Neuroscience Lite

While browsing NetGalley, I chanced upon Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life and found myself intrigued. Written by Paul Hammerness, a practicing psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, and Margaret Moore, a professional wellness coach, the book promised to describe relevant developments in neuroscience that might be helpful to people in search of ways to be better organized and more focused.

While I don't have a particular fondness for self-help books (not this kind, anyway), I was curious about how successful it would be as a resource on neuroscience, a subject of which I've developed a particular interest of late.

Overall, there's no doubt that Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life isn't in the same league as more comprehensive and entertaining books that discuss neuroscience, but then it's not supposed to be. It's supposed to be a book that discusses neuroscience in a way that is appealing and comprehensible to the average reader, providing the requisite self-help tips and tricks to put the aforementioned insights to good use. By this yardstick, the book largely succeeds, mainly because its individual authors write about areas of their respective expertise: Hammerness gets the task of describing the research, while Moore is the one responsible for discussing how such insights apply in daily life.

It's important to remember, however, that Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life is above all else self-help material, with all that the genre implies. For instance, readers will find that the book itself takes a while to get to the topic at hand, owing to unnecessarily folksy back-and-forth between the authors as a by-way-of-explanation to how the book is structured. Likewise, it should be clear from the very beginning that the book can only offer only so much as far as the research on neuroscience is concerned, more so given what seems to be Hammerness' particular expertise dealing with patients who have ADHD.

Still, I'd have to say that Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life is a decent enough layman's introduction to neuroscience. If it turns out to be as helpful to readers as its authors envision, then that would be a real bonus.

[Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life will be published by Harlequin on 27 December 2011. This review is based on a pre-publication proof obtained through NetGalley.]