Garth Sundem is back - only this time, he's serving up Brain Candy for your intellectual enrichment!
The Geek Logik author, whose previous writing inspired over two dozen fun tools here at Political Calculations, including the amazingly popular "What Are the Chances Your Marriage Will Last?", this time mines the latest reporting of research into the sciences of the brain and of behavior to explain why we do and think the things we do!
But better yet, he breaks extremely dry topics like morality, game theory, neuroscience, psychology and others down into bite size pieces, adding a touch of his trademark humor along with a number of brain-teasing puzzles, illusions and suggestions of tricks that you might consider playing on others that you can literally consume like pieces of, well, brain candy. Brain Candy is the kind of book that you don't have to read through from front-to-back, or in one sitting, and is actually better if you don't.
In return, you'll be rewarded with countless "Hey Mabel" insights. Like the power that the color red would appear to have in affecting the outcome of Olympic sporting events like boxing, tae kwon do and wrestling. Or why students should take notes after class. Or why coffee and cigarettes make you smarter, but only for a little while. Or how someone waiting tables might be able to increase their tip income by 14%.
For our money, the best feature of the book are the snippets that get into the "logic of illogic" and the economics of mating, where the kind of common sense things you might expect to apply, just don't!
So if you're the kind of person whose inclined to take random reading recommendations from an anonymously written blog, (and well, who isn't?) might we suggest adding Garth Sundem's Brain Candy to your random reading list. You'll learn an amazing amount of pretty cool stuff related to some very sophisticated concepts in a pretty short period of time. We would only caution you to read the book at random - it really is more rewarding that way!
And who knows - it might just inspire a whole new batch of tools here at Political Calculations....
Our thanks to Garth and Three Rivers Press for making a pre-release copy of Brain Candy available for our review!