Rating: 

Matthew MacDonald displays a great sense of humor in Your Brain: The Missing Manual.

He covers a complex subject as complex as the human brain in simple easy to understand language and does it in about a third the number of pages needed to cover a much simpler computer operating system.

He includes summaries of the information that can help you to use this understanding for your own brain maintenance.

I believe some of the most useful information that he provides has to do with how the brain and our own expectations can fool us into an unshakable belief in something that is absolutely untrue.

I also believe that his own brain fooled him into including a probability example from a 1990 Parade magazine article. I had read about this before and the author repeated what I had read - that hundreds of math professors wrote in with faulty logic to "correct" the solution that was given in the Parade article.

A person is to pick the one of three doors that leads to the prize. After he picks the door, the host then eliminates one of the remaining doors that does not contain the prize. The person is not told whether the door he picked leads to the prize or not. It is true, but maybe not obvious, that this first choice is absolutely meaningless and provides no information about what is behind the other two doors.

The person is then told that he can pick either of the two doors. Wording this instruction in terms of switching or sticking to the person's initial choice obscures the fact that this is now a new separate simple probability game where choosing either door has a 50 - 50 chance of winning.

If you cannot see that this simple solution is correct, it is probably because who are we to question it when hundreds of math professors wrote it with faulty logic to "correct" it?

I recommend reading this book to learn more about how our brains and others words lead us to incorrect conclusions, and about ways we might better maintain the way our brains function.

If you read the above probability example remember that the probability depends only upon the doors and has nothing to do with whether he changes his mind.