Reality Check: What Your Mind Knows, But Isn't Telling You

by David L. Weiner

"[T]his book, when read with an open, inquisitive mind, will not fail to stimulate new perspectives and provoke new ideas."
- Science Books & Films
"How Weiner goes about understanding these conundrums is a fascinating journey that will make any reader astonished, frustrated, angry, and definitely curious about the human mind."
Biology Digest
"What is reality? Can our brains comprehend the true nature of reality? Do we know anything for certain? Reality Check is an entertaining, sometimes light-hearted tour through the many mysteries of neuroscience, genetics and physics by psychology popularizer and businessman David Weiner. Weiner ... writes in a frank and direct manner devoid of technical jargon. He extracts the essence of the many facets of the mind-brain problem."
Science & Theology News
"David Weiner has written a delightful and impressively researched tour de force on how the brain works that includes wonderful side trips about DNA, the size of the universe and the foibles of religiosity. This is popular science writing at its best - clear, witty and marvelously informative."
Benjamin J. Hubbard, Ph.D.
Professor of Comparative Religion
California State University, Fullerton
What is reality? Each of us has a "virtual reality map" imprinted on our brains, which consists of our individual ideologies, opinions, attitudes, values, and beliefs that we've built up over the years. But what if you learned that your reality map was distorted or limited? In Reality Check, David L. Weiner takes us on an entertaining romp through many odd and interesting new findings in various scientific fields - from neurobiology to physics and genetics, describing how difficult it is for these findings to sink in and impact our perspectives.
One of the most fascinating topics that Weiner discusses is what neuroscience has found out about certain apelike mechanisms in our brains. These ancient vestiges of evolution can cause turmoil if we don't meet their primitive expectations, and their penchant for pecking order and status can create far-out realities that we think are absolutely true. By opening our minds to what science has discovered about our realities, and what it still considers to be mysteries, we can gain valuable insights and tools for improving the quality of our lives.
The fresh and surprising information in this book has ramifications for parents, managers, educators, and everyone else interested in getting the most out of others and themselves.

:David L. Weiner (Chicago, IL) is author of the psychology bestseller Battling the Inner Dummy: The Craziness of Apparently Normal People, Power Freaks: Dealing with Them in the Workplace or Anyplace, and Reality Check: What Your Mind Knows, but Isn't Telling You. He is also on the external board of advisers of the HealthEmotions Research Institute of the University of Wisconsin, and is the founder and CEO of Marketing Support, Inc., a $100-million marketing agency with clients including IBM, Motorola, Home Depot, Xerox, and many other Fortune 500 companies.

Genres: Nonfiction

303 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 1, 2005

Reviews

[Josh · Rating 2 out of 5]

this was a borderline interesting read. as someone w/ a psych degree, i appreciate the way that the author tries to draw attention to the way the brain works in a way that is more easily accessible to the general public, but the book seemed a little scatterbrained. he starts off talking about how the brain can be imagined as a computer processor - 1s & 0s, on or off - which is a great simplified model then moved into how complex it is to make a perform a somewhat simple task (serving a tennis ball). from here, he started talking about "what is consciousness" and theories throughout the ages on the topic, primal drives and mental illnesses / disorders.

everyone's with us on this, right?

now it starts getting weird. he starts on a series of topics about how large the universe is, we can't grasp that fact, the theory of relativity, space travel, how insignificant we are in a cosmic sense, the illusion of time, tries to explain the human genome project and how DNA works, the bogusness of religion and an array of other topics designed to show that nothing we do matters - so we should all stop being dicks and just get along.

sure, DBAD (don't be a dick) is a great philosophy to live by, but in (what i thought was supposed to be) a psych book on the brain... this was definitely not the route i was expecting the book to go.

[Don]

Fills in not all but a lot of the blank spots in the question we all ask ourselves...Who am I and why am I here.