The problem is, when you meet someone, they don’t just tell you their name. Why is it so hard to remember the name of someone you’ve just met, even when you recognize their face? And as a result the brain thinks it’s been poisoned and what do you do when you’ve been poisoned? Throw up. The brain is getting conflicting messages from the fundamental senses, and in evolutionary terms there’s only one thing that can cause that, which is a neurotoxin. The balance sense in the ears are detecting movement. Your eyes are saying the environment is still. The body and the muscles are saying we are still. So the main theory as to why we get motion sickness is that it’s essentially a conflict in the senses that are being relayed to the subcortical part of the brain where the senses are integrated together. We haven’t evolved, obviously, to ride in vehicles that’s a very new thing in evolutionary terms. Why is it that we get motion sickness when we’re traveling in a plane or a car? We caught up with Burnett, who is also a science blogger for The Guardian and a stand-up comic, to ask him some of our everyday questions and frustrations with neuroscience. (It could have something to do with our ancestors sleeping in trees.) His book explores many of these quirks: How we edit our own memories to make ourselves look better without knowing it how anger persuades us we can take on a bully twice our size and what may cause us to feel like we’re falling and jerk awake just as we’re falling asleep. In his new book, Idiot Brain, Burnett aims to take our most prized organ down a peg or two.īurnett is most fascinated by the brain’s tendency to trip us up when it’s just trying to help. But if he’s being honest, it’s “really quite rubbish in a lot of ways,” he says. Don’t get him wrong: Dean Burnett loves the brain as much as the next neuroscientist.

Dean burnett neuroscientist