Her twenty- five-year career conducting experiments that involve rats has led her to a surprising conclusion: Through their adaptive strategies and good habits, these unassuming little animals can teach us some essential lessons about how we, as humans, can lead successful lives. From emotional resilience and a strong work ethic to effective parenting and staying healthy, the lab rat is an unlikely but powerful role model for us all. This is a surprising and engaging guided tour into the sophisticated mental, emotional, and behavioral worlds of these frequently maligned and often misunderstood little creatures.

    His beat is a nursing home in Miami that some would dismiss as “God’s waiting room.” Nothing in the young doctor’s medical training had quite prepared him for what he was to discover there. As Agronin first learned from ninety-eight-year-old Esther and, later, from countless others, the true scales of aging aren’t one-sided—you can’t list the problems without also tallying the hopes and promises. Drawing on moving personal experiences and in-depth interviews with pioneers in the field, Agronin conjures a spellbinding look at what aging means today—how our bodies and brains age, and the very way we understand aging.

    A leading neurologist offers a new collection of essays about the strange and frightening things that happen when the workings of the human brain go awry.

    Beck, Ph.D., has inspired thousands of dieters to lose excess weight and keep it off using the power of Cognitive Therapy to prepare the mind and alter habits before starting any diet. Now, for the first time, Dr. Beck outlines the next step: a specific, balanced diet plan that teaches you how to EAT THIN and keep excess weight off for life. Based on the eating choices of Dr. Becks most successful dieters and maintainers, The Complete Beck Diet for Life includes comprehensive suggestions for breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, and bonus foods including 150- or 200-calorie treats such as sweets, alcohol, bread, and fries--and a Think Thin menu formula that allows you to easily adapt to any situation. Everything you need to stay on track is provided, including a sample strength-training plan and interactive elements such as Response Cards, daily eating logs, and charts and graphs to track your progress. The Complete Beck Diet for Life also features Dr. Becks signature Cognitive Therapy tools, organized in a 5-stage program designed to teach you how to EAT THIN. The program details precisely what to do to stay motivated, overcome emotional eating, eliminate bingeing, and immediately get back on track when youve made a mistake. If youve struggled with dieting in the past, its only because you never acquired these essential skills. Once you learn to master these skills, you will be able to successfully maintain your new weight for life.

    It is a safe and easy way to relieve stress, anxiety, and depression and to control weight gain and physical pain. With EFT and Tapping for Beginners: Practice the basic tapping sequences using helpful illustrations that show you the exact energy points to activate on your head, hands, and torso. Learn how to focus your thoughts and tapping goals with freewriting and journaling. Begin experiencing relief from stress and everyday anxieties. Use tapping to help manage the root causes of weight gain and the physical symptoms associated with diabetes, high blood pressure, persistent pain, and more. EFT and Tapping for Beginners: The Essential EFT Manual to Start Relieving Stress, Losing Weight, and Healing not only helps you learn the tapping process, but also invites you to look at the causes of emotional and physical pain. Begin healing today with this concise guide.

    As an empath herself, Dr. Judith Orloff is uniquely versed in the challenges and opportunities facing people with extraordinary sensitivity. With Essential Tools for Empaths, she offers techniques, insights, and guided practices to help you overcome the most common pitfalls for empaths—while helping you develop your exceptional gifts of perception, compassion, and creativity. In this practice-based companion to her book, The Empath’s Survival Guide, she shows you how to: • Discover what kind of empath you are—and what your particular obstacles and opportunities will be • Stop absorbing physical and emotional symptoms from those around you • Manage the challenges of sensory overload, social overwhelm, and empathy fatigue • Protect yourself from narcissists, control freaks, and other energy vampires • Enhance your health, intuition, and spiritual life • Recognize and overcome the addiction issues empaths often face • Flourish in intimate relationships while maintaining healthy boundaries • Help non-empaths understand your needs and special abilities of perception • Find fulfilling work that supports your sensitivities • Raise empathic children in a healthy, supportive way "Empaths are pioneers of a new way of being for humankind," says Dr. Orloff. "We are in the midst of an evolution of human consciousness . . . and you are the path-forgers." Here she brings empaths an invaluable resource for learning to survive and thrive in an overwhelming culture—so you can fully shine your power in the world.

    The first volume in this annual series of the best writing by Americans, meticulously selected by bestselling author James Gleick, one of the foremost chronicles of scientific social history, debuts with a stellar collection of writers and thinkers.  Many of these cutting-edge essays offer glimpses of new realms of discovery and thought, exploring territory that is unfamiliar to most of us, or finding the unexpected in the midst of the familiar.  Nobel Laureate physicist Steven Weinberg challenges the idea of whether the universe has a designer; Pulitzer Prize winner Natalie Angier reassesses caveman (and-woman) couture; bestselling author and Darwinian theorist Stephen Jay Gould makes a claim for the man whose ideas Darwin discredited; Timothy Ferris proposes a realistic alternative to wrap-speed interseller travel; neurologist and bestselling author Oliver Sacks reminisces about his first loves-chemistry and math.  This diverse, stimulating and accessible collection is required reading for anyone who wants to travel to the frontier of knowledge.

    In 1996 Joseph LeDoux's "The Emotional Brain" presented a revelatory examination of the biological bases of our emotions and memories. Now, the world-renowned expert on the brain has produced with a groundbreaking work that tells a more profound story: how the little spaces between the neurons-the brain's synapses--are the channels through which we think, act, imagine, feel, and remember. Synapses encode the essence of personality, enabling each of us to function as a distinctive, integrated individual from moment to moment. Exploring the functioning of memory, the synaptic basis of mental illness and drug addiction, and the mechanism of self-awareness, "Synaptic Self" is a provocative and mind-expanding work that is destined to become a classic.

