Showing titles in Neuroscience & Neuropsychology

In several of the compassionate case histories collected here, Sacks considers for the first time the enigmas of depression, psychosis, and schizophrenia, and in others he returns to conditions that have long fascinated him: Tourette’s syndrome, ageing, dementia and hallucinations. In counterpoint to these elegant investigations of what makes us human, this volume also includes pieces that celebrate Sacks’s love of the natural world – and his last meditations on life in the 21st century. Everything in Its Place gives us an intimate portrait of a master writer and thinker at work.

Anxiety is natural. Calm is learned. If you didn’t learn yesterday, you can learn today. It’s not easy, of course. Once your natural alarm system is triggered, it’s hard to find the off switch. Indeed, you don’t have an off switch until you build one. Tame Your Anxiety shows you how. Listeners learn about the brain chemicals that make us feel threatened and the chemicals that make us feel safe. You’ll see how your brain turns on these chemicals with neural pathways built from past experience, and, most important, you discover your power to build new pathways.

In Mind in Motion, psychologist Barbara Tversky shows that spatial cognition isn't just a peripheral aspect of thought, but its very foundation, enabling us to draw meaning from our bodies and their actions in the world. Our actions in real space get turned into mental actions on thought, often spouting spontaneously from our bodies as gestures. Spatial thinking underlies creating and using maps, assembling furniture, devising football strategies, designing airports, understanding the flow of people, traffic, water, and ideas.

Zurn and Bassett—identical twins who write that their book "represents the thought of one mind and two bodies"—harness their respective expertise in the humanities and the sciences to get irrepressibly curious about curiosity. They identify three styles of curiosity—the busybody, who collects stories, creating loose knowledge networks; the hunter, who hunts down secrets or discoveries, creating tight networks; and the dancer, who takes leaps of creative imagination, creating loopy ones.

In The Complete Guide to Memory, renowned neurologist and bestselling author Dr Richard Restak distils the wisdom of an entire career into a one-stop guide to the science of memory. Drawing on cutting-edge neuroscience, case studies, famous anecdotes and more, he offers tips and tricks for anyone who wants to strengthen their memory, protect themselves from diseases like Alzheimer's and think smarter.

Leading sleep researcher Rosalind Cartwright brings together decades of work on sleep, dreaming, and sleep disorders to propose a new theory of how the mind works continuously. Drawing on her own research and that of others, Cartwright describes how conscious and unconscious thoughts and feelings move forward - from waking, into sleep and dreaming, to the next waking day. One main purpose of sleep is to regulate disturbing emotions. Not everyone does this successfully every night.

Social media, eating and gambling are just some of the things that can trigger a release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter in our brain’s reward system that has a huge influence on our behaviours and habits. In The Dopamine Brain, addiction expert and clinical psychologist Dr Anastasia Hronis lifts the lid on dopamine – what it is, how it works inside our brain and how it drives our daily choices – so we can take back control.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) might be the treatment you’ve been looking for. CBT uses your own mind’s internal processes and ability to make associations to unleash a better version of yourself. This audiobook explains what CBT is, how it works, and how you can benefit from it. It also guides you through a 10 step process where your awareness of how your mind works can lead to greater personal happiness, peace, and joy. You'll learn how to achieve a higher level of personal clarity.

Do you worry about your child all the time? Maybe they are behind on certain milestones, struggling in school, having difficulty making friends, or heading off to college. Their problems or struggles become your own, and you end up feeling so anxious that you forget what it's like to just enjoy being their parent. The good news is that you can rewire your "parent brain" to respond differently to these challenges. This book will show you how to replace parental anxiety with parental effectiveness.

A decade ago, MIT and Harvard-trained researcher Elizabeth Ricker set out to answer a provocative question: if you had only 15 minutes a day, no prescriptions, and a tiny budget, what tools could you use to measurably upgrade your brain? Smarter Tomorrow shares the spoils of Ricker's around-the-world quest to answer that question.

Viele Autor*innen haben die Gewohnheiten von Supertalenten beschrieben, die Spitzenleistungen erbringen. Doch Adam Grant zeigt: Wir alle können Großes erreichen! Denn unser Fortschritt hängt nicht davon ab, wie hart wir arbeiten, sondern davon, wie gut wir lernen. Unsere Entwicklung ist keine Frage der Talente, die uns gegeben sind, sondern der Einstellung. Grants Forschungen beweisen: Wenn wir gezielt unsere vorhandenen Fähigkeiten stärken und neue Motivationsstrukturen aufbauen, können wir unsere verborgenen Potenziale heben und Dinge erreichen, die wir nicht für möglich gehalten hätten!

Physical control of the mind by direct manipulation of the brain is a novel event in human history. In this volume, Dr. Jose M. R. Delgado describes his pioneering work in implanting electrodes in the brains of cats, monkeys, and men. Through electrical stimulation of specific cerebral structures, Delgado demonstrates how movements can be induced by radio command, hostility may appear or disappear, social hierarchy can be modified, sexual behavior may be changed, and memory, emotions, and the thinking process may be influenced by remote control.

Although every creature on the planet ages, there are still many people that fear the process of aging because you might think there is a loss of control of how you look or how your brain functions. Our cognitive functions, such as memory, learning, focus, and concentration, naturally start to decline when we age. This decline, especially in memory formation and recall, is what people fear about aging the most.

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.

We often don't realize how much control we have over our thoughts, feelings, and actions. On some days, the most minor irritation can upset us, but, on others, we are in our best form and can rise to challenges with grace. These fluctuations depend on the neural networks firing in our brains, but we have the power to consciously break hardwired thought patterns. Author Due Quach developed an intimate understanding of the brain during her personal journey of healing from PTSD.

Post-traumatic stress disorder was recognized as a psychiatric disorder in the latter part of the 19th century. In PTSD, Allan V. Horwitz traces the fluctuations in definitions of and responses to traumatic psychic conditions. Arguing that PTSD, perhaps more than any other diagnostic category, is a lens for showing major historical changes in conceptions of mental illness, he surveys the conditions most likely to produce traumas, the results of those traumas, and how to evaluate the claims of trauma victims.

Science confirms the distinction between the biological brain and the conscious mind. Each day, a game of mind versus matter plays out on a field defined by the problems we must solve. Most are routine, and don't demand a more mindful approach. It's when we're faced with more difficult challenges that our thinking becomes vulnerable to brain patterns that can lead us astray.

Most of the people are unaware of the existence of the vagus nerve and how important it is for our body: It’s not just a nerve, it’s much more because it affects different organs of our body and, if stimulated correctly, it produces numerous important benefits. Polyvagal theory tells us that the body operates in two chemical states: the state of danger and the state of safety. All exercises and stimulating techniques that facilitate vagus nerve functions are all designed with one primary goal: to restore the vagus nerve to a safe state.

When your lover kisses your throat or the skin behind your ear, this pair of nerves helps you feel it. If a doctor tickles certain spots in your throat with a cotton swab, it causes you to gag. When you eat, it helps food move through your digestive tract. Why should you care, though, about the vagus nerve? After all, it doesn’t sound as exciting as Vegas. If you have certain illnesses or symptoms, a poorly functioning vagus nerve could be the culprit; that’s particularly true of inflammatory and autoimmune diseases.

For more than a century, scientists across disciplines have investigated the workings of nature’s most complex organ. Findings from cutting-edge neuroscience are moving us closer to understanding processes like how we make decisions or navigate our environment. In this audiobook, we examine the latest research on cognition, how the brain gives rise to consciousness, and how we can improve mental health.