The Humanual, Volume 2: The Operating System

The hardware came with software. Nobody told you that either.

The Operating System is the second volume of The Humanual, and it is about the three pounds of electrified fat that is currently reading this sentence and quietly congratulating itself. It explains what the mind is doing when it feels, remembers, pays attention, wants things, sleeps, tells itself stories, and occasionally crashes. It covers the known bugs (the cognitive biases every human ships with), the unreliable storage (memory is a reconstruction, not a recording), the scarcest resource (attention, and everyone who is trying to buy it), the reward circuit (why the phone is designed the way it is), the ancient code you inherited from ancestors who had excellent reasons to fear the dark, and the narrator in your head who is confident, persuasive, and frequently wrong.

Each chapter states plainly what science has settled and what it has not, translates every technical term the moment it appears, and closes with practical tools, Frequently Panicked Questions, and the myths you can now stop believing. The final chapter is a user manual for your own mind, assembled from everything before it.

Funny, kind, and unwilling to pretend the mind is simpler than it is, The Operating System is for anyone who has ever wondered why they did that. There is a reason. It is in here.

Adam Blak was issued a human body in the usual way, without paperwork, and has spent the years since trying to work out how it operates. The Humanual is his notes. Every claim in it was checked against the evidence, which is more than can be said for most of what you were told about being a person. He is also the author of The Good Work, a shorter book about how people might treat one another, and he lives near Philadelphia, where he is, at the time of writing, still a human.