    But is science ever enough to explain why we feel the way we feel?Giovanni Frazzetto takes us on a journey through our everyday lives and most common emotions. In each chapter, his scientific knowledge mixes with personal experience to offer a compelling account of the continual contrast between rationality and sentiment, science and poetry. And he shows us that by facing this contrast, we can more fully understand ourselves and how we feel.

    . . . The main lines of argument—that the emotions are ways we constitute our lives with meaning; that they are in some important sense things we do rather than things that merely happen to us; that emotions have their own sort of rationality and logic and are subject to evaluation and criticism as such; that emotions are, in some important sense, evaluative judgments—remain an important, credible contemporary view. . . . Solomon is clear, clever, and deep (also often funny).” —Owen Flanagan, Duke University

    Pruchno, a scientist widely acclaimed for her research on mental illness and families, shows how mental illness threatened to destroy her own family. Not once, but twice. As a child, she didn't understand her mother's episodes of crippling sadness or whirlwind activity. As a mother, she feared her daughter Sophie would follow in the footsteps of the grandmother Sophie never knew. Unraveling the mysteries of her mother's and daughter's illnesses, Pruchno fought to preserve her marriage and protect her son. But it was not until she came to terms with her own secrets that she truly understood the destructive and pervasive effects mental illness has on families. Surrounded By Madness is transforming. It will empower families to stop hiding and start talking when mental illness strikes. RACHEL PRUCHNO is Director of Research at the New Jersey Institute for Successful Aging and Endowed Chair, Professor of Medicine at Rowan University's School of Osteopathic Medicine. She earned her Ph.D. in Human Development and Family Studies at Penn State University. Dr. Pruchno has been the Principal Investigator on numerous research grants funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Aging, the National Institute of Nursing Research, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the Retirement Research Foundation, and the Cleveland Foundation. She has published more than 70 peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals, authored 10 invited book chapters, and co-edited Challenges of an Aging Society: Ethical Dilemmas, Political Issues. She has served as Editor-in-Chief of The Gerontologist, a leading scientific journal, since 2011. She is married with four children, two of whom are dogs.

    Mental play impacts every aspect of piano playing: memorizing, controlling nervousness, developing performance skills, playing musically, acquiring absolute pitch, composing, improvisation, etc. Genius is more created than born; most of what had been attributed to talent are simple knowledge-based solutions that we can all learn. Improved memory can raise the effective IQ; memory is an associative process based on algorithms -- music is such an algorithm, enabling us to memorize hours of repertoire. Learning piano makes you smarter and teaches project management. Includes chapter on tuning your own piano; the chromatic scale, temperaments, circle of fifths, etc., are explained.

     The blast took off half his face, yet somehow he survived. They called Parnell the "miracle man" at the Nashville hospital where he'd been pronounced clinically dead. Following an afterlife experience where he briefly experienced hell, David woke up in the hospital, and he was changed forever, both physically and emotionally.In Facing the Dragon, readers will witness the slow, agonizing metamorphosis of a good-looking high school athlete into a violent, drug-dealing, psychotic wife beater whose children were terrified of him. In graphic detail, they will relive his suicide attempts and then walk alongside him as he endures countless surgeries to reconstruct his decimated face and learns how to cope with his hideous disfigurement.  Now thirty-nine, Parnell is clean and sober and is making the most of the second chance he's been given, bringing his message about the dangers of meth and other drugs to schools, prisons, churches, and antidrug organizations around the world as a full-time lecturer.By experiencing the nightmare of his life-—and his brief glimpse of hell--readers will find hope and healing when facing their own life-threatening dragons.

    What is it like to try to heal the body when the mind is under attack? In this book, Dr. Allan Ropper and Brian Burrell take the reader behind the scenes at Harvard Medical School's neurology unit to show how a seasoned diagnostician faces down bizarre, life-altering afflictions. Like Alice in Wonderland, Dr. Ropper inhabits a world where absurdities abound:• A figure skater whose body has become a ticking time-bomb • A salesman who drives around and around a traffic rotary, unable to get off • A college quarterback who can't stop calling the same play • A child molester who, after falling on the ice, is left with a brain that is very much dead inside a body that is very much alive • A mother of two young girls, diagnosed with ALS, who has to decide whether a life locked inside her own head is worth livingHow does one begin to treat such cases, to counsel people whose lives may be changed forever? How does one train the next generation of clinicians to deal with the moral and medical aspects of brain disease? Dr. Ropper and his colleague answer these questions by taking the reader into a rarified world where lives and minds hang in the balance.

    This book presents a revolutionary new understanding of the concept of depression and offers readers skills and strategies to manage it.  No longer is this a one-size-fits-all diagnosis, and antidepressants are no longer the one-size-fits-all treatment. Mood disorders are now seen to form a spectrum of problems, from common depression on one end to full bipolar disorder on the other. In between these extremes are multitudes of people who are on the middle of the mood spectrum, and this book is for them.The first part of the book helps readers answer the question, “Where am I on the mood spectrum?” By laying the foundation for understanding this spectrum, Aiken and Phelps highlight the key distinctions that define unipolarity, bipolarity, hypomania, mania, and depression. Readers will be able to discern which definition best fits their experience, and use this understanding to learn which treatment methods will work best.  The authors also empower readers to look beyond antidepressants. They walk readers through new medications for the mood spectrum, and offer a guide to non-medication treatments that anyone can use on their own, from diet and lifestyle changes to natural supplements. The book also discusses other innovative technologies that can aid in recovery, including dawn simulators, mood apps, and blue-light filters.      This thoughtful and beneficial book will offer readers skills and strategies, as well as hope, in the face of debilitating mental challenges.