But how did we acquire the most advanced form of communication on Earth? Daniel L. Everett, a “bombshell” linguist and “instant folk hero” (Tom Wolfe, Harper’s), provides in this sweeping history a comprehensive examination of the evolutionary story of language, from the earliest speaking attempts by hominids to the more than seven thousand languages that exist today.Although fossil hunters and linguists have brought us closer to unearthing the true origins of language, Daniel Everett’s discoveries have upended the contemporary linguistic world, reverberating far beyond academic circles. While conducting field research in the Amazonian rainforest, Everett came across an age-old language nestled amongst a tribe of hunter-gatherers. Challenging long-standing principles in the field, Everett now builds on the theory that language was not intrinsic to our species. In order to truly understand its origins, a more interdisciplinary approach is needed—one that accounts as much for our propensity for culture as it does our biological makeup.Language began, Everett theorizes, with Homo Erectus, who catalyzed words through culturally invented symbols. Early humans, as their brains grew larger, incorporated gestures and voice intonations to communicate, all of which built on each other for 60,000 generations. Tracing crucial shifts and developments across the ages, Everett breaks down every component of speech, from harnessing control of more than a hundred respiratory muscles in the larynx and diaphragm, to mastering the use of the tongue. Moving on from biology to execution, Everett explores why elements such as grammar and storytelling are not nearly as critical to language as one might suspect.In the book’s final section, Cultural Evolution of Language, Everett takes the ever-debated “language gap” to task, delving into the chasm that separates “us” from “the animals.” He approaches the subject from various disciplines, including anthropology, neuroscience, and archaeology, to reveal that it was social complexity, as well as cultural, physiological, and neurological superiority, that allowed humans—with our clawless hands, breakable bones, and soft skin—to become the apex predator.How Language Began ultimately explains what we know, what we’d like to know, and what we likely never will know about how humans went from mere communication to language. Based on nearly forty years of fieldwork, Everett debunks long-held theories by some of history’s greatest thinkers, from Plato to Chomsky. The result is an invaluable study of what makes us human.

    Your brain knows it's not good to do these things, but it can't help it sometimes--especially if it's obsessing about trauma it can't overcome. That's where this life-changing book comes in. With humor, patience, science, and lots of good-ole swearing, Dr. Faith explains what's going on in your skull, and talks you through the process of retraining your brain to respond appropriately to the non-emergencies of everyday life, and to deal effectively with old, or newly acquired, traumas (particularly post-traumatic stress disorder).

    Kandel investigates The Disordered Mind to uncover what brain disorders reveal about human nature. This challenging study will not only help transform medical care but also encourage a new humanism based in part on the biological confirmation of individuality.Eric R. Kandel, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his foundational research into memory storage in the brain, is one of the pioneers of modern brain science. His work has helped shape our understanding of how learning and memory work. Building from this scientific research, Kandel explores one of the most fundamental questions we face: How does our mind, our individual sense of self, arise from the physical matter of the brain? The brain’s 86 billion neurons communicate with one another through very precise connections. If those connections are disrupted, the brain processes that give rise to our mind can become disordered, resulting in diseases such as depression, schizophrenia, Parkinson’s, and autism.The Disordered Mind illustrates how breakthrough studies of these disruptions can deepen our understanding of thought, feeling, behavior, memory, and creativity, and perhaps in the future will lead to the development of a unified theory of mind.

     In this paradigm-shifting book, neurolearning experts Drs. Brock and Fernette Eide describe an exciting new brain science that reveals that dyslexic people have unique brain structure and organization. While the differences are responsible for certain challenges with literacy and reading, the dyslexic brain also gives a predisposition to important skills, and special talents. While dyslexics typically struggle to decode the written word, they often also excel in such areas of reasoning as mechanical (required for architects and surgeons), interconnected (artists and inventors); narrative (novelists and lawyers), and dynamic (scientists and business pioneers). The Dyslexic Advantage provides the first complete portrait of dyslexia.

    It will shock, surprise and astound the reader. Paul Harrison has a unique set of skills and experiences based upon his life in the British police service and later as a crime writer. Now, for the first time ever, you can read of his gripping experiences as a profiler dealing with the world's most notorious serial killers and violent offenders. Mind Games is a forensic examination of the psyche of the world's most vicious and evil offenders in their own words, just as they related it. It's an exploration into the darkest recesses of the criminal mind and possibly the most in-depth examination of the serial killer phenomenon ever published. Includes exclusive interviews with Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, Kenneth Harrison, Henry Lee Lucas, Aileen Wuornos, Ted Bundy, Carl Watts, Donald 'Pee Wee' Gaskins, Donald Neilson, Kenneth McDuff, Jeffrey Dahmer, Joe 'The Cannibal' Metheney.

