An Introduction to Brain and Behavior


Bryan Kolb - 2000
    Each chapter of An Introduction to Brain and Behavior explores a specific question asked by working neuroscientists and students (i.e. "Why do we have a brain?"  "How is the nervous system organized?").  This approach brings coherence to a vast subject, and helps students understand what information is important as their study of brain and behavior progresses chapter to chapter.

The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World


Iain McGilchrist - 2009
    In a book of unprecedented scope, McGilchrist draws on a vast body of recent brain research, illustrated with case histories, to reveal that the difference is profound—not just this or that function, but two whole, coherent, but incompatible ways of experiencing the world. The left hemisphere is detail oriented, prefers mechanisms to living things & is inclined to self-interest. The right hemisphere has greater breadth, flexibility & generosity. This division helps explain the origins of music & language, & casts new light on the history of philosophy, as well as on some mental illnesses. The 2nd part of the book takes a journey thru the history of Western culture, illustrating the tension between these two worlds as revealed in the thought & belief of thinkers & artists, from Aeschylus to Magritte. He argues that, despite its inferior grasp of reality, the left hemisphere is increasingly taking precedence in the modern world, with potentially disastrous consequences.List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionAsymmetry and the brain --What do the two hemispheres 'do'? --Language, truth and music --The nature of the two worlds --The primacy of the right hemisphere --The triumph of the left hemisphere --Imitation and the evolution of culture --The ancient world --The Renaissance and the Reformation --The Enlightenment --Romanticism and the Industrial Revolution --The modern and post-modern worldsConclusionNotes BibliographyIndex

How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain


Gregory Berns - 2013
    Loyal, obedient, and affectionate, they are truly “man’s best friend.” But do dogs love us the way we love them? Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns had spent decades using MRI imaging technology to study how the human brain works, but a different question still nagged at him: What is my dog thinking?   After his family adopted Callie, a shy, skinny terrier mix, Berns decided that there was only one way to answer that question—use an MRI machine to scan the dog’s brain. His colleagues dismissed the idea. Everyone knew that dogs needed to be restrained or sedated for MRI scans. But if the military could train dogs to operate calmly in some of the most challenging environments, surely there must be a way to train dogs to sit in an MRI scanner.   With this radical conviction, Berns and his dog would embark on a remarkable journey and be the first to glimpse the inner workings of the canine brain. Painstakingly, the two worked together to overcome the many technical, legal, and behavioral hurdles. Berns’s research offers surprising results on how dogs empathize with human emotions, how they love us, and why dogs and humans share one of the most remarkable friendships in the animal kingdom.   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.

The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain


Tali Sharot - 2011
     Psychologists have long been aware that most people maintain an often irrationally positive outlook on life. In fact, optimism may be crucial to our existence. Tali Sharot’s experiments, research, and findings in cognitive science have contributed to an increased understanding of the biological basis of optimism. In this fascinating exploration, she takes an in-depth, clarifying look at how the brain generates hope and what happens when it fails; how the brains of optimists and pessimists differ; why we are terrible at predicting what will make us happy; how emotions strengthen our ability to recollect; how anticipation and dread affect us; and how our optimistic illusions affect our financial, professional, and emotional decisions.  With its cutting-edge science and its wide-ranging and accessible narrative, The Optimism Bias provides us with startling new insight into the workings of the brain.From the Hardcover edition.

The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind


Alison Gopnik - 1999
    It argues that evolution designed us both to teach and learn, and that the drive to learn is our most important instinct. It also reveals as fascinating insights about our adult capacities and how even young children -- as well as adults -- use some of the same methods that allow scientists to learn so much about the world. Filled with surprise at every turn, this vivid, lucid, and often funny book gives us a new view of the inner life of children and the mysteries of the mind.

Kaplan & Sadock's Synopsis of Psychiatry: Behavioral Sciences/Clinical Psychiatry


Benjamin James Sadock - 1988
    This complete, concise overview of the entire field of psychiatry is a staple board review text for psychiatry residents and is popular with a broad range of students in medicine, clinical psychology, social work, and occupational therapy. This edition includes new chapters on health care delivery systems and end-of-life care and palliative medicine. Coverage of psychotropic drugs and neuropsychiatric foundations of biological psychiatry has been significantly updated. The book is DSM-IV-TR compatible and replete with case studies and tables, including ICD-10 diagnostic coding tables.

