First, what this is not: a “how to improve your memory” book of the kind marketed to students and/or people who want to do memory-themed party tricks.

What this book actually is: exactly what the title and subtitle claim it to be: seven steps to managing your memory: what’s normal, what’s not, and what to do about it.

Drs. Budson & O’Connor cover:

• which memory errors can (and usually do) happen at any age
• how memory changes with normal aging, and
• what kinds of memory problems are not normal.

One thing that sets this book aside from a lot of its genre is that it also covers which kinds of memory loss are reversible—and, where appropriate, what can be undertaken to effect such a reversal.

The authors talk about what things have (and what things haven’t!) been shown to strengthen memory and reduce cognitive decline, and in the worst case scenario, what medications can help against Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.

The style is halfway between pop-science and a science textbook. The structure of the book, with its headings, subheadings, bullet points, summaries, etc, helps the reader to process and remember the information.

Bottom line: if you’d like to get on top of managing your memory before you forget, then this book is for you.

Click here to check out Seven Steps to Managing Your Memory, and safeguard what’s most important to you!

We’ve reviewed books about neurology before, and we always try to review books that bring something new/different. So, what makes this one stand out?

Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, one of the world’s foremost neuroscientists, starts with an overview of how our unusual brain (definitely our species’ defining characteristic) came to be, and then devotes the rest of the book to mostly practical information.

She explains, in clear terms and without undue jargon, how the brain goes about such things as making constant predictions and useful assumptions about our environment, and reports these things to us as facts—which process is usually useful, and sometimes counterproductive.

We learn about how the apparently mystical trait of empathy works, in real flesh-and-blood terms, and why some kinds of empathy are more metabolically costly than others, and what that means for us all.

Unlike many such books, this one also looks at what is going on in the case of “different minds” that operate very dissimilarly to our own, and how this neurodiversity is important for our species.

Critically, she also looks at what else makes our brains stand out, the symphony of “5 Cs” that aren’t often found to the same extent all in the same species: creativity, communication, copying, cooperation, and compression. This latter being less obvious, but perhaps the most important; Dr. Feldman Barrett explains how we use this ability to layer summaries of our memories, perceptions, and assumptions, to allow us to think in abstractions—something that powers much of what we do that separates us from other animals.

Bottom line: if you’d like to learn more about that big wet organ between your ears, what it does for you, and how it goes about doing it, then this book gives a very practical foundation from which to build.

Click here to check out Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain, and learn more about yours!