Brain Science Neuroscience

In a fascinating tour of creativity and the brain, Nancy Andreasen, professor of psychiatry at the University of Iowa and the winner of the National Medal of Science, explores how the human brain achieves creative breakthroughs--in art, literature, music, and science--the role of genes and environment, extraordinary creativity vs. ordinary creativity, and the question of genius and insanity.

Imagine knowing what the brain craves from every tale it encounters, what fuels the success of any great story, and what keeps readers transfixed. Wired for Story reveals these cognitive secrets—and it’s a game-changer for anyone who has ever set pen to paper.

The brain is our most vital and complex organ. It controls and coordinates our actions, thoughts and interactions with the world around us. It is the source of personality, of our sense of self, and it shapes every aspect of our human experience. Yet most of us know precious little about how our brains actually work, or what we can do to optimise their performance. Combining the latest scientific research with storytelling and advice, Supercharge Your Brain reveals everything you need to know about how your brain functions, and what you can do to keep it in peak condition.

Two New York Times best-selling authors unveil new research showing what meditation can really do for the brain. In the last 20 years, meditation and mindfulness have gone from being kind of cool to becoming an omnipresent Band-Aid for fixing everything from your weight to your relationship to your achievement level. Unveiling here the kind of cutting-edge research that has made them giants in their fields, Daniel Goleman and Richard J Davidson show us the truth about what meditation can really do for us.

Before journalist Chelsea Conaboy gave birth, she anticipated the joy of holding her newborn, the endless dirty diapers, and the sleepless nights. What she didn’t expect was how different she would feel—a shift in self, as deep as it was disorienting. Something was changing: her brain. New parents undergo major brain changes, driven by hormones and the deluge of stimuli a baby provides. Conaboy delves into the neuroscience to reveal unexpected upsides, generations of scientific neglect, and a powerful new narrative of parenthood.

How does the brain work? How different is a human brain from other creatures' brains? Is the human brain still evolving? In this fascinating book, Michael O'Shea provides a non-technical introduction to the main issues and findings in current brain research, and gives a sense of how neuroscience addresses questions about the relationship between the brain and the mind.

The Memory Thief is the remarkable true story of a team of doctors who - through years of scientific sleuthing and observant care - discover a surprising connection between opioids and memory, one that holds promise and peril for any one of us.

In this groundbreaking union of art and science, rocker-turned-neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin explores the connection between music - its performance, its composition, how we listen to it, why we enjoy it - and the human brain. Levitin draws on the latest research and on musical examples ranging from Mozart to Duke Ellington to Van Halen.

The answers to these questions are right behind our eyes. The greatest technology we have ever discovered on our planet is the three-pound organ carried in the vault of the skull. This book is not simply about what the brain is; it is about what it does. The magic of the brain is not found in the parts it’s made of but in the way those parts unceasingly reweave themselves in an electric, living fabric.

Conventional science has long held the position that 'the mind' is merely an illusion, a side effect of electrochemical activity in the physical brain. Now in paperback, Dr Jeffrey Schwartz and Sharon Begley's groundbreaking work, The Mind and the Brain, argues exactly the opposite: that the mind has a life of its own. Dr Schwartz, a leading researcher in brain dysfunctions, and Wall Street Journal science columnist Sharon Begley demonstrate that the human mind is an independent entity that can shape and control the functioning of the physical brain.

Why do minds exist? How did mud and stone develop into beings that can experience longing, regret, love, and compassion - beings that are aware of their own experience? Until recently, science offered few answers to these existential questions. Journey of the Mind is the first book to offer a unified account of the mind that explains how consciousness, language, the Self, and civilization emerged incrementally out of chaos.

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 audio program from expert David Krueger, MD, listeners will learn: a proven system to consistently perform under pressure; success strategies for dealing with stress in high pressure circumstances; the self-regulation system that pro athletes and actors use; a way to enter and sustain a mindset of optimum performance; how to avoid chokes and slumps; and how to develop proven pressure management tools to sustain focus and enhance success.

In the mid-20th century, Michael S. Gazzaniga made one of the great discoveries in the history of neuroscience: split-brain theory, the notion that the right and left hemispheres of the brain can act independently from each other and have different strengths.

Aphasia is a language disorder often brought on after a stroke that causes a loss of ability to understand or express speech. There are a number of different types of Aphasia, including Broca's and Wernicke's. In this book, you will find explanations for these types of aphasia, among others. It will also tell you who is at risk for aphasia. Learn about the various medications and treatments, both medical and natural.

The brain is made up of 85 billion neurons, which are connected by over 100 trillion synapses. For over a century, a diverse array of researchers have been trying to find a language that can be used to capture the essence of what these neurons do and how they communicate - and how those communications create thoughts, perceptions, and actions. The language they were looking for was mathematics, and we would not be able to understand the brain as we do today without it.

Behavior change is hard, but O’Mara shows that by adopting strategies that are well-founded in the science of brain and behavior, individuals and organizations can adapt to the demands of the modern world.

For years, most of us believed that remarkably talented people were born different, and that exceptional performance lay beyond our grasp. Now, groundbreaking neuroscience studies are revolutionizing our understanding of "genius" and how it works. Brain Apps is the first book to consolidate that research into a unifying theory for radically boosting your achievement. Robert G. Best combines years of study with one-on-one interviews featuring renowned scientists like Karl Anders Ericsson, B.J. Fogg, and Arne Dietrich.

The placebo effect, what is it and does it truly work? What are its health advantages, its medical benefits? What about weight loss and wrinkle creams? Is it your brain, or the supplement working? Is this a victory of your brain, or is this a win for medicine? Does the Placebo effect associate itself with hypnosis? How does it fit in with subconscious thinking? This book will teach you what multiple sclerosis is and how to comprehend its various subtypes and treatments.

The Well-Tuned Brain is a call to action. Swept along by the cascading advances of today's technology, most of us take for granted that progress brings improvement. Despite spectacular material advance, however, the evidence grows that we are failing to create a sustainable future for humanity. We are out of tune with the planet that nurtures us.