Showing results by publisher "The Great Courses" in Health & Wellness

In the 24 compelling half-hour lectures of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Daily Life, Professor Jason Satterfield will help you build your cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) toolbox, giving you the skills you need to change those stories that hold you back and that keep you from experiencing your fullest life possible.

Sleep is the subject of intense scientific debate among biologists and neuroscientists. Why must we spend about one-third of our lives asleep? What exactly is sleep? Why does a lack of sleep impair our cognitive abilities and leave us vulnerable to a host of medical issues ranging from obesity to reduced resistance to infectious disease?

Your senses aren't just a part of you-they define you. Nothing you experience would be possible without the intricate power of your senses. But how much about them do you really know? Your ability to sense and perceive the world around you is so richly detailed and accurate as to be miraculous.

In The Black Death: New Lessons from Recent Research, celebrated medievalist Dorsey Armstrong shares the fascinating new story of this old pandemic—revealed by dedicated researchers working with 21st-century technologies and a knowledge of language and history that now provide input from all geographic areas of the medieval world. In seven engaging lectures, Professor Armstrong corrects explanations of the pandemic that are now known to be inaccurate and offers a more robust description of plague biology than has ever been known.

What is our species' greatest invention? Medicine, computers, space travel? Not even close. The innovation that underlies each of our past achievements and those we still aspire to is language. Language is the ultimate invention of Homo sapiens - one that has allowed us to change the physical and social world around us in every conceivable way, and an invention that has fundamentally changed us, as well.

The quest to understand the mind has motivated some of history's most profound thinkers. But only in our own time are we beginning to see the true complexity of this quest, as today's philosophers draw on the latest evidence from neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, and other fields to probe deeply into the inner workings of the mind.

Learning is a lifelong adventure.It starts in your mother's womb, accelerates to high speed in infancy and childhood, and continues through every age. Whether you're actively engaged in mastering a new skill, intuitively discovering an unfamiliar place, or even sleeping-which is fundamental to helping you consolidate and hold on to what you've learned-you are truly born to learn around the clock.But few of us know how we learn, which is the key to learning and studying more effectively.

Social interactions and the impressions that drive them are vitally important aspects of human behavior. In this compelling course, learn about how we shape the impressions other people form of us - at work, at home, in our social lives, and in the world at large.

In How You Decide: The Science of Human Decision Making, Professor Ryan Hamilton, associate professor of marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School, uses research revealed via the scientific method to understand and explain human decision making. While his easygoing manner and anecdotes about surprising and bizarre choices will keep you enthralled, Professor Hamilton also shares what decision science has revealed through empirically tested theories.

In Your Best Brain, Professor John J. Medina - an award-winning scientist, New York Times best-selling author, and leading advocate for brain research - delivers 24 exciting lectures that probe the origins of consciousness, memory, emotion, attention, intelligence, and beyond. He focuses on five key areas of study in neuroscience: the brain’s physical structure and function, and how it enabled us to become the planet’s apex predator.

According to the latest scientific research, anyone can be creative. You just have to know how to think creatively, which involves taking a more imaginative approach to the challenges we all face. Learn how to wield the same research-based tools that today's creative people use and tap into your inner creative thinker with Professor Puccio's engaging 24-lecture series that takes you step-by-step through the creative-thinking process.

A must-have course for corporate leaders, design professionals, marketers, and anyone else who communicates visually, How Colors Affect You tells you everything you need to know about the science of color and its impact on all aspects of human experience. These lectures will give you a beautiful new perspective on color - one rooted in credible scientific knowledge and not popular myth.

Music is an integral part of humanity. Every culture has music, from the largest society to the smallest tribe. Its marvelous range of melodies, themes, and rhythms taps in to something universal. Babies are soothed by it. Young adults dance for hours to it. Older adults can relive their youth with the vivid memories it evokes. Music is part of our most important rituals, and it has been the medium of some of our greatest works of art.

The form of research-based meditation known as Integrative Restoration (or iRest®) has helped special operations troops improve their resiliency, executives manage stress, cancer patients cope with pain, and trauma survivors experience safety and healing. Now, bring the practice right into your life and home in these 24 classes.

In these 24 lectures, probe the field of "human development"; the science that studies how we learn and develop psychologically, from birth to the end of life. This very young science not only enables us to understand children and help them develop optimally, but also gives us profound insights into who we are as adults. Professor Watson introduces you to the six theories that have had perhaps the greatest influence on this field

From technology to business, two (or more) heads often prove to be better than one - but only if those heads are cognitively diverse. Diverse perspectives are a powerful tool for maximizing productivity and enhancing collective performance. Now, in The Hidden Factor: Why Thinking Differently Is Your Greatest Asset, you can learn the strategies that make you a more diverse thinker and position you to break down institutional silos and build robust, effective teams.

Consciousness, a unique and perplexing mental state, has been the subject of debate for philosophers and scientists for millennia. And while it is widely agreed within contemporary philosophy that consciousness is a problem whose solutions are likely to determine the fate of any number of other problems, there is no settled position on the ultimate nature of consciousness. This series of 12 penetrating and thought-provoking lectures by an acclaimed teacher and scholar approaches its subject directly and unflinchingly.

Memory is, without a doubt, the most powerful (and practical) tool of everyday life. By linking both your past and your future, memory gives you the power to plan, to reason, to perceive, and to understand. Yet while all of us have an amazing capacity for memory, there are plenty of times when it seems to fail us. Why does this happen? And how can you fix it? In Scientific Secrets for a Powerful Memory, you’ll explore the real research on how memory functions - and then apply these findings to help you make better use of the memory abilities you have.

For millennia, philosophers and scientists have been trying to unlock the secrets of the mind with only limited success—until now. Today, with modern technologies including the best in neuroscience, medical imaging, and recent advances in artificial intelligence, we are making more progress than ever before. In Introduction to Cognitive Science, Professor Thad A. Polk takes you on a fascinating tour of the latest discoveries in the relatively new field of cognitive science. In 24 exciting lectures, Professor Polk shares dozens of the most challenging questions in cognitive science today.

In Understanding Cognitive Biases, you will learn how to recognize biases for what they are, counteract them when necessary, and even use them to your advantage in some instances. In 24 fascinating lectures, Dr. Alexander B. Swan uses examples from psychology experiments, history, politics, movies, TV, comics, social media, and more to illustrate dozens of cognitive biases that affect us all.