Brain Behavior

Parenting and neuroscience expert Robyn Gobbel is here to reveal how all behavior, no matter how baffling, can be explained and remedied. You just need to look past the behavior and understand what's going on inside. Robyn decodes the latest brain science into easy-to-understand principles and metaphors to help you become an expert in your child's behavior. She reveals simple ways to help you regulate and connect with your child, with brain-, body- and sensory-based strategies to overcome day-to-day challenges.

Over her decades as a clinical psychologist, Dr. Mona Delahooke has routinely counseled distraught parents who struggle to manage their children’s challenging, sometimes oppositional behaviors. These families are understandably focused on correcting or improving a child’s lack of compliance, emotional outbursts, tantrums, and other “out of control” behavior. But, as she has shared with these families, a perspective shift is needed. Behavior, no matter how challenging, is not the problem but a symptom; a clue about what is happening in a child’s unique physiologic makeup.

In Beyond Behaviors, internationally known pediatric psychologist Dr. Mona Delahooke describes behaviors as the tip of the iceberg, important signals that we should address by seeking to understand a child's individual differences in the context of relational safety. This accessible book offers professionals, educators, and parents tools and techniques to reduce behavioral challenges and promote psychological resilience and satisfying, secure relationships.

An estimated five million Americans suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and live diminished lives in which they are compelled to obsess about something or to repeat a similar task over and over. Traditionally OCD has been treated with Prozac or similar drugs. The problem with medication, aside from its cost, is that 30 percent of people treated don't respond to it, and when the pills stop, the symptoms invariably return.

No listener curious about our "little gray cells" will want to pass up Harvard neuroscientist John E. Dowling's brief introduction to the brain. In this up-to-date revision of his 1998 book Creating Mind, Dowling conveys the essence and vitality of the field of neuroscience - examining the progress we've made in understanding how brains work, and shedding light on discoveries having to do with aging, mental illness, and brain health.

Our world teems with the unexpected: marsupial wolves, carnivorous plants, flocks of starlings, and many more surprising phenomena. In this audio course, you’ll explore the most fascinating of these natural wonders: consciousness. Have you ever watched a fiery sunset or heard a Mozart concerto? Human beings could soak up such sights and sounds in the same predictable ways computers or car engines do.

Using best practices from gentle parenting, improv comedy, and trauma recovery, this peaceful parenting book brings joy back to families. These positive discipline tips can help whether you're raising toddlers, parenting preschoolers, or supporting school-age children with love and respect. Effective for the hypersensitive child and the strong-willed child, this audiobook offers conscious parenting guidance for solving challenges and preventing them in the first place.

We humans tend to get in our own way time and time again - whether it comes to not speaking up for ourselves, going back to bad romantic partners, our umpteenth diet, or engaging in any of a range of bad habits we just can’t seem to shake. In Rewire, renowned psychotherapist Richard O’Connor, PhD, reveals why our bad habits die so hard. We have two brains - one a thoughtful, conscious, deliberative self, and the other an automatic self that does most of the work without our attention.

The ReWired Brain offers a clear framework for understanding our brains and the decisions we make, showing how certain fears and instincts drive unhealthy emotional dysfunctions and related behavioral patterns in the most important areas of life. This book shows how to reframe negative experiences, overcome fears, experience emotional and spiritual healing, and ultimately rewire our brains, empowering us to be free and to live fearlessly.

When you tame your most impulsive, primitive reactions to the crazy situations you face every day, you'll help others do the same. Tame the Primitive Brain offers a new and simple system to understanding and controlling the behavior of others. Noted body language, behavior, and communication expert Mark Bowden explains the fastest and most effective ways to understand why someone acts toward you the way they do; why you react to their behavior in the way you do; and most important, what exactly to do to achieve the right outcomes.

A riveting investigation of the myriad ways that parasites control how other creatures - including humans - think, feel, and act. These tiny organisms can live only inside another animal, and, as McAuliffe reveals, they have many evolutionary motives for manipulating their host's behavior. Far more often than appreciated, these puppeteers orchestrate the interplay between predator and prey.

