Mental Gymnastics

A smart, funny, and deeply humane guide to the beautifully flawed human brain—and how to stop fighting it and start working with it.

In an age of endless notifications, crushing information overload, and a productivity culture that demands we do more, faster, and better, most of us feel like our minds are failing us. We forget where we put our keys, doom-scroll for hours, make terrible decisions when tired, and still insist—against all evidence—that we're excellent multitaskers.

But as neuroscientist Earl Miller bluntly puts it: "People can't multitask very well, and when people say they can, they're deluding themselves."

In Mental Gymnastics, Ash Robertson takes readers on an entertaining and eye-opening tour through the quirks, glitches, and hidden superpowers of the human mind. With wit, warmth, and rigorous science, Robertson reveals that our brains aren't broken—they're just running Stone Age software on a 21st-century operating system, optimized for survival on the savanna, not for navigating the attention economy.