Books and Me

By Lucy Crehan (2018) Subtitled "The Secrets Behind the Success of the World's Education Superpowers", Crehan visited five of the top performing countries in the PISA checklist: Finland, Singapore, Japan, China and Canada.    Despite the superficial differences in education policy in the above countries, there are indeed lessons to be drawn from the exercise.  For example:  you can't build problem solving excellence in a vacuum - you need the expertise in the content.   All of the above systems, one way or another, help young people to build that expertise and the related problem solving ability. In the last chapter, the author derives five key lessons from what she has seen.  Broadly speaking, the greater the respect for the neuroscience and the culture in which children are raised, the more successful the schooling. It turns out the author has had some advisory role in the Department for Education in the UK, but sadly as yet, the dep...

by Dr. Michael Ruscio. (2018) First off, let's deal with the issue of the "Dr" bit.  It turns out that Ruscio is not a doctor in the  conventional sense.  Rather he is a "functional medical practitioner, clinical researcher and international lecturer".   What is functional medicine, you may well ask?  This is what Wikipedia has to say: "Functional medicine is a form of alternative medicine which proponents say focuses on interactions between the environment and the gastrointestinal, endocrine, and immune systems, but opponents have described it as "pseudoscientific silliness" and quackery.  Of course, it is infinitely preferable not to take anything as gospel simply on the basis that an official authority told you so and equally, far be it for me to dismiss anything on the basis that it comes from even the most apparently disreputable source.  Forget argumentum ab auctoritate  - w hen deciding between competing theories, you must a...

by James Wong (2017) This book is superb. The abundance of nutritional information should inspire almost anyone to strive to eat as healthily as possible and can even convince one to warm to flavours that would previously have been eschewed. Green tea, anyone? The book is packed with a shed load of useful tips which are easy to adhere to and indeed, in my case, can quite often be accomplished completely accidentally. Who knew, for example, that leaving a squash in the fridge for a month turns out to be good thing! A tip about reading this book if you happen to be on the 5:2 diet , don't read it on a fast day. It will make it completely impossible.  Even on a feast day, it's a hard book to read as one is constantly stopping to note down ingredients, google to see if Morrisons has baby kiwis in stock, and most disruptively, to jump up to raid the kitchen. I got there in the end, though, and my desire to take all the quoted research as gospel knows no bounds.  I want...

by Susan Quilliam  (2016) This slim book creates the sensation of having spent a couple of sessions with a slightly dodgy counsellor who may have read all the right books which they can proffer up as needed, but who doesn't have much more to offer and indeed can do a complete explanatory volte face if the situation seemingly dictates.   Given that the book is only 99p on Kindle, perhaps that represents value for money, but if you've been around the block a bit, done a smidgeon of reading for yourself (Bowlby et al), and have topped this up with a dose of navel-gazing, there really won't be much to surprise you in this.   Perhaps it's a book for the very young, but then again, it often makes relationships seem so arduous and distracting that one wonders if it will put that readership off for good.  Rating: 2/10

by Martin Blaser (2014) I was initially concerned that "Missing Microbes" would replicate the information I had already gleaned from other sources, such as Tim Spectre's "The Diet Myth" (2015), but I needn't have worried.  I have recently taken to rationalising the highlighting system in Kindle books so that I will have a clue as to what sort of information it is.  Pink indicates new and vital information, blue  denotes new vocabulary that I wish to retain and yellow indicates material that is repeated but that is so important that I wish to ram it home and retain it.  "Missing Microbes" is covered in pink  and   blue  .The only place where yellow  cropped up was in the two page epilogue. In other words, this book is cram pack full of new and, given the state of the science, pretty detailed information principally about a certain microbe that is, or at least should be, very close to all our hearts, (ie: in our stomachs). Of cours...

by Daniel Gilbert (2009) This is quite some book!  There is a lot more to it than I had initially predicted, which in retrospect is strange as the first bit of the book did set one up with a challenging question - (why are humans so bad at predicting what will make them happy?) - which would seemingly demand pretty big answers, but I still thought that it was likely that the book would be a bit sketchy somehow!  Perhaps that was partly the cover, which quite possibly does predispose one to think that this book isn't up for anything too weighty. Or perhaps it was another problem of priming, ie: that I had recently read a few books that whilst they weren't exactly short of content, had laboured the point a bit more than this one does and I had therefore made a false predication as to the extent and nature of the content based upon recent books I had read rather than my other awareness of the need for big answers. As it happens, this problem of priming, although Gilbe...

