The Second Book of General Ignorance: A Quite Interesting Book

Who made the first aeroplane flight? How many legs does an octopus have? How much water should you drink every day? What is the chance of tossing a coin and it landing on heads? What happens if you leave a tooth in a glass of coke overnight? What is house dust mostly made from? What colour are oranges? Who in the world is most likely to kill you? What was the first dishwasher built to do? John Lloyd and John Mitchinson, the brains behind QI, here present a wonderful collection of the most outrageous, fascinating and mind-bending facts, taking on the popular General Ignorance round from BBC1's top rated quiz and the first book in the bestselling series.

Brains: How They Seem to Work

“Dale Purves’ Brains is my favorite sort of reading--an engaging and intelligent scientific autobiography full of vivid personal and historical accounts; the story not only of a life but of an intellectual pursuit. Purves has a unique voice, lively, outspoken, and very human--and his love of science comes through on every page.” --Oliver Sacks
 

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

The best-selling author of The Big Switch returns with an explosive look at technology's effect on the mind.
"Is Google making us stupid?" When Nicholas Carr posed that question in an Atlantic Monthly cover story, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing us. He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: as we enjoy the Internet's bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply?

Now, Carr expands his argument into the most compelling exploration yet published of the Internet's intellectual and cultural consequences. Weaving insights from philosophy, neuroscience, and history into a rich narrative

From Bricks to Brains: The Embodied Cognitive Science of LEGO Robots

From Bricks to Brains introduces embodied cognitive science, and illustrates its foundational ideas through the construction and observation of LEGO Mindstorms robots.
Discussing the characteristics that distinguish embodied cognitive science from classical cognitive science, From Bricks to Brains places a renewed emphasis on sensing and acting, the importance of embodiment, the exploration of distributed notions of control, and the development of theories by synthesizing simple systems and exploring their behaviour. Numerous examples are used to illustrate a key theme: the importance of an agent’s environment

Brains on Fire: Igniting Powerful, Sustainable, Word of Mouth Movements

Develop and harness a powerful, sustainable word-of-mouth movement How did the 360-year-old scissor company, Fiskars, double its profit in key markets just by realizing its customers had already formed a community of avid scrapbookers? How is Best Buy planning to dominate the musical instruments market? By understanding the Brains on Fire model of tapping movements and stepping away from the old-school marketing "campaign" mentality.