We take for granted that we can remember, feel emotion, navigate, empathize, and understand the world around us, but how would our lives change if these abilities were dramatically enhanced--or disappeared overnight?Helen Thomson has spent years traveling the world, tracking down incredibly rare brain disorders. In Unthinkable she tells the stories of nine extraordinary people she encountered along the way. From the man who thinks he's a tiger to the doctor who feels the pain of others just by looking at them to a woman who hears music that’s not there, their experiences illustrate how the brain can shape our lives in unexpected and, in some cases, brilliant and alarming ways.Story by remarkable story, Unthinkable takes us on an unforgettable journey through the human brain. Discover how to forge memories that never disappear, how to grow an alien limb, and how to make better decisions. Learn how to hallucinate and how to make yourself happier in a split second. Find out how to avoid getting lost, how to see more of your reality, even how exactly you can confirm you are alive. Think the unthinkable.

    The authors invite students to search for clues, follow-up on hunches, evaluate evidence, and participate in a process of discovery as they sift through the evidence on the origins of psychopathology and the effectiveness of specific interventions. In the new edition, Davison and Neale welcome new coauthor Ann Kring (University of California, Berkeley), who brings her interest and expertise in emotion and psychopathology, as well as an emphasis on gender, ethnicity, and culture. In addition, new pedagogy and a more open layout make the book more accessible to all students.

    Sapolsky's storytelling concept is delightful but it also has a powerful intrinsic logic: he starts by looking at the factors that bear on a person's reaction in the precise moment a behavior occurs, and then hops back in time from there, in stages, ultimately ending up at the deep history of our species and its evolutionary legacy.And so the first category of explanation is the neurobiological one. A behavior occurs--whether an example of humans at our best, worst, or somewhere in between. What went on in a person's brain a second before the behavior happened? Then Sapolsky pulls out to a slightly larger field of vision, a little earlier in time: What sight, sound, or smell caused the nervous system to produce that behavior? And then, what hormones acted hours to days earlier to change how responsive that individual is to the stimuli that triggered the nervous system? By now he has increased our field of vision so that we are thinking about neurobiology and the sensory world of our environment and endocrinology in trying to explain what happened.Sapolsky keeps going: How was that behavior influenced by structural changes in the nervous system over the preceding months, by that person's adolescence, childhood, fetal life, and then back to his or her genetic makeup? Finally, he expands the view to encompass factors larger than one individual. How did culture shape that individual's group, what ecological factors millennia old formed that culture? And on and on, back to evolutionary factors millions of years old.The result is one of the most dazzling tours d'horizon of the science of human behavior ever attempted, a majestic synthesis that harvests cutting-edge research across a range of disciplines to provide a subtle and nuanced perspective on why we ultimately do the things we do...for good and for ill. Sapolsky builds on this understanding to wrestle with some of our deepest and thorniest questions relating to tribalism and xenophobia, hierarchy and competition, morality and free will, and war and peace. Wise, humane, often very funny, Behave is a towering achievement, powerfully humanizing, and downright heroic in its own right.

    Many new or revised figures and photographs, study questions and a glossary of key terms have been added.

    It was developed by internationally recognized neuroscientists and teachers Marian C. Diamond and Arnold B. Scheibel in association with highly acclaimed teacher and anatomist Lawrence M. Elson, creator of Coloring Concepts. This coloring book is designed for a wide range of users: informal learners, students of psychology and the biological sciences, medical, dental, nursing, and other health professional students, and students and workers in the neurosciences. The unique, highly developed coloring process makes this book an effective learning device for such a diverse audience. The material included here represents the state-of-the-art knowledge about the brain and how it works. Each plate of illustrations has been carefully designed to yield maximum information when colored. The accompanying text has been creatively integrated with the coloring process to enhance understanding and retention.

    This book integrates clinical examples throughout each chapter and covers important physiologic concepts. It includes 630 multiple choice questions. It covers topics such as: Regulation of food intake; Mitochondria and molecular motors; Renal function; and, Estrogen receptors.

