Moonwalking With Einstein

 A little while after I started reading this book, I realized I had read about it in an article online before. Took me a while to find, but here it is. If you don't want to bother reading the book, just read the article. Or maybe reading the article will help make you want to read the book. The writer of this book stumbles upon the world of competitive memorization, where people memorize things like a random list of numbers, the order of a shuffled deck of cards, or an unknown poem, all within minutes. Then he learns the techniques used by the memory athletes and trains for one year so that he can compete the following year. The book also talks about other interesting subjects related to memory, like the role memorization in education, history, culture, and more... examples of people with extraordinary memory and extraordinary lack of memory, how memory formation is related to how slow or how fast we perceive passage of time, why it is that we improve quickly when acquiring a new skill but then hit a plateau beyond which it is very difficult to get better at the skill...
One idea this book made me think about was about how much of my day I float through on auto-pilot. It's a probably greater proportion than I'm happy with. It's a remarkable ability that our brain has, to be able to shift activities that we process with the top of our consciousness to lower levels, so that we can concentrate on more important things. It's up to us to give our brains lots of those important things, so we can make the best use of our time.

While reading this book, I added Born On A Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant to my queue of books to read.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Very interesting story about how cells taken from a cancer victim turned out to be special and revolutionized the way cells could be used in study and drug testing. Also, sad story about the family of the cell "donor" and some questions around the ethical implications of using human materials for science.

Fingerprints of God

I added this book to my wishlist after hearing the story about the book on NPR. Almost two years later, I finally read it. It's very interesting. You get to read about all sorts of spiritual experiences people had, like encounters with God, near death experiences, spiritual conversions... and then an explanation of what's going on from the neurological perspective. There were quite a few interesting stories. The writer shares her own spiritual experience, which wasn't quite as interesting, but relevant. The book comes down to the idea that there's a part of the brain that seems to be involved in pretty much everyone's spiritual experiences, which Hagerty likens to piece audio hardware, and poses the question is it more like a radio, receiving real signals from a real God (some people's radios work better than others) or is it more like a CD player, where everything is just in our heads?

Here's a link to the story on NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104466652

Water for Elephants

It was entertaining. It didn't get into circuses or elephants as much as I hoped it would. The love story was a little weak. I'll be interested to see how they handle the "twist ending" in the movie... probably after it's on netflix and it makes its way through my queue.

The End of Overeating

Got a little repetitive after a while, but it had some interesting ideas and facts. Some really revealing things about the food industry. Like how a lot of the food we eat when we go out have been essentially engineered to be addictive. Foods are described as layers of salt, fat, and sugar, and this layering has a special affect on our brains. 
They keys seem to be to recognize what food really is, and also to change our attitude towards food. Of course to do any of that, you need to think to do it, first. You'll probably like this book if you liked Fast Food Nation or Omnivore's Dilemma.