Neuroscience Brain

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.

A leading neuroplasticity researcher and the coauthor of the groundbreaking books Brain Lock and The Mind and the Brain, Jeffrey M. Schwartz has spent his career studying the structure and neuronal firing patterns of the human brain. He pioneered the first mindfulness-based treatment program for people suffering from OCD, teaching patients how to achieve long-term relief from their compulsions. In You Are Not Your Brain, Schwartz and Gladding carefully outline their program.

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.

Written by two world-renowned sleep and dream researchers, When Brains Dream debunks common myths while acknowledging the mysteries that persist around both the science and experience of dreaming.

You can learn to play music, no matter what you've been told about your musical talent or aptitude. With the right instruction and methods, learning to play music can be an endless source of joy and fulfillment. And learning to play music isn't just fun, it's also the ideal brain fitness activity. Dr. Turknett, a neurologist, self-taught multi-instrumentalist, and the founder of Brainjo and the Brainjo Method of instruction, distills the principles of learning to play music down into a set of universal "laws" that can be applied to any instrument.

For the modern world, it seems as if sexuality and spirituality have always been at odds. But what if the two are actually deeply connected? And what if science could prove this connection? From neuroscientist Andrew Newberg, Sex, God, and the Brain argues that our religious and spiritual experiences derive directly from our sexual being. While others have speculated on a connection between religion and sex, Newberg is the first to demonstrate that the underlying biological mechanism of religious, spiritual, and sexual experiences are identical.

In 1991 the police were called to East 72nd St. in Manhattan, where a woman's body had fallen from a 12th-story window. The woman's husband, Herbert Weinstein, soon confessed to having hit and strangled his wife after an argument, then dropping her body out of their apartment window to make it look like a suicide. The 65-year-old Weinstein, a quiet, unassuming retired advertising executive, had no criminal record, no history of violent behavior - not even a short temper.

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.

Narrated by the author, Diane Wilson shares her journey through random and sometimes humorous events of having an invisible illness, how her brain kept this injury even from herself, the loss of focus and sense of self, an obsession with day trading retirement funds, and the alternative therapies that helped heal her brain—a retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh, acupuncture, learning to sing, and, most centrally, neurofeedback.

In the United States alone, one in five adults experiences chronic pain. For too long, when a doctor couldn’t find the source of frequent pain, the patient was dismissively told “it’s all in your head.” Today, we know that our somatic responses to trauma, anxiety, and depression create real suffering, and that physical pain can lead to trauma, anxiety, and depression. Dr. Daniel Amen calls this “the doom loop”—the dance between physical and emotional pain. These doom loops interfere with our ability to live our lives. But we can shift the doom loop into a healing loop.

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.

If you think baby brain is bad for you, think again - because neuroscientist Dr Sarah McKay (author of The Women's Brain Book) has looked at studies and talked to experts from all over the world and the proof is in: giving birth is one of the best things to ever happen to a woman's brain. Baby Brain contains the ultimate good-news story about mothers' brains, backed up by scientific research from leading experts and presented in highly digestible bite-sized sections by one of Australia's leading science communicators.

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.

Between the ages of twelve and twenty-four, the brain changes in important and, at times, challenging ways. In Brainstorm, the renowned psychiatrist and bestselling author of Parenting from the Inside Out, The Whole-Brain Child, and Mindsight, Daniel Siegel busts a number of commonly held myths about adolescence — for example, that it is merely a stage of “immaturity” filled with often “crazy” behavior — to reveal how it is in fact a vital time in our lives in terms of charting the course for the adults we ultimately become.

Chief CNN medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta helped countless people keep their brains sharp and effortlessly productive with KEEP SHARP. In 12 Weeks to a Sharper You, he now provides a step-by-step 12-week program to help you put his transformational ideas into daily practice. This workbook makes it easy to apply Gupta’s groundbreaking tips and research to establish healthy behaviors for life. The 12-week program will help you feel less anxious, sleep better, improve energy, think more clearly, and become more resilient to daily stress.

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.

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.

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

Recent advances in affective neuroscience reveal long-held secrets of mental health and illness in the brain. However, the gap between brain science and clinical practice is wide, and many clinicians find neuroscience to be tedious, overly technical and laborious to learn. Clinical psychologist and best-selling author Jennifer Sweeton details the eight main areas of the brain affected by mental illness, how brain changes show up in the therapy room as symptoms and behaviours and the types of therapies and psychotherapeutic techniques research has shown can heal the brain.