Mental Brain

This groundbreaking book explores the recent revolution in psychotherapy that has brought an understanding of the social nature of people's brains to a therapeutic context. Louis Cozolino is a master at synthesizing neuroscientific information and demonstrating how it applies to psychotherapy practice. New material on altruism, executive function, trauma, and change round out this essential book.

In Fast Asleep, Dr. Michael Mosley brings together the latest, groundbreaking science to explain exactly why it is so important that we regularly get enough sleep. Prone to insomnia, he has taken part in numerous sleep experiments and tested every sleep remedy. Combining personal insight and in-depth research, he explains why so many of us struggle with sleep, what works and what doesn’t, and shares his own myth-busting program to help you achieve a good night’s rest.

In The Influential Mind, neuroscientist Tali Sharot takes us on a thrilling exploration of the nature of influence. We all have a duty to affect others - from the classroom to the boardroom to social media. But how skilled are we at this role, and can we become better? It turns out that many of our instincts - from relying on facts and figures to shape opinions, to insisting others are wrong or attempting to exert control - are ineffective because they are incompatible with how people's minds operate.

Images and sounds of war, natural disasters, and human-made devastation explicitly surround us and implicitly leave their imprint in our muscles, our belly and heart, our nervous systems, and the brains in our skulls. We each experience more digital data than we are capable of processing in a day, and this is leading to a loss of empathy and human contact. This loss of leisurely, sustained, face-to-face connection is making true presence a rare experience for many of us, and is neurally ingraining fast pace and split attention as the norm.

How the Brain Lost Its Mind tells the rich and compelling story of two confounding ailments, syphilis and hysteria, and the extraordinary efforts to confront their effects on mental life. How does the mind work? Where does madness lie, in the brain or in the mind? How should it be treated?

Are you truly in danger or has your brain simply "tricked" you into thinking you are? In The Worry Trick, psychologist and anxiety expert David Carbonell shows how anxiety hijacks the brain and offers effective techniques to help you break the cycle of worry, once and for all. Anxiety is a powerful force. It makes us question ourselves and our decisions, causes us to worry about the future, and fills our days with dread and emotional turbulence.

Oliver Sacks' compassionate, compelling tales of people struggling to adapt to different neurological conditions have fundamentally changed the way we think of our own brains, and of the human experience. In Musicophilia, he examines the powers of music through the individual experiences of patients, musicians, and everyday people. He explores how catchy tunes can subject us to hours of mental replay, and how a surprising number of people acquire nonstop musical hallucinations that assault them night and day. Yet far more frequently, music goes right....

This book introduces the new and fascinating field of Clinical Neuroscience, which argues that the brain has the power to prevent and treat a variety of neurobiological disorders, from autism to attention deficit disorder. With ground-breaking neuroscience research presented in an accessible, easy-to-understand way The Brain Code teaches listeners how to get the most from their brains and how to access their peak cognitive function.

Are we "noble in reason"? Perfect, in God's image? Far from it, says New York University psychologist Gary Marcus. In this lucid and revealing book, Marcus argues that the mind is not an elegantly designed organ but a "kluge", a clumsy, cobbled-together contraption. He unveils a fundamentally new way of looking at the human mind - think duct tape, not supercomputer - that sheds light on some of the most mysterious aspects of human nature.

You can either take your thoughts captive or be held captive by them. The choice is yours. Scripture declares we will be transformed by the renewing of our minds. Manny Arango describes this process as God washing our brains, and it is the surest way to overcome anxious thoughts, self-doubt, bitterness, and other mental struggles. But how can we experience this healing power? This book is a biblical roadmap for winning the battles in your mind. Identify faulty ways of thinking and learn how to take every thought captive under the authority of Christ.

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.

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.

The topic of neurotheology has garnered increasing attention in the academic, religious, scientific, and popular worlds. But there have been no attempts to explore more specifically how Jewish religious thought and experience may intersect with neurotheology. The Rabbi's Brain engages this groundbreaking area.

An empowering journey through the mechanisms of the mind from one of the world’s leading mental health experts.

Our brain is recreating the world in its own way—most of the time for our own good: how hard would it be if, before making a choice, we had to know about all the options available in a given situation? Luckily, our brain can estimate: it allows us to reconstruct the world as we know it, and live in it. However, these very useful mechanisms can sometimes mislead us and have a rather negative impact on our actions, beliefs and opinions: when our brain behaves that way, we say it is biased. Albert Moukheiber gives us tips and tricks to fight against these cognitive biases.

Dreaming is one of the most deeply misunderstood functions of the human brain. Yet recent science reveals that our very survival as a species has depended on it. This Is Why You Dream explores the landscape of our subconscious, showing why humans have retained the ability to dream across millennia and how we can now harness its wondrous powers in both our sleeping and waking lives.

From ADHD and dyslexia to autism, the number of diagnosis categories listed by the American Psychiatric Association has tripled in the last fifty years. With so many affected, it is time to revisit our perceptions of people with disabilities. Psychologist and educator Thomas Armstrong illuminates a new understanding of neuropsychological disorders. He argues that if they are a part of the natural diversity of the human brain, they cannot simply be defined as illnesses. Armstrong explores the evolutionary advantages, special skills, and other positive dimensions of these conditions.

The memoir of a neuroscientist whose research led him to a bizarre personal discovery, James Fallon had spent an entire career studying how our brains affect our behavior when his research suddenly turned personal. While studying brain scans of several family members, he discovered that one perfectly matched a pattern he’d found in the brains of serial killers. This meant one of two things: Either his family’s scans had been mixed up with those of felons or someone in his family was a psychopath.

So often when we awake we find that our dreams have either evaporated like mist or seem to be just on the edge of our memory. Many people cannot recall their dreams at all. But Dr. Doris Cohen has developed a seven-step process to let you tap into the rich repository of your subconscious. Drawing on years of clinical experience and her familiarity with Freud, myth, and sacred writings, Cohen presents a program that results in a life of abundance, texture, and self-awareness that will teach you how to unlock the secrets of your personal dream language.

How does a neural network become a brain? While neurobiologists investigate how nature accomplishes this feat, computer scientists interested in AI strive to achieve this through technology. The Self-Assembling Brain tells the stories of both fields, exploring the historical and modern approaches taken by the scientists pursuing answers to the quandary: What information is necessary to make an intelligent neural network? As Peter Robin Hiesinger argues, "the information problem" underlies both fields.