BRAINSTYLES: Change Your Life Without Changing Who You Are

In this insightful, inspirational self-help book, readers will journey from the hard-edged realities of genetics and personal limitations to a limitless spiritual path and personal mastery of one's brainstyle.
Each of us has a natural brainstyle wired into our genes. Your brainstyle is your particular set of gifts, the essence of who you are. Neurological research has shown that the left and right sides of the brain are accessed at different speeds, and in varying sequences, in different people. This is critically important when making decisions. So important that relationships and businesses pivot around those judgments. By understanding how your brainstyle mandates your decisions, you can deliver your best in any relationship.
Entertaining and easy self-tests help you to identify your brainstyle. Clarity and focus follow, along with a new foundation for self-esteem beyond personal insights to authentic ways of interacting with others that draw out the best in each of you.

This facile instant guide to self-identity reduces the human brain to four modes of perception and response. You supposedly find out which variation of right brain/left brain operation fits you by reading the book. And then onward to "personal satisfaction, ease, self-esteem." What is a "brain style," anyway? It is variously offered as "your natural way of doing things...you at your best"; or, "the speed of information exchange between the brain hemispheres...expressed as...behaviors"; or "a combination of aptitudes." The fact that the author has a business consulting firm with the same name as the book, BrainStyles, does suggest that the work is not disinterested science. (Her previous book on the same subject, BrainStyles: Be Who You Really Are, was coauthored in 1992 with her husband, David J. Cherry, a business executive whom she credits with inventing the BrainStyle System-a registered title.) This book is a pop brain scan, simplifying the most complex aspect of human functioning to quick takes-a psychosilliness that despite attempts at validating the concept in several appendixes never quite rises to the dignity of a parlor game. Author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Miller, president of the BrainStyles consulting firm, argues that although we cannot change the way we think, we can make the most of our various "brainstyles," whether we are "knowers," "conciliators," "conceptors," or "deliberators." The text is fleshed out with interesting trivia about the brain and cognition. But although the title and premise will interest those unwilling or afraid to change, the book's promise is not fulfilled. The self-test questions are vague and difficult to answer, and as the text progresses, it begins to resemble yet another variation on a very familiar theme. All but large public libraries can pass on this one.?January Adams, Franklin Twp. P.L., Somerset, N.J.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.