll also discuss sleep research from other experts as well as new findings that emerged after the book was published.