As much as 95% of our decisions are made by the subconscious mind. As a result, the world's largest and most sophisticated companies are applying the latest advances in neuroscience to create brands, products, package designs, marketing campaigns, store environments, and much more, that are designed to appeal directly and powerfully to our brains.

From the author of the groundbreaking New York Times bestseller The Female Brain, here is the eagerly awaited follow-up book that demystifies the puzzling male brain.

Dr. Louann Brizendine, the founder of the first clinic in the country to study gender differences in brain, behavior, and hormones, turns her attention to the male brain, showing how, through every phase of life, the "male reality" is fundamentally different from the female one. Exploring the latest breakthroughs in male psychology and neurology with her trademark accessibility and candor, she reveals that the male brain:

*is a lean, mean, problem-solving machine. Faced with a personal problem, a man will use his analytical brain structures, not his emotional ones, to find a solution.

*thrives under competition, instinctively plays rough and is obsessed with rank and hierarchy.

*has an area for sexual pursuit that is 2.5 times larger than the female brain, consuming him with sexual fantasies about female body parts.

*experiences such a massive increase in testosterone at puberty that he perceive others' faces to be more aggressive.


The Male Brain finally overturns the stereotypes. Impeccably researched and at the cutting edge of scientific knowledge, this is a book that every man, and especially every woman bedeviled by a man, will need to own.

Praise for The Female Brain:
"Louann Brizendine has done a great favor for every man who wants to understand the puzzling women in his life. A breezy and enlightening guide to women and a must-read for men."
—Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence






From the Hardcover edition.

We've all seen the happiness on the face of a child while playing in the school yard. Or the blissful abandon of a golden retriever racing across a lawn. This is the joy of play. By definition, play is purposeless, all-consuming, and fun. But as Dr. Stuart Brown illustrates, play is anything but trivial. It is a biological drive as integral to our health as sleep or nutrition. We are designed by nature to flourish through play.

The human brain is an impossibly complex and delicate instrument—capable of extraordinary calculations, abundant creativity, and linguistic dexterity. But the brain is not just the most brilliant of evolutionary wonders. It's also one of the most bizarre. This book shows a whole other side of how brains work—from the patient who is afraid to take a shower because she fears her body will slip down the drain to a man who is convinced he is a cat and a woman who compulsively snacks on cigarette ashes.

Losing weight and successfully maintaining it over the long term is not as much about what you put in your stomach; it's more about what's happening in the brain. In Brain-Powered Weight Loss, psychotherapist and weight management expert Eliza Kingsford shows that more than 90 percent of people who go on diet programs (even healthy ones) fail or eventually regain because they have a dysfunctional relationship with food.

We live in a gendered world, where we are ceaselessly bombarded by messages about sex and gender. On a daily basis, we face deeply ingrained beliefs that sex determines our skills and preferences, from toys and colors to career choice and salaries. But what does this constant gendering mean for our thoughts, decisions, and behavior? And what does it mean for our brains? Drawing on her work as a professor of cognitive neuroimaging, Gina Rippon unpacks the stereotypes that surround us from our earliest moments and shows how these messages mold our ideas of ourselves.

Neuro-Habits gets directly to the root of all behavior: the human brain. We will explore the quirks of the brain that create habits from both a psychological and neurological perspective and what we can do about it. This book also presents an in-depth view of the concept of habits and exactly what motivates us to act.

Your first instincts and gut feelings are usually flat out wrong. Discover why, and learn how to actually think clearly. A brain fart is a lapse in judgment. We do this every day without realizing it, and it can have severe consequences on our lives. Use this book as a field guide to think better, understand your feelings better, and tame your stupid brain.

This groundbreaking book explores the revolution in psychotherapy that brought an understanding of the social nature of people's brains into a therapeutic context. Louis Cozolino is a master at synthesizing neuroscience and demonstrating how it applies to psychotherapy practice. Here, he argues that all forms of psychotherapy are successful to the extent to which they enhance change in relevant neural circuits.