The Genius Within: Smart Pills, Brain Hacks and Adventures in Intelligence

Description

From the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Man Who Couldn't Stop 'Witty, sharp and enlightening ... This book will make you smarter' Adam Rutherford What if you have more intelligence than you realize? What if there is a genius inside you, just waiting to be released? And what if the route to better brain power is not hard work or thousands of hours of practice but to simply swallow a pill? In The Genius Within, bestselling author David Adam explores the ground-breaking neuroscience of cognitive enhancement that is changing the way the brain and the mind works - to make it better, sharper, more focused and, yes, more intelligent. Sharing his own experiments with revolutionary smart drugs and electrical brain stimulation, he delves into the sinister history of intelligence tests, meets savants and brain hackers and reveals how he boosted his own IQ to cheat his way into Mensa. Going to the heart of how we consider, measure and judge mental ability, The Genius Within asks difficult questions about the science that could rank and define us, and inevitably shape our future.

Dr David Adam is a Sunday Times bestselling author and an editor at Nature, the world's leading scientific journal. Before that he was a specialist correspondent on the Guardian for seven years, writing on science, medicine and the environment. He was named Feature Writer of the Year by the Association of British Science Writers, and has reported from Antarctica, the Arctic, China and the depths of the Amazon jungle.

Witty, sharp and enlightening ... This book will make you smarter -- Adam Rutherford A breezily written pop science book about the quest to find out about what intelligence is and how it can be boosted. -- Robbie Millen * The Sunday Times * Quite simply book of the year, on living with OCD: just buy it now -- Adam Rutherford on The Man Who Couldn't Stop A fundamentally important book that will bring a breath of fresh understanding to sufferers . . . It will make you think again -- Sunday Times on The Man Who Couldn't Stop [A] fascinating study of the living nightmare that is obsessive compulsive disorder . . . one of the best and most readable studies of a mental illness to have emerged in recent years . . . an honest and open and, yes, maybe life-changing work -- Matt Haig, Observer, on The Man Who Couldn't Stop A brave and helpful contribution to deepening our understanding of the intricate complexities of mental ill-health -- The Times on The Man Who Couldn't Stop What if you could zap your head or take a pill, like Bradley Cooper in the film Limitless, and become insanely clever? Over the last decade, this sci-fi possibility has started to approach reality, and David Adam's book is a timely prologue to the brave new world that might await us...Fascinating. * The Guardian *