Showing titles in Neuroscience & Neuropsychology

Understanding how our brains and bodies actually work is a powerful tool in mitigating the anxiety generated by unpleasant physical and emotional symptoms that we all may experience from time to time. Here, Robert Scaer unravels the complexities of the brain-body connection, equipping all those who are in distress with a plausible explanation for how they feel.

To many, the brain is the seat of personal identity and autonomy. But the way we talk about the brain is often rooted more in mystical conceptions of the soul than in scientific fact. This blinds us to the physical realities of mental function. We ignore bodily influences on our psychology, from chemicals in the blood to bacteria in the gut, and overlook the ways that the environment affects our behavior, via factors varying from subconscious sights and sounds to the weather.

This riveting narrative explores the world of placebos, hypnosis, false memories, and neurology to reveal the groundbreaking science of our suggestible minds. Could the secrets to personal health lie within our own brains? Journalist Erik Vance explores the surprising ways our expectations and beliefs influence our bodily responses to pain, disease, and everyday events.

A look at the extraordinary ways the brain turns thoughts into actions - and how this shapes our everyday lives. In On Task, cognitive neuroscientist David Badre presents the first authoritative introduction to the neuroscience of cognitive control - the remarkable ways that our brains devise sophisticated actions to achieve our goals. We barely notice this routine part of our lives. Yet, cognitive control, also known as executive function, is an astonishing phenomenon that has a profound impact on our well-being.

In Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep?, neuroscientists and zombie enthusiasts Timothy Verstynen and Bradley Voytek apply their neuro-know-how to dissect the puzzle of what has happened to the zombie brain to make the undead act differently than their human prey. Combining tongue-in-cheek analysis with modern neuroscientific principles, Verstynen and Voytek show how zombism can be understood in terms of current knowledge regarding how the brain works.

What is it that makes you distinct from me? Identity is a term much used but hard to define. For that very reason, it has long been a topic of fascination for philosophers but has been regarded with aversion by neuroscientists - until now. Susan Greenfield takes us on a journey in search of a biological interpretation of this most elusive of concepts, guiding us through the social and psychiatric perspectives and ultimately to the heart of the physical brain.

Brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s affect an estimated one in six Americans and are increasing in incidence as the population ages. In this audiobook, we examine these and other conditions involving the damage and loss of neurons, including other forms of dementia, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), and multiple sclerosis (MS).

Penguin presents The Shed Method, written and read by Sara Milne Rowe. Wishing to be better at something lies at the heart of modern life: a bad week to a better week, a frustrated parent to a better parent, an anxious speaker to better speaker, a burnt-out colleague to a better colleague. Doing anything new or better might sound simple, but in practice it can be tricky. The Shed Method is a mind-management system that offers practical advice for improving your decision making.

Mieux se connaître grâce aux neurosciences. Pourquoi croyons-nous souvent avoir raison lorsque nous avons tort ? Pourquoi sommes-nous terrorisés par une toute petite araignée inoffensive ? Pourquoi avons-nous peur de parler en public alors qu'aucun danger ne nous guette ? Pourquoi nous laissons-nous avoir par les infox? Face à un réel multiple et complexe, nous sommes sujets à l'approximation, à l'illusion et à l'erreur. Ces mécanismes cérébraux nous permettent de construire une vision cohérente du monde.

The moment your vape battery dies a familiar unease creeps in. You tell yourself you're in control, but deep down, you know it’s not true. You check your pockets, your bag, just in case. You’ve tried cutting back, quitting cold turkey, only vaping socially — but it never sticks. Before you know it, you're right back where you started. $2,500 a year, gone. You feel it in your lungs climbing stairs, when your mood shifts without warning. The exhaustion, the irritability — it spills into your work, your relationships, the way you show up in your own life.

Are art and science separated by an unbridgeable divide? Can they find common ground? In this book, neuroscientist Eric R. Kandel, whose remarkable scientific career and deep interest in art give him a unique perspective, demonstrates how science can inform the way we experience a work of art and seek to understand its meaning. Kandel illustrates how reductionism - the distillation of larger scientific or aesthetic concepts into smaller, more tractable components - has been used by scientists and artists alike to pursue their respective truths.

What makes you the way you are - and what makes each of us different from everyone else? In Innate, leading neuroscientist and popular science blogger Kevin Mitchell traces human diversity and individual differences to their deepest level: in the wiring of our brains.

In this extraordinary book, Dr. Alexandra Shaker, a clinical psychologist, takes us on a journey through the body—from brain to blood to heart to guts—to examine the connections between our emotional, psychological, and physical lives. She unravels what the body can teach us about anxiety, and what we can learn from our long cultural history of the anxious impulse.

Concerns about memory and other thinking skills are common, particularly in middle age and beyond. Due to worries about declining brain health, some seek out dubious products or supplements purportedly designed to improve memory and other cognitive abilities. Fortunately, scientific research has uncovered a clear-cut set of evidence-based activities and lifestyle choices that are inexpensive or free and known to promote brain and cognitive functioning. John Randolph translates this science in an engaging and accessible way.

Would you like to know what your boss really thinks of you? Would you like to be able to read people and influence, or even manipulate their thoughts? The art of persuasion and deception can be learned! Dark Psychology is much misunderstood and is as much an art as any other. While some will naturally possess the skills that are needed to persuade and control the minds of others, many people don’t. But that does not mean that you will never understand them or be able to master at least some of these amazing abilities.

How is it that we can walk unfamiliar streets while maintaining a sense of direction? How can we come up with shortcuts on the fly, in places we've never traveled? The answer is the complex mental map in our brains. This feature of our cognition is easily taken for granted, but it's also critical to our species' evolutionary success. In From Here to There, Michael Bond tells stories of the lost and found - Polynesian sailors, orienteering champions, early aviators - and surveys the science of human navigation.

In The River of Consciousness, Dr. Sacks takes on evolution, botany, chemistry, medicine, neuroscience and the arts and calls upon his great scientific and creative heroes - above all, Darwin, Freud and William James. For Sacks these thinkers were constant companions from an early age; the questions they explored - the meaning of evolution, the roots of creativity and the nature of consciousness - lie at the heart of science and of this audiobook.

A leading brain scientist's look at the neurobiology of pleasure-and how pleasures can become addictions. Whether eating, taking drugs, engaging in sex, or doing good deeds, the pursuit of pleasure is a central drive of the human animal. In The Compass of Pleasure Johns Hopkins neuroscientist David J. Linden explains how pleasure affects us at the most fundamental level: in our brain.

Applying insights from neuroscience to philosophical questions about the self, consciousness, and the healthy mind. Can we "see" or "find" consciousness in the brain? How can we create working definitions of consciousness and subjectivity, informed by what contemporary research and technology have taught us about how the brain works? How do neuronal processes in the brain relate to our experience of a personal identity? Where does the brain end and the mind begin?

How to be yourself and how to be healthy is very challenging in these times of great change. Human evolution is being hijacked by multiple different levels of corruption across all areas of society, making it extremely hard to see the woods for the trees. These life hacks are proven techniques in combating the matrix and becoming the best version of you. They take into consideration all the elements of what it means to be a human being, including the physical body, healing the inner child, mental health, spiritual practices, and even delving into metaphysical realms.