Welcome To Your Brain Book Summary

In the book Welcome to Your Brain, Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang explain how the human brain processes sensory and cognitive information, regulates emotions, and forms memories. An important process for responding to the world, is to take in information and decipher what it means so the brain can come up with a response to it. Since people often have to react quickly to emergencies and limited-time opportunities, the brain usually aims for a hurried answer instead of taking its time to formulate a perfect one. This together with the intricacy of the world, means that the brain has to make a lot of assumptions. The brain is doing its best to help everyone survive but it can make predictable mistakes when it makes those assumptions. The brain uses shortcuts and tricks to methodically take in information so it can do its job, but these shortcuts can lead to undesired results.
When the brain is doing essential and difficult tasks, it takes in more information than it can retain and also speeds through them. When the
One of the physiological processes that maintains homeostasis is the circadian rhythm which helps animals anticipate when light, heat, and food are likely to be available. This book explains that the circadian rhythm regulates multiple activities, including when someone needs to sleep, their body temperature, and when they get hungry. But it also says that things that disrupt one’s circadian rhythm, such as jet lag, can lead them to having a different timing from the external day/night cycle in the world. Their rhythms can become out of sync and they may suffer from difficulty getting to sleep, drowsiness, lack of alertness, and digestive problems. This clearly establishes that if the dynamic homeostasis of a biological system is disturbed, then the biological system will be affected as a