    Assuming no prior science knowledge, this book supports main concepts with clinical applications, making them more relevant to students pursuing careers in the allied health field.

    Extensively illustrated and user-friendly, the text offers examples pf how knowledge of biochemistry is essential for understanding the molecular basis of health and disease. The 26th edition also features expanded content on results of the Human Genome Project. Perfect as both text and USMLE review.

    Richard Dawkins, for example, jolted us into realizing that we are just survival mechanisms for our own genes, sophisticated robots in service of huge colonies of replicators to whom concepts of rationality, intelligence, agency, and even the human soul are irrelevant.Accepting and now forcefully responding to this decentering and disturbing idea, Keith Stanovich here provides the tools for the "robot's rebellion," a program of cognitive reform necessary to advance human interests over the limited interest of the replicators and define our own autonomous goals as individual human beings. He shows how concepts of rational thinking from cognitive science interact with the logic of evolution to create opportunities for humans to structure their behavior to serve their own ends. These evaluative activities of the brain, he argues, fulfill the need that we have to ascribe significance to human life. We may well be robots, but we are the only robots who have discovered that fact. Only by recognizing ourselves as such, argues Stanovich, can we begin to construct a concept of self based on what is truly singular about humans: that they gain control of their lives in a way unique among life forms on Earth—through rational self-determination.

    An evolutionary perspective forms the foundation of the entire discussion. The book begins with the natural history of the planet, considers portions of the whole in the middle chapters, and ends with another perspective of the entire planet in the concluding chapter. Its unique organization of focusing only on several key concepts in each chapter sets it apart from the competition. .

    The Social Issues boxes are useful in engaging students in topics of real-life importance that go beyond the individual.

    This clear, concise look at the basic principles and concepts of genetics uses a human genetics perspective to discuss the methods and experiments upon which genetic principles are based, such as DNA replication.

    This comprehensive text, appropriate for courses in basic principles, applications, and behavioral research methods, helps students, educators, and practitioners appreciate and begin to acquire the conceptual and technical skills necessary to foster socially adaptive behavior in diverse individuals.

    Each chapter will review key terms, test for understanding basic concepts, and pose research-based problems. The Problems Book has been designed to correspond with the first twenty chapters of Molecular Biology of the Cell, Fifth Edition.Includes the solutions to the end-of-chapter problems in the textbook Molecular Biology of the Cell, Fifth Edition. Contains over 2,000 problems and their solutions. All of the solutions to the problems in The Problems Book are on the CD-ROM that is packaged with every copy of the book. The problems are organized into the following categories: Terms to Learn, Definitions, True/False, Thought Problems, Calculations, and Data Handling.The Problems Book will be useful for homework assignments and as a basis for class discussion. It could even provide inspiration for exam questions.

    This began to change with the devising of methods to try to tap into what was going on in the 'black box' of the mind, and the development of 'cognitive psychology'. With the study of patients who had suffered brain damage or injury to limited parts of the brain, outlines of brain components and processes began to take shape, and by the end of the 1970s, a new science, cognitive neuroscience, was born. But it was with the development of ways of accessing activation of the working brain using imaging techniques such as PET and fMRI that cognitive neuroscience came into its own, as a science cutting across psychology and neuroscience, with strong connections to philosophy of mind. Experiments involving subjects in scanners while doing various tasks, thinking, problem solving, and remembering are shedding light on the brain processes involved. The research is exciting and new, and often makes media headlines. But there is much misunderstanding about what brain imaging tells us, and the interpretation of studies on cognition.In this Very Short Introduction Richard Passingham, a distinguished cognitive neuroscientist, gives a provocative and exciting account of the nature and scope of this relatively new field, and the techniques available to us, focusing on investigation of the human brain. He explains what brain imaging shows, pointing out common misconceptions, and gives a brief overview of the different aspects of human cognition: perceiving, attending, remembering, reasoning, deciding, and acting. Passingham concludes with a discussion of the exciting advances that may lie ahead.ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.