The Owner’s Manual for the Brain

Once when I had just completed doing a creativity workshop one of the participants came up to ask me what book was my favorite book for understanding creativity. I am pretty sure he expected me to answer with one of the many book by Michael Michalko or perhaps What A Great Idea 2.0 by Chic Thompson. Those books are very high on my list but by far the book that I have learned the most from is The Owner’s Manual for the Brain. This book is perhaps the most accessible book on the human brain available. From describing the most fundamentals concepts of how the brain functions to analyzing the latest research in various fields of psychology, each topic is presented a way that is enjoyable, easy to understand and informative. The breadth and clarity of the topics is amazing, with very practical topic selection and presentation you will very pleasantly surprised at how much you can learn from this book.

My Take On The Book

The best part of this book is that there is a list of “applications” for what you have just read after every major sub section. This moves the the book from being a simple reference to being a tool that you will be able to use over and over again. As you would expect this book is HUGE (700+ pages to be exact), however when I am developing training for developers, designers, sales people, project manager I find myself going back to this book constantly to get applicable tips on how to communicate certain topics, how to present information and how to understand why people react in certain situations.