A short, accessible book on neuroscience and how the brain works. While a lot of it was stuff I knew already, some of it was new, which is always fun. (For example: your brain actually predicts the environment around you and has you act before you even receive the sensory data. While it feels to us like we’re reacting, in fact the cause-and-effect is reversed inside our brains. Wild!) I liked how readable this book was for a layperson like me, and I appreciated how Barrett distinguished between actual science, metaphor, and personal opinion – it’s always nice when those are explicitly delineated in a nonfiction book. I particularly liked the chapters on how children’s brains develop and are guided by their caregivers, and how our brains collectively invent “social reality” (which is pretty much all the time). A good book for newbies to the neuroscience arena who want an easy jumping-off point into the subject.