Psychology History

How does the brain—a three-pound wrinkly mass—give rise to intelligence and conscious experience? Was Freud right that we are all plagued by forbidden sexual desires? What is the function of emotions such as disgust, gratitude, and shame? Renowned psychologist Paul Bloom answers these questions and many more in Psych, his riveting new book about the science of the mind.

This pioneering account sets out to understand the structure of the human brain - the place where mind meets matter. Until recently, the left hemisphere of our brain has been seen as the "rational" side, the superior partner to the right. But is this distinction true? Drawing on a vast body of experimental research, Iain McGilchrist argues while our left brain makes for a wonderful servant, it is a very poor master.

What really drives our decisions? Where do language and memory come from? Why do our minds sometimes seem to work against us? Psychologists have long attempted to answer these questions, seeking to understand human behavior, feelings, and thoughts. But how to explore something so elusive?

Why has there been such an explosion of discussion about sex in the West since the 17th century? Here, one of France's greatest intellectuals explores the evolving social, economic, and political forces that have shaped our attitudes toward sex. In a book that is at once controversial and seductive, Michel Foucault describes how we are in the process of making a science of sex which is devoted to the analysis of desire, rather than the increase of pleasure.

Based on the popular research project Whores of Yore, and written with her distinctive humor and wit, A Curious History of Sex draws upon Dr. Kate Lister's extensive knowledge of sex history. From medieval impotence tests to 20th-century testicle thefts, from the erotic frescoes of Pompeii, to modern-day sex-doll brothels, Kate unashamedly roots around in the pants of history, debunking myths, challenging stereotypes, and generally getting her hands dirty.

Psychiatry has come a long way since the days of chaining "lunatics" in cold cells and parading them as freakish marvels before a gaping public. But, as Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, the former president of the American Psychiatric Association, reveals in his extraordinary and eye-opening audiobook, the path to legitimacy for "the black sheep of medicine" has been anything but smooth.

John Forbes Nash, Jr., a prodigy and legend by the age of 30, dazzled the mathematical world by solving a series of deep problems deemed "impossible" by other mathematicians. But at the height of his fame, Nash suffered a catastrophic mental breakdown and began a harrowing descent into insanity, resigning his post at MIT, slipping into a series of bizarre delusions, and eventually becoming a dreamy, ghostlike figure at Princeton, scrawling numerological messages on blackboards.

A seminal and controversial figure in the history of political thought and public relations, Edward Bernays pioneered the scientific technique of shaping and manipulating public opinion, which he famously dubbed the "engineering of consent". During World War I, he was an integral part of the US Committee on Public Information, or CPI, a powerful propaganda apparatus that was mobilized to package, advertise, and sell the war to the American people as one that would "Make the World Safe for Democracy".

This is a cutting-edge tour de force that traces human family life from its origins in Africa over 20 million years ago to the Internet dating sites and bedrooms of today. It's got it all: the copulatory gaze and other natural courting ploys; the who, when, where, and why of adultery; love addictions; Fisher's discovery of four broad chemically based personality styles and what each seeks in romance; the newest data on worldwide (biologically based) patterns of divorce....

Interweaving her vast knowledge of neurology, sociology, psychology, and philosophy with fascinating down-to-earth examples and lively personal anecdotes, developmental psychologist, neuroscientist, and dyslexia expert Wolf probes the question, "How do we learn to read and write?" This ambitious and provocative new book offers an impassioned look at reading, its effect on our lives, and explains why it matters so greatly in a digital era.

By explaining how the human brain works and outing its most irrational processes, this book provides the thinking tools that will help you make better decisions, ask the right questions (at the right time), know what to look for when evaluating information, and understand how your own brain subconsciously clouds your judgment. Think you're too smart to be easily misled? Harrison summarizes scientific research showing how easily even intelligent and well-educated people can be fooled.

In an age riven by "fake news," "alternative facts," and disputes over the validity of everything from climate change to the size of inauguration crowds, the authors argue that social factors, not individual psychology, are what's essential to understanding the persistence of false belief and that we must know how those social forces work in order to fight misinformation effectively.

In The Distracted Mind, leading psychologist Larry Rosen and pioneering neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley explain why our minds have become addicted to email, text messages, virtual worlds, and social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Through compelling true stories and scientific research, they show how digital distractions affect every aspect of life, from work, safety, and communication to our relationships and health.

Francis Ouimet and Harry Vardon came from different worlds and different generations, but their passion for golf set them on parallel paths that would collide in the greatest match their sport had ever known.

Following a remarkable epoch of greater dispersion of wealth and opportunity, we are inexorably returning towards a more feudal era marked by greater concentration of wealth and property, reduced upward mobility, demographic stagnation, and increased dogmatism. If the last 70 years saw a massive expansion of the middle class, not only in America but in much of the developed world, today that class is declining and a new, more hierarchical society is emerging. The new class structure resembles that of Medieval times.

Its landscaped ground, chosen by Frederick Law Olmsted and dotted with Tudor mansions, could belong to a New England prep school. There are no fences, no guards, no locked gates. But McLean Hospital is a mental institution - one of the most famous, most elite, and once most luxurious in America. Gracefully Insane, by Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam, is a fascinating and emotional biography of McLean Hospital from its founding in 1817 through today.

Millions of Americans know yoga as a superb form of exercise and as a potent source of calm in the midst of our stress-filled lives. Far fewer are aware of the full promise of yoga as "the way of the fully alive human being" - a 4,000-year-old practical path of liberation that fits the needs of modern Western seekers with startling precision. Now Stephen Cope, a Western-trained psychotherapist who has lived and taught for more than 10 years at the largest yoga center in America, offers this marvelously lively and irreverent "pilgrim's progress" for today's world.

Stress is our internal response to an experience that our brain perceives as threatening or challenging. Trauma is our response to an experience in which we feel powerless or lacking agency. Until now, researchers have treated these conditions as different, but they actually lie along a continuum. Dr. Elizabeth Stanley explains the significance of this continuum, how it affects our resilience in the face of challenge, and why an event that's stressful for one person can be traumatizing for another.

In 1930s and 1940s Vienna, child psychiatrist Hans Asperger sought to define autism as a diagnostic category, aiming to treat those children, usually boys, he deemed capable of participating fully in society. Depicted as a compassionate and devoted researcher, Asperger was in fact deeply influenced by Nazi psychiatry. Although he did offer individualized care to children he deemed promising, he also prescribed harsh institutionalization and even transfer to Spiegelgrund for children with greater disabilities, who, he held, could not integrate into the community.

Tomasello assembles nearly three decades of experimental work with chimpanzees, bonobos, and human children to propose a new framework for psychological growth between birth and seven years of age. Becoming Human places human sociocultural activity within the framework of modern evolutionary theory and shows how biology creates the conditions under which culture does its work.