Adventures in Reading

My favorite science book this year (so far) is Norman Doidge’s The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph From the Frontiers of Brain Science.

If you enjoy reading Oliver Sacks (I’ve read Awakenings and An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales), you’ll probably be fascinated by The Brain That Changes Itself.

Click here to read an excerpt from the author’s website.

My freshman year at MIT, I took a few classes within the in Brain and Cognitive Sciences department at MIT (course 9 as we called it) and even considered majoring in BCS. So I have had a very basic education of the brain and have long been interested in brain science.

Anyway, I thought of The Brain That Changes Itself today when I read Nicholas Bakalar’s April 29, 2008 New York Times article “Memory Training Shown to Turn Up Brainpower.” The research described in Bakalar’s article confirms Doidge’s book about the brain’s plasticity (neuroplasticity) — the theory that changes in the brain can occur as a result of experience, which challenges the old idea that we can’t change our brains (that we are “hard-wired”).

“Memory Training Shown to Turn Up Brainpower” discusses a study that improved participants “working memory” (”the kind that allows memorization of a telephone number just long enough to dial it”) using various techniques and then tested the participant’s “fluid intelligence” (”the kind of mental ability that allows us to solve new problems without having any relevant previous experience,” which has been thought to be innate).

I suspect that scientists will continue to learn more about neuroplasticity and that in not so distant future, we’ll be able to cure strokes, paralysis and other “incurable” diseases/symptoms that stem from the brain.

By the way, I loved The Brain That Changes Itself and highly recommend it. It was one of those books that I could not put down. The stories of neuroplasticity will shock you, yet the stories are uplifting and inspirational.

I’ve considered many graduate school options…medical school, law school, business school, doctoral programs, masters programs…but more and more I think I will not go to graduate school.

I figure I love to read and learn and if I put my mind to it, I can learn just about anything.

So I think I will finally take a friend’s suggestion to read What the Best MBAs Know: How to Apply the Greatest Ideas Taught in the Best Business Schools by Peter Navarro (editor) — my friend is in business school so I figure she knows what she’s talking about.

From what I gather, the contributors are from top-ranked business schools like Sloan (at MIT), Kellogg (at Northwestern), Wharton (at the University of Pennsylvania) and Stanford and feature detailed chapters important MBA topics such as strategy, accounting, managerial economics, marketing and decision analysis.

Here’s the table of contents in case you’re curious:

Part 1: The big MBA picture
1. Who should read this book? 1
2. The big picture - an overview of the MBA curriculum 6

Part 2: The strategic and tactical MBA
3. Management strategy - five steps to successful strategic analysis 19
4. Macroeconomics and the well-timed business strategy 57

Part 3: The functional MBA
5. Strategic marketing - delivering customer value 87
6. Operations and supply chain management - getting the stuff out the door 119
7. Financial accounting - “doing the numbers” for investors, regulators and other external users 152
8. Managerial accounting - “doing the numbers” for internal decision making and control 171
9. Corporate finance - the big questions and key concepts 194

Part 4: The organizational and leadership MBA
10. Organizational behavior - the power of people and leadership 227

Part 5: The MBA toolbox
11. Statistics, decision analysis, and modeling - how the numbers help us manage 261
12. Managerial economics - microeconomics for managers 287
13. Concluding thoughts 318

Click here for an audio excerpt on the author’s website.

What the Best MBAs Know was published in 2005 so I’d guess that the information is still relevant though I may simply borrow a copy from the library and hold off purchasing until McGraw-Hill publishes a second edition.