    French, Portuguese and Arabic versions are soon to be released. The Nemechek Protocol™ for Autism and Developmental Disorders outlines Dr. Patrick M. Nemechek’s clear and concise description about the present scientific basis for autism and many childhood developmental disorders. His unique but simple treatment is the most talked about approach for autism and developmental disorders of the last decade. The Nemechek Protocol™ finally offers hope that children around the world afflicted with these conditions may begin on the path of neurological development and recovery.

    Charting the most cutting-edge scientific breakthroughs, and marshalling his decades of research and clinical practice, Walker explains how we can harness sleep to improve learning, mood and energy levels, regulate hormones, prevent cancer, Alzheimer's and diabetes, slow the effects of aging, and increase longevity. He also provides actionable steps towards getting a better night's sleep every night.

    Why do you still feel fat after losing weight? What makes video games so addictive? How can “practicing” your favorite sport in your imagination improve your game? The answers can be found in body maps.Just as road maps represent interconnections across the landscape, your many body maps represent all aspects of your bodily self, inside and out. In concert, they create your physical and emotional awareness and your sense of being a whole, feeling self in a larger social world.Moreover, your body maps are profoundly elastic. Your self doesn’t begin and end with your physical body but extends into the space around you. This space morphs every time you put on or take off clothes, ride a bike, or wield a tool. When you drive a car, your personal body space grows to envelop it. When you play a video game, your body maps automatically track and emulate the actions of your character onscreen. When you watch a scary movie, your body maps put dread in your stomach and send chills down your spine. If your body maps fall out of sync, you may have an out-of-body experience or see auras around other people.The Body Has a Mind of Its Own explains how you can tap into the power of body maps to do almost anything better–whether it is playing tennis, strumming a guitar, riding a horse, dancing a waltz, empathizing with a friend, raising children, or coping with stress. The story of body maps goes even further, providing a fresh look at the causes of anorexia, bulimia, obsessive plastic surgery, and the notorious golfer’s curse “the yips.” It lends insights into culture, language, music, parenting, emotions, chronic pain, and more. Filled with illustrations, wonderful anecdotes, and even parlor tricks that you can use to reconfigure your body sense, The Body Has a Mind of Its Own will change the way you think–about the way you think.“The Blakeslees have taken the latest and most exciting finds from brain research and have made them accessible. This is how science writing should always be.”–Michael S. Gazzaniga, Ph.D., author of The Ethical Brain“Through a stream of fascinating and entertaining examples, Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee illustrate how our perception of ourselves, and indeed the world, is not fixed but is surprisingly fluid and easily modified. They have created the best book ever written about how our sense of ‘self’ emerges from the motley collection of neurons we call the brain.”–Jeff Hawkins, co-author of On Intelligence “The Blakeslees have taken the latest and most exciting finds from brain research and have made them accessible. This is how science writing should always be.”–Michael S. Gazzaniga, Ph.D., author of The Ethical Brain“A marvelous book. In the last ten years there has been a paradigm shift in understanding the brain and how its various specialized regions respond to environmental challenges. In addition to providing a brilliant overview of recent revolutionary discoveries on body image and brain plasticity, the book is sprinkled with numerous insights.”–V. S. Ramachandran, M.D., director, Center for Brain and Cognition, University of California, San Diego

    Other bestselling works of neurobiology and the mind have focused on mental illness and abnormal behaviors—like the Oliver Sacks classic, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat—but The Other Side of Normal is an eye-opening, thought-provoking, utterly fascinating and totally accessible exploration of the universals of human experience. It will change forever our understanding of who we are and what makes us that way.

