Garth Sundem has a lot of fun talking to a bunch of scientists who seem to spend a good deal of time thinking about things that aren’t all that important. Among the topics covered are how to talk your way out of a traffic ticket, how to lose weight by eating 8 hours a day, and how to win a race by taking the best angle on the turns.
As the subtitle suggests, we get advice from 93 top scientists-and since the book is only 250 pages thick, this means there is not a lot of in depth coverage of any of the topics. This is a kind of Reader’s Digest tour of science, where you are given the gist of the ideas. And for the most part, the gist is all you really need.
For example, I read the two page article about Dr Panda’s 8 hour diet and it made perfect sense. I then picked up David Zincenko’s 250 page book on the 8 hour diet and found I learned all I needed to know from the short article.
Brain Trust was a fun read, but the ideas pretty quickly blurred and the tips and advice left no real impression on me. Even the odd item I was interested in, such as when to buy Lotto tickets and have the best chance of a winning ticket, didn’t stick. But then, it isn’t really a textbook or one of Tim Ferris’s tomes on being the best that you can be. It’s more like one of the 500 Jokes to Read on The Toliet books were you aren’t really meant to read the whole thing at once.
Brain Trust: 93 Top Scientists Reveal Lab-Tested Secrets to Surfing, Dating, Dieting, Gambling, Growing Man-Eating Plants, and More!
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