By Michael Mosley and Mimi Spencer (2014) So far, the process described in this book looks to be pretty life changing as far as I am concerned!  I have found it extremely easy to enact the principles described and have lost 10lbs in three weeks.  Not that I was overweight to start with you understand.  My BMI was 20.4 at the start. Haven't worked it out now, but it is anyway nice to feel a lot lighter and to think that my insulin sensitivity is probably improving, along with all the other health benefits that this process is meant to produce.  The whole experience has been made very easy by using Huel on fasting days.  I just don't have to think about food at all and I very rarely have felt hungry!  What's more, I can't eat nearly as much on the non-fast days either.  I just feel as if I have over-eaten very quickly.  It is a strange thing.  Food also does taste so delicious now.  My previous boredom with food has vanished ...

  By Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson (2017) Superbly told, weaving science into a historical narrative of discovery, this has the effect of being profoundly convincing, the Cochrane Report of meditation, and is also profoundly hopeful.  It does offer ways ahead. Only caveat, I read it before "How Emotions are Made" (the book I read immediately afterwards), and now wish I had read them the other way around.  I will have to read this one again to make sure it still makes sense.  I suspect it does - for example, the emotions it discusses, such as compassion, peace, etc work as cultural artefacts or as triggers in this book, but would just like to be certain that there are no epistemic conflicts! On first reading therefore: 10/10

By Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017) I can't help feeling that this book is undersold by its title.  There is nothing much to suggest that this is a pretty radical overhaul of the theory of emotion, and indeed of all thought.  Of course, Karl Popper has been saying the same sorts of things since the 1950s in "The Logic of Scientific Discovery" et al,  ie: about all products of the human mind being "theory laden", but that was coming at it from a philosophical point of view.  Feldman Barrett seems to be backing up what Popper said (without ever referencing him) with evidence from the lab. Feldman's thesis is such a massive overturning of previous assumptions in popular science books that even though I am familiar with Popper and have had at least a tenuous grasp of his epistemology for about 20 years now,  and even though Feldman's theories seem to make sense, I was still rather pleased that Barrett kept labouring her points.  It was necessary so as to f...

By Nicola Morgan (2013) I perhaps should have read the blurb more closely as this book is aimed at a young teen market.  In fact, I don't think my 16 year old daughter would have been surprised by anything in it.  I was familiar with absolutely all the information it contained, and skipped through the stories as they seemed unnecessary for making the rather sketchy neuroscience.  I am not even sure that it doesn't directly contradict some of the stuff in the previous book I have just finished, ie: How Emotions are Made, by Lisa Feldman Barrett, which, if right, might challenge a few of the very broad assumptions that are made in this book. I did, however, warm to the device of offering several different explanations for her assertions.  This at least seemed sufficiently modest.  I particularly liked the one about "how do brains come through adolescence and out the other side with a whole bundle of skills to boot".  One suggested that it was school...

By Harry Lorayne and Jerry Lucas (1974) Over the past couple of years,  a few friends and I have had a go at our local pub quiz.  Overall, it's been entertaining, despite the repeated losses and the fact that it has occurred to me that, deprived of Google, I might have a few issues in the memory department.  In this regard, I'm definitely not as bad as some. I am, for example, broadly capable of retaining the thrust of the question long enough to know what sort of category of answer we should be aiming for. This is not something that can necessarily be assumed - witness a disgruntled quizzer reporting that his team-mate had responded to the question: "To which country is this song connected?" with the answer: "Chicken nuggets. Put it down.  It's CHICKEN NUGGETS! CH..ICK..EN NUG..GETS!" There was also a lot of finger stabbing apparently.  My issues with memory are by no means of that order.  They are more along the lines of: "Don...