    

    She woke up in a hospital soon after with serious deficiencies to her reading, speaking, and writing abilities, and an unfamiliar diagnosis: aphasia. This would be shocking news for anyone, but Lauren was a voracious reader, an actress, director, and dramaturg, and at the time of the event, pursuing her PhD. At any other period of her life, this diagnosis would have been a devastating blow. But she woke up...different. The way she perceived her environment and herself had profoundly changed, her entire identity seemed crafted around a language she could no longer access. She returned to her childhood home to recover, grappling with a muted inner monologue and fractured sense of self.Soon after, Lauren began a journal, to chronicle her year following the rupture. A Stitch of Time is the remarkable result, an Oliver Sacks–like case study of a brain slowly piecing itself back together, featuring clinical research about aphasia and linguistics, interwoven with Lauren’s personal narrative and actual journal entries that marked her progress. Alternating between fascination and frustration, she relearns and re-experiences many of the things we take for granted—reading a book, understanding idioms, even sharing a “first kiss”—and begins to reconcile “The Girl I Used to Be” with “The Girl I Am Now.” Deeply personal and powerful, A Stitch of Time is an unforgettable journey of self-discovery, resilience, and hope.

    Some people call it “ADHD,” “scatter brain,” or “brain fog.” And some people simply say they “just don’t feel like themselves”—and haven’t for a long time.      People are thinking and feeling worse than ever. Why? Because our brains are not getting the support they need to produce the essential brain chemicals that keep us energized, calm, focused, and inspired. In fact, if you look at the way that most of us live, it’s almost as though we had chosen a lifestyle deliberately intended to undermine our brain chemistry.      Fortunately, there is a solution. The Brain Fog Fix is a three-week program designed to help you naturally restore three of your brain’s most crucial chemicals: serotonin, dopamine, and cortisol. Rebalancing these three brain chemicals will, in turn, enable the rest of your brain’s chemistry to reach optimal levels. You will find yourself thinking more clearly, remembering more accurately, learning more quickly, and unleashing the floodgates of your creativity. You will also find yourself feeling more optimistic, calm, energized, connected, and inspired.      The good news is that this is easier than you think. Instead of trying to ambitiously overhaul one aspect of your life entirely with some difficult-to-maintain resolution, begin by making small and achievable changes in many different areas of your life.      “If I’ve learned one thing from the thousands of people I’ve treated, it’s that you have to take the whole person into account if you want to think and feel better.” —Dr. Mike Dow

    In this captivating fusion of science, history and personal memoir, writer David Adam explores the weird thoughts that exist within every mind, and how they drive millions of us towards obsessions and compulsions.David has suffered from OCD for twenty years, and The Man Who Couldn’t Stop is his unflinchingly honest attempt to understand the condition and his experiences. What might lead an Ethiopian schoolgirl to eat a wall of her house, piece by piece; or a pair of brothers to die beneath an avalanche of household junk that they had compulsively hoarded? At what point does a harmless idea, a snowflake in a clear summer sky, become a blinding blizzard of unwanted thoughts? Drawing on the latest research on the brain, as well as historical accounts of patients and their treatments, this is a book that will challenge the way you think about what is normal, and what is mental illness.Told with fierce clarity, humour and urgent lyricism, this extraordinary book is both the haunting story of a personal nightmare, and a fascinating doorway into the darkest corners of our minds.

    And no delay causes more parental anxiety than late talking, which is associated in many parents' minds with such serious conditions as autism and severe intellectual disability. In fact, as children's speech expert Stephen Camarata points out in this enlightening book, children are late in beginning to talk for a wide variety of reasons. For some children, late talking may be a symptom of other, more serious, problems; for many others, however, it may simply be a stage with no long-term complications.Camarata describes in accessible language what science knows about the characteristics and causes of late talking. He explains that late talking is only one of a constellation of autism symptoms. Although all autistic children are late talkers, not all late-talking children are autistic.Camarata draws on more than twenty-five years of professional experience diagnosing and treating late talkers--and on his personal experience of being a late talker himself and having a late-talking son. He provides information that will help parents navigate the maze of doctors, speech therapists, early childhood services, and special education; and he describes the effect that late talking may have on children's post-talking learning styles.

    Randall never gave sleep much thought. That is, until he began sleepwalking. One midnight crash into a hallway wall sent him on an investigation into the strange science of sleep.In Dreamland, Randall explores the research that is investigating those dark hours that make up nearly a third of our lives. Taking readers from military battlefields to children’s bedrooms, Dreamland shows that sleep isn't as simple as it seems. Why did the results of one sleep study change the bookmakers’ odds for certain Monday Night Football games? Do women sleep differently than men? And if you happen to kill someone while you are sleepwalking, does that count as murder?This book is a tour of the often odd, sometimes disturbing, and always fascinating things that go on in the peculiar world of sleep. You’ll never look at your pillow the same way again.