Psychology Brain

Licensed therapist and mental health writer Dr. Kathleen Smith offers a smart, practical antidote to our anxiety-ridden times. Everything Isn't Terrible is an informative and practical guide—featuring a healthy dose of humor—for people who want to become beacons of calmness in their families, at work, and in our anxious world. Everything Isn't Terrible will inspire you to confront your anxious self, take charge of your anxiety, and increase your own capacity to choose how you respond to it.

Our brains are the most complex machines known to humankind, but they have an Achilles heel: The very molecules that allow us to exist can also sabotage our minds. Here are true accounts of unruly molecules and the diseases that form in their wake, from total loss of inhibitions to florid psychosis to compulsive lying.

Applying insights from neuroscience to philosophical questions about the self, consciousness, and the healthy mind. Can we "see" or "find" consciousness in the brain? How can we create working definitions of consciousness and subjectivity, informed by what contemporary research and technology have taught us about how the brain works? How do neuronal processes in the brain relate to our experience of a personal identity? Where does the brain end and the mind begin?

Maybe you’ve struggled for years with anxiety, depression, ADHD, migraines, PTSD, obsessive thinking, sleep issues or other unwanted conditions. You’ve tried medication, psychotherapy, breathing techniques, yoga, exercise or dietary changes—with no permanent relief. Neurofeedback is an emerging technology that’s helped thousands of people feel better—without medication. It allows you to gently nudge your brain along through training until it learns to operate in a healthier manner.

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.

We live in a world that is always on, where everyone is always connected. But we feel increasingly disconnected. Why? The answer lies in our brains. Carl D. Marci, MD, a leading expert on social and consumer neuroscience, reviews the mounting evidence that overuse of smart phones and social media is rewiring our brains, resulting in a losing deal: we are neglecting the relationships that sustain us and keep us healthy in favor of weaker and more ephemeral ties. Rewired provides scientifically supported solutions for everyone who wants to restore their tech-life balance.

Who hasn't had a rough day? What if that 'rough day' ended up spanning the course of years? And, it was invisible to others? Hannah's life was going great. She was a stylist with high profile clients in Los Angeles, New York, Las Vegas, and Miami. Her talk show host career was taking off, but in one split second, everything changed. She was in a serious auto accident, left with a traumatic brain injury - and post-concussion syndrome, which results in threatening depression.

Collectively, anxiety disorders are our most prevalent psychiatric problem, affecting about 40 million adults in the United States. In Anxious, Joseph LeDoux, whose NYU lab has been at the forefront of research efforts to understand and treat fear and anxiety, explains the range of these disorders, their origins, and discoveries that can restore sufferers to normalcy. LeDoux's groundbreaking premise is that we've been thinking about fear and anxiety in the wrong way.

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.

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.

Emotions can be a pain. After his father died of Covid, Dean Burnett found himself wondering what it would be like to live without emotion. And so, he decided to put his feelings under the microscope—for science. With his trademark humour, Burnett takes us on an incredible journey of discovery, stretching from the origins of life to the ends of the universe.

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.

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.

The first edition of this book tackled these important questions of interpersonal neurobiology - that the brain is a social organ built through experience - using poignant case examples from the author's years of clinical experience. Elegant explanations of social neuroscience wove together emerging findings from the research literature to bring neuroscience to the stories of our lives.

Psychologists and neuroscientists struggle with how best to interpret human motivation and decision making. The assumption is that below a mental "surface" of conscious awareness lies a deep and complex set of inner beliefs, values, and desires that govern our thoughts, ideas, and actions, and that to know this depth is to know ourselves. In this profoundly original book, behavioral scientist Nick Chater contends just the opposite: Rather than being the plaything of unconscious currents, the brain generates behaviors in the moment based entirely on our past experiences.

How Dogs Love Us answers the age-old question of dog lovers everywhere and offers profound new evidence that dogs should be treated as we would treat our best human friends: with love, respect, and appreciation for their social and emotional intelligence.

It all starts with your brain: How you think, how you feel, how you interact with others, and how well you succeed in realizing your goals and dreams. When your brain works right, so do you. When it’s out of balance, you feel frustrated, or worse. Yet amid all the advice that bombards us daily about how to keep the rest of our body strong and healthy, we hear very little about how to keep the most complex and magnificent organ of all - the human brain - in top working order.

Having witnessed her own mother’s struggles with mental ill-health, Dr. Rachel Barr embarked on studies that would help her understand and share the simple steps that we can all take to better our own mental well-being. In stark contrast to the relentless effort and productivity of the multi-step optimization movement, Rachel offers a refreshing alternative: by simply aligning with our brain’s natural rhythms–from its need for sleep to rewiring its tendency towards negativity bias–we can all experience more peace in our day-to-day lives.

Everyone experiences trauma. Whether a specific harrowing event or a series of stressful moments that culminate over time, trauma can echo and etch itself into our brain as we remember it again and again throughout our lives. In Everyday Trauma, neuroscientist Dr. Tracey Shors examines trauma with a focus on its pervasive nature - how it can happen at any time, through big or small events, and how it often reappears in the form of encoded memory.

From New York Times best-selling author and blogger Heather B. Armstrong comes an honest and irreverent memoir - reminiscent of the New York Times best-seller Brain on Fire - about her experience as one of only a few people to participate in an experimental treatment for depression involving 10 rounds of a chemically induced coma approximating brain death.