Brain Wars: The Scientific Battle Over the Existence of the Mind and the Proof That Will Change the Way We Live Our Lives


Mario Beauregard - 2012
    Schwartz, Beauregard believes that consciousness is more than simply a physical process that takes place in the brain. And here, he presents the evidence to prove it. Brain Wars will revolutionize the way we think about thinking forever.

The Prescriber's Guide: Stahl's Essential Psychopharmacology


Stephen M. Stahl - 2004
    Easy to navigate and easy to use, the Prescriber's Guide combines evidence-based information with clinically informed guidance to support clinicians in making the most effective prescribing decisions for the good of their patients. With coverage of twelve brand-new drugs including antidepressants, antipsychotics, hypnotics, nonstimulants for ADHD, and medical foods and incorporating information on the newest indications, new formulations, new recommendations, and new safety data, this edition continues to provide the essential practical support required by anyone prescribing in the field of mental health."

Brainscapes: The Warped, Wondrous Maps Written in Your Brain—And How They Guide You


Rebecca Schwarzlose - 2021
    Your brain is a collection of maps. That is no metaphor: scrawled across your brain’s surfaces are actual maps of the sights, sounds, and actions that hold the key to your survival. Scientists first began uncovering these maps over a century ago, but we are only now beginning to unlock their secrets—and comprehend their profound impact on our lives. Brain maps distort and shape our experience of the world, support complex thought, and make technology-enabled mind reading a modern-day reality, which raises important questions about what is real, what is fair, and what is private. They shine a light on our past and our possible futures. In the process, they invite us to view ourselves from a startling new perspective.  ​ In Brainscapes, Rebecca Schwarzlose combines unforgettable real-life stories, cutting-edge research, and vivid illustrations to reveal brain maps’ surprising lessons about our place in the world—and about the world’s place within us.

The Ego Trick: In Search Of The Self


Julian Baggini - 2011
    His fascinating quest draws on the history of philosophy, but also anthropology, sociology, psychology and neurology; he talks to theologians, priests, allegedly reincarnated Lamas, and delves into real-life cases of lost memory, personality disorders and personal transformation; and, candidly and engagingly, he describes his own experiences. After reading "The Ego Trick," you will never see yourself in the same way again.

The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live--and How You Can Change Them


Richard J. Davidson - 2012
    For more than thirty years, Richard Davidson has been at the forefront of brain research. Now he gives us an entirely new model for understanding our emotions, as well as practical strategies we can use to change them.Davidson has discovered that personality is composed of six basic emotional "styles," including resilience, self-awareness, and attention. Our emotional fingerprint results from where on the continuum of each style we fall. He explains the brain chemistry that underlies each style in order to give us a new model of the emotional brain, one that will even go so far as to affect the way we treat conditions like autism and depression. And, finally, he provides strategies we can use to change our own brains and emotions-if that is what we want to do.Written with bestselling author Sharon Begley, this original and exciting book gives us a new and useful way to look at ourselves, develop a sense of well-being, and live more meaningful lives.

Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought


George Lakoff - 1998
    In addressing them, philosophers have made certain fundamental assumptions-that we can know our own minds by introspection, that most of our thinking about the world is literal, and that reason is disembodied and universal-that are now called into question by well-established results of cognitive science. It has been shown empirically that: Most thought is unconscious. We have no direct conscious access to the mechanisms of thought and language. Our ideas go by too quickly and at too deep a level for us to observe them in any simple way. Abstract concepts are mostly metaphorical. Much of the subject matter of philosophy, such as the nature of time, morality, causation, the mind, and the self, relies heavily on basic metaphors derived from bodily experience. What is literal in our reasoning about such concepts is minimal and conceptually impoverished. All the richness comes from metaphor. For instance, we have two mutually incompatible metaphors for time, both of which represent it as movement through space: in one it is a flow past us and in the other a spatial dimension we move along. Mind is embodied. Thought requires a body-not in the trivial sense that you need a physical brain to think with, but in the profound sense that the very structure of our thoughts comes from the nature of the body. Nearly all of our unconscious metaphors are based on common bodily experiences. Most of the central themes of the Western philosophical tradition are called into question by these findings. The Cartesian person, with a mind wholly separate from the body, does not exist. The Kantian person, capable of moral action according to the dictates of a universal reason, does not exist. The phenomenological person, capable of knowing his or her mind entirely through introspection alone, does not exist. The utilitarian person, the Chomskian person, the poststructuralist person, the computational person, and the person defined by analytic philosophy all do not exist. Then what does? Lakoff and Johnson show that a philosophy responsible to the science of mind offers radically new and detailed understandings of what a person is. After first describing the philosophical stance that must follow from taking cognitive science seriously, they re-examine the basic concepts of the mind, time, causation, morality, and the self: then they rethink a host of philosophical traditions, from the classical Greeks through Kantian morality through modern analytic philosophy. They reveal the metaphorical structure underlying each mode of thought and show how the metaphysics of each theory flows from its metaphors. Finally, they take on two major issues of twentieth-century philosophy: how we conceive rationality, and how we conceive language.

