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Informationen zum Autor MARBLES: THE BRAIN STORE is in malls across the country. They and their branded products have been featured in Good Housekeeping, Real Simple, USA Today, and Wired , as well as on the Today show and Martha Stewart Living . GARTH SUNDEM is the author of books including Geek Logik, The Geeks’ Guide to World Domination, Brain Candy, Brain Trust, and Beyond IQ. He lives and writes in Boulder, Colorado. Klappentext Want to stop losing your car keys? Will a creative idea into existence? Have more productive arguments with your spouse? In Your Daily Brain! the team behind Marbles: The Brain Store! a chain devoted to building better brains! shows you all the weird and wonderful ways your brain works throughout the day-even when you think it's not working at all! like when you're on the treadmill or picking the kids up from school. Consider this book a wake-up call! a chance to take a closer look at and jump start your brain. From the minute your alarm clock buzzes in the morning until your head hits the pillow at night! your daily activities-everything from doing a crossword puzzle to parallel parking-are part of a process for how you evaluate the world! make choices and decisions! and reach short-term goals while keeping your eyes on the bigger ones. In each! you have the opportunity to use your brain for better or worse! whether it's what to listen to you on your morning commute or avoiding mental traps at the grocery store. Packed with information as well as useful tips and tricks! Your Daily Brain is the brain hack you've been looking for! Chapter 1 6:30am Insight or Energy: Should You Hit the Snooze Button? You’ve heard of brain waves, and here’s how they happen. Think of the eighty-six billion neurons in your head like crickets. When one cricket chirps, not much happens—it’s not like the voice of one cricket can make you pour a cup of coffee or help you remember that snappy comeback. But your brain crickets don’t just do their own thing. They synchronize in ways that create the pulsing cacophony of a summer night. The thing is, crickets can come into synch in different rhythms. The neuronal crickets in your brain “chirp” more slowly when you are asleep than they do when you are awake. Just like a summer night, the brain waves created by your chirping neurons are like the background noise against which other things take place. When you’re awake, everything you do or think happens against the backdrop of the pattern called beta waves. Deep sleep happens against delta waves. If you listened closely, the beta waves would sound like high-pitched chirps and the delta waves would sound like crickets bowing a section of orchestral basses. Between these two patterns—the beta waves of alertness and the delta waves of deep sleep—are alpha waves of wakeful relaxation and theta waves of light sleep. So there are many patterns of brain waves created by the synchronicity of your neuronal crickets, and each brain wave is associated with a level of sleep or consciousness. The purpose of an alarm is to mess with these crickets, forcing them to chirp in the pattern you want. Of course, you have a last line of defense against the dictatorship of your alarm clock: the snooze button! The desire to whack snooze competes only with the need to check Facebook while driving and with the overwhelming compulsion to scratch mosquito bites on your knuckles for the top spot on the human list of temptations. The question is, should you? Here’s the reason you shouldn’t: maybe if you set the alarm five, ten, or fifteen minutes later, you wouldn’t need the alarm at all. If you kicked the snooze habit, you could sleep a little longer, and these few minutes might be all it takes for your brain to reach a natural state of wakefulness without being tossed into the ic...
