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    Your Brain on Food: How Chemicals Control Your Thoughts and Feelings 3rd Edition
    Your Brain on Food: How Chemicals Control Your Thoughts and Feelings 3rd Edition
    Your Brain on Food: How Chemicals Control Your Thoughts and Feelings 3rd Edition
    Audiobook8 hours

    Your Brain on Food: How Chemicals Control Your Thoughts and Feelings 3rd Edition

    Written by Gary Wenk

    Narrated by Jonathan Yen

    3/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    An internationally renowned neuroscientist, Dr. Wenk has been educating college and medical students about the brain and lecturing around the world for more than forty years. With this essential book, he vividly demonstrates how a little knowledge about the foods and drugs we eat can teach us a lot about how our brain functions. The information is presented in an irreverent and non-judgmental manner, making it highly accessible to high school teenagers, inquisitive college students, and worried parents. Dr. Wenk has skillfully blended the highest scholarly standards with illuminating insights, gentle humor, and welcome simplicity. The intersection between brain science, drugs, food, and our cultural and religious traditions is plainly illustrated in an entirely new light. Wenk tackles fundamental questions, including:

    - Why do you wake up tired from a good long sleep and why does your sleepy brain crave coffee and donuts?

    - How can understanding a voodoo curse explain why it is so hard to stop smoking?

    - Why is a vegetarian or gluten-free diet not always the healthier option for the brain?

    - How can liposuction improve brain function?
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateJun 18, 2019
    ISBN9781684570515
    Your Brain on Food: How Chemicals Control Your Thoughts and Feelings 3rd Edition

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    Reviews for Your Brain on Food

    3/5

    33 ratings5 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Some interesting stuff..though not sure it's about food. The author though spends a good amount of time telling us not to waste our money on supplements or procedures..and mostly because there is no proof they work. I think many understand there usually isn't studies done unless someone stands to make some money. Drug companies have no interest in paying for trials on items they can't sell. There are items such as mushrooms that can provide immense support or help for people. Chinese have been using them for centuries.
    • 2/5
      This may be one of the most misleading book titles I've ever encountered. In the entire book, there are maybe a handful of sentences actually discussing food. Presumably "Your Brain on Drugs" was already claimed by those PSAs, but that would be the far more accurate title for the book. The vast majority of it discusses the effects of various drugs on the brain, particularly with regards to neurotransmitters. Additionally, the author doesn't seem entirely sure of who his audience is. The books is somewhat too advanced for a layperson audience, but a bit too simplified for an audience with a background in psych/neuro/brain science and several chunks of it come off as him trying to come across as the "cool professor." Many of the facts were fairly interesting, but all in all it was a strange read.
    • 3/5
      The title and the cover are completely misleading. Pretty much the only thing about foods (with the exception of coffee and chocolate) the author said was that the amounts of certain chemicals are not enough to produce significant effects, if any.

      That said, I did learn a few things about how different drugs effect the brain. For instance, I never knew why so many medications prohibit you from drinking alcohol (it multiplies the effects and can be fatal). I also learned why teenagers are so wreckless:

      Essentially, your frontal lobes tell you that it's a bad idea to drink alcohol and drive or to ignore the consequences of taking ecstacy. When your frontal lobes finally complete their process of myelination, they begin to work properly and you stop doing stupid things. Most importantly, you stop feeling immortal. Apparently, women finish this process by age 25 years and men finish by age 30. [...] This delay in brain maturation among males may explain the behavior of many members of college fraternities.
      There are entire books that discuss each of the different sections in this book. This one is meant as an introduction, and there is a small suggested further reading section in the back.

      Many books have been written about religion and brain chemistry, but I love this quote: "A recent investigation discovered that the tendency to display extravagant religious behaviors correlated significantly with atrophy (i.e., shrinkage) of the right hippocampus in patients with untreatable epilepsy."
    • 1/5
      I couldn't finish it. I've taken physiological psychology classes, and so this book was a lot of stuff I knew already. I was hoping for stuff I didn't know about brains and food, but I already knew how chocolate works. :shrug: Whatever.
    • 4/5
      This book could have been more accurately titled Your Brain on Drugs, although I suppose that phrase might already have been trademarked, and, as the author points out, the line between foods and drugs is really quite a blurry one, anyway. Basically, it's an overview of how various chemicals we humans put into our bodies -- whether medicinally, recreationally, or as food -- affect the working of our brains. This involves lots of discussions of neurotransmitters with long, unwieldy names and complicated descriptions of the intricate ways in which they interact inside our skulls. But Wenk generally writes very clearly, keeps things reasonably simple without dumbing them down, and breaks up the difficult subject matter a bit by occasionally providing interesting facts about the cultural history of various substances and personal anecdotes about ill-advised ways his students have experimented with drugs. All in all, I'd say it's a pretty good introduction to the subject, if you're interested in something that's short, but reasonably detailed.