Wheater's Functional Histology: A Text and Colour Atlas


Barbara Young - 2000
    The book starts with a section on general cell structure and replication. Basic tissue types are covered in the following section, and the third section presents the microstructures of each of the major body systems. The highest -quality color light micrographs and electron micrograph images are accompanied by concise text and captions which explain the appearance, function, and clinical significance of each image. The accompanying website lets you view all the images from the atlas with a virtual microscope, allowing you to view the image at a variety of pre-set magnifications.Includes access to website containing book images and additional material, extra illustrations, self tests, and more. Utilizes virtual microscope function on the website, allowing you to see images first in low-powered and then in high powered magnification. Incorporates new information on histology of bone marrow, male reproductive system, respiratory system, pancreas, blood, cartilage, muscle types, staining methods, and more. Uses Color coding at the side of each page to make it easier to access information quickly and efficiently. Includes access to www.studentconsult.com - where you'll find the complete text and illustrations of the book online, fully searchable - Integration Links to bonus content in other STUDENT CONSULT titles - 300 new USMLE-style review questions, with answers and rationales - content clipping for handheld devices - an interactive community center with a wealth of additional resources - and much more!

Flavor: The Science of Our Most Neglected Sense


Bob Holmes - 2017
    In this delightful and compelling exploration of our most neglected sense, veteran science reporter Bob Holmes shows us just how much we’re missing.Considering every angle of flavor from our neurobiology to the science and practice of modern food production, Holmes takes readers on a journey to uncover the broad range of factors that can affect our appreciation of a fine meal or an exceptional glass of wine. He peers over the shoulders of some of the most fascinating food professionals working today, from cutting-edge chefs to food engineers to mathematicians investigating the perfect combination of pizza toppings. He talks with flavor and olfactory scientists, who describe why two people can experience remarkably different sensations from the same morsel of food, and how something as seemingly unrelated as cultural heritage can actually impact our sense of smell.Along the way, even more surprising facts are revealed: that cake tastes sweetest on white plates; that wine experts’ eyes can fool their noses; and even that language can affect our sense of taste. Flavor expands our curiosity and understanding of one of our most intimate sensations, while ultimately revealing how we can all sharpen our senses and our enjoyment of the things we taste.Certain to fascinate everyone from gourmands and scientists to home cooks and their guests, Flavor will open your mind—and palette—to a vast, exciting sensory world.

Decoding Anorexia: How Breakthroughs in Science Offer Hope for Eating Disorders


Carrie Arnold - 2012
    Its clear, user-friendly descriptions of the genetics and neuroscience behind the disorder is paired with first person descriptions and personal narratives of what biological differences mean to sufferers. Author Carrie Arnold, a trained scientist, science writer, and past sufferer of anorexia, speaks with clinicians, researchers, parents, other family members, and sufferers about the factors that make one vulnerable to anorexia, the neurochemistry behind the call of starvation, and why it's so hard to leave anorexia behind. She also addresses: - How environment is still important and influences behaviors- The characteristics of people at high risk for developing anorexia nervosa- Why anorexics find starvation "rewarding"- Why denial is such a salient feature, and how sufferers can overcome itCarrie also includes interviews with key figures in the field who explain their work and how it contributes to our understanding of anorexia. Long thought to be a psychosocial disease of fickle teens, this book alters the way anorexia is understood and treated and gives patients, their doctors, and their family members hope.