DEAN BUONOMANO is a full professor in the departments of neurobiology and psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles and an investigator at UCLA’s Brain Research Institute. He has been invited to speak at many American universities and international meetings, published numerous scientific articles in leading journals such as Science and Neuron and been interviewed for newspapers and magazines including Discover, Newsweek, Scientific American and Die Zeit, most recently about his novel research on the psychological perception of time. Currently, he is being consulted for the programme organization of the 2009 World Science Festival in New York.

Links
Dean Buonomano's website

BRAIN BUGS
How the Brain’s Flaws Shape Our Lives

What is 1,000 plus 40? Now add another 1,000 to that, and 30 and 1,000 more, plus 20, plus 1,000, and finally an additional 10.

Your final answer? Most people arrive at five thousand, as opposed to the correct answer of four
thousand one hundred.

Many of our mental faculties rely on the brain’s ability to create links between sounds, sights and feelings. Although this associative architecture is responsible for some of the brain’s most sophisticated features, it is also the cause of many of its failings – be these our poor memory for names and numbers, our susceptibility to advertising, marketing and propaganda, or the fact that our supposedly rational decisions are often influenced by arbitrary factors. 

BRAIN BUGS is the first to document this profound transition in our view of the brain. Far from thinking of the brain as a miraculous device, we are beginning to see it as a highly imperfect machine riddled with flaws that are detrimental to our well being. Addressing topics ranging from molecular receptors and brain synapses, to fear and phantom limbs, shopping and gambling, and time, religion and consciousness, Dean Buonomano provides a comprehensive tour of our mental glitches, examining their causes and consequences as well as providing insights into how our brains can be debugged.

Along the way, he shows how our neural hardware was built for a time and place we no longer inhabit and how this archaic operating system is inherently ill-suited to perform many of the computations required in the modern world. And, uniquely, he reveals how our ability to form associations is such a vital part of human cognition that evolution devised a single sophisticated protein for making associations at the cellular level – associations which, researchers are discovering, define who and what we are.

Publisher: Norton
Delivery: Spring 2010
Publication: Autumn 2010
Status: Proposal and sample chapter
Length: 80,000–90,000 words

All rights available excluding:
World English Language (Norton), Korea (Chiho), Taiwan (Business Weekly/Cite)

For UK & Commonwealth rights contact Elizabeth Kerr at Norton