Review: Super Brain by Deepak Chopra & Rudolph Tanzi

I could not have started the year off with a better book.  Super Brain is an incredible book, part neuro science, part self help book, it was the perfect combination of fact and guidance.  On the cover it says: “Unleashing the explosive power of your mind to maximise health, happiness, and spiritual well being.”  It is this and so much more.

“Two pioneers in health–Dr Deepak Chopra and Prof Rudolph E. Tanzi, one of the world’s foremost experts on the causes of Alzheimer’s–share a bold new understanding of the brain and a prescriptive plan for how we can use it to achieve physical, mental and spiritual well-being.“ (GoodReads)

Super Brain describes eloquently and backed up by scientific fact how the brain works and then shows us how we train it sometimes positively and sometimes negatively.  Super Brain explains how this training can result in either the brain using us or us using it as is supposed to be.  It provides guidance on how you can retrain your brain for maximum health, happiness, and spiritual well being.

In each chapter the authors talk about an area or function of the brain and also deal with a specific problem that many of us face in society.  For example the book explains and offers guidance on memory loss, depression, overweight, anxiety, personal crisis, self-healing, maximum longevity, among others.  And even if you don’t deal with any of these in your life the book is so well written and interesting that you will enjoy it for the simple fact that we all have a brain and it’s wonderful to better understand it and our particular nervous system because they are the vehicle through which we experience life.

The beautiful message of this book for me is that you have control over your brain and therefore your experience of life.  My favourite line in the book comes from pg 167:

“…every thought is an instruction…”

I enjoyed and highly recommend this book.  It was a fantastic read and I’ll be reading the follow up Super Genes later in the year.

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TBR Chronicles #11

This month’s TBR list begins with a book I hope will guide me on the beginnings of the journey I described in New Year, New Goals to teach myself Photoshop.  There are bucket loads of resources available out there from books to online tutorials to help with this but I’ve decided to start with Adobe Photoshop onDemand by Steve Johnson which covers basic to advanced Photoshop skills and can be used as preparation or the Adobe Certification exams.

I am currently reading Super Brain by Deepak Chopra and Rudolph Tanzi which I am enjoying thoroughly and so I will definitely be reading their follow up by Super Genes.  I have really enjoyed the mixture of science and self help advice in Super Brain so I expect Super Genes to be equally interesting.

This next book has been  on my TBR list for a while but it was only when I heard a reference to the uniqueness of Colombian magical realism while watching the Netflix series Narcos that One Hundred Years of Solitude by G. G. Marquez popped back into my mind.  I hope to get to this one this year.

A friend of mine gave me her copy of The Witch of Portobello by Paulo Coelho.  I’m a fan of Coelho’s and I haven’t read this novel yet so I was pretty thrilled.  On GoodReads the blurb says: “How do we find the courage to always be true to ourselves—even if we are unsure of whom we are?”.  Mission accomplished, I am intrigued.

The last book on this month’s TBR chronicles is a photography book.  It is Negatives by Xu Yong and is Yong’s collection of negatives taken in 1989.  I sa y collection of negatives because they are printed in negative form and you have to use a phone app, held over the negative, to view the photograph which I thought was a very interesting concept.  I found out about this book from the article The Best Photo Books of 2015 By Teju Cole from which I took this excerpt:

“Xu Yong had a camera with him on June 4, 1989, during the protests in Tiananmen Square. He took many photographs that day, but he did not print or publish them. But what makes the appearance of these images in book form remarkable is hinted at in the title, “Negatives”: Xu has presented the photos in the form of enlarged negatives. (The photos can be viewed as positives through the camera of a cellphone, with “invert colors” switched on in the phone’s settings.) The negatives have a ghostly tinge, and effectively introduce a distance into our viewing of the events of that still-resonant day. Though Xu himself is careful to disavow any political intent, the long wait to publish the book, as well as the fact of its being published in Hong Kong, makes clear the ongoing censorship faced by the Chinese pro-democracy movement.”

Cole talks about elements of the publication of this book pointing to censorship and I felt that the unique concept of printing this book in the form of negatives instead of processed images may also be part of this.  I would love to see a copy of this book.

That’s it for this month.  I hope you found some inspiration or if you have read any of these I would love to hear about them.  Share your thoughts.