It lasted 3,000 years, longer than any other on the planet. Its Great Pyramid of Cheops was the tallest building in the world until well into the 19th century and remains the only Ancient Wonder still standing. And it was the most technologically advanced of the ancient civilizations, with the medical knowledge that made Egyptian physicians the most famous in the world.Yet even after deciphering its hieroglyphs, and marveling at its scarabs, mummies, obelisks, and sphinxes, Egyptian civilization remains one of history's most mysterious, as "other" as it is extraordinary. This chronological survey presents the complete history of ancient Egypt's three great Kingdoms: the Old Kingdom, when the pyramids were built and Egypt became a nation under the supreme rule of the pharaoh and the rules of Egyptian art were established; the Middle Kingdom, when Egypt was a nation fighting to restore its greatness; and the New Kingdom, when all the names we know today-Hatshepsut, Tutankhamen, Ramses the Great, Cleopatra, and others-first appeared.Listening Length: 24 hours and 25 minutes

    David Christian, professor of history at San Diego State University, surveys the past at all possible scales, from conventional history, to the much larger scales of biology and geology, to the universal scales of cosmology.

    Whether it’s a friend who can’t quit smoking, a colleague afflicted with alcoholism, or a relative abusing prescription drugs, we all know someone who suffers from some form of addiction—we may even have an addiction ourselves. By some estimates, roughly one in four Americans might be considered addicts. On the other hand, many of us use substances such as alcohol recreationally, without suffering the physical or psychological symptoms of addiction. So what is the difference between drug use, abuse, and clinical addiction? What causes addictions? What happens when your brain is on drugs, and why do addicts behave the way they do?12 Lectures 1. Addiction 101 2. The Psychology and Neuroscience of Reward 3. How Addiction Hijacks the Brain 4. Genetics: Born to Be an Addict? 5. Your Brain on Drugs 6. Why We Crave Coffee and Cigarettes 7. Alcohol: Social Lubricant or Drug of Abuse? 8. The Science of Marijuana 9. Stimulants: From Cocaine to Ritalin 10. The Science of Poppies, Pleasure, and Pain 11. The Gambler's Brain 12. Junk Food, Porn, Video Games: Addictions?Listening Length: 6 hours and 23 minutes

    These include tipping points, the sociological term used to describe moments when unique or rare phenomena become more commonplace; the wisdom of crowds, the argument that certain types of groups harness information and make decisions in more effective ways than individuals; six degrees of separation, the idea that it takes no more than six steps to find some form of connection between two random individuals; and emergence, the idea that new properties, processes, and structures can emerge unexpectedly from complex systems.

    The Great Ideas of Classical Physics 2. Describing MotionA Break from Aristotle 3. Describing Ever More Complex Motion 4. Astronomy as a Bridge to Modern Physics 5. Isaac NewtonThe Dawn of Classical Physics 6. Newton QuantifiedForce and Acceleration 7. Newton and the Connections to Astronomy 8. Universal Gravitation 9. Newton's Third Law 10. Conservation of Momentum 11. Beyond NewtonWork and Energy 12. Power and the Newtonian Synthesis 13. Further DevelopmentsStatic Electricity 14. Electricity, Magnetism, and Force Fields 15. Electrical Currents and Voltage 16. The Origin of Electric and Magnetic Fields 17. Unification IMaxwell's Equations 18. Unification IIElectromagnetism and Light 19. Vibrations and Waves 20. Sound Waves and Light Waves 21. The Atomic Hypothesis 22. Energy in SystemsHeat and Thermodynamics 23. Heat and the Second Law of Thermodynamics 24. The Grand Picture of Classical Physics

    Central to many spiritual and philosophical traditions and known in English as "meditation," these practices are considered a major means for enhanced awareness and self-mastery. In recent decades, modern science has dramatically confirmed what advanced meditators have long claimed—that meditation, correctly practiced, offers deep and lasting benefits for mental functioning and emotional health, as well as for physical health and well-being.

    Game theory plays a crucial role in our lives and provides startling insights into all endeavors in which humans cooperate or compete, including biology, computer science, politics, agriculture, and, most importantly, economics.For example, game theory*has become an invaluable tool for economists, underpinning the theories of five Nobel Prize winners in economics;*helps corporate decision makers through the alternatives of complex negotiations where thousands of jobs and billions of dollars may be at stake;*plays a crucial role in international diplomacy and military strategy, influencing the fates of nations even when that influence may well be invisible to the uninitiated; and provides insights into the origins of human behaviors, not only for psychologists seeking to understand why we act as we do, but also for evolutionary biologists asking how those patterns of actions—as human strategies—were handed down.You can even see game theory at work in the interactions you engage in every day, such as an obvious "game," like buying a car, or a less obvious one, like trying to decide where to go on a Saturday night or how you ought to dress.A basic working knowledge of this profoundly important tool can help us cut through an often confusing clutter of information—allowing us to make better decisions in our own lives or better understand the decisions facing other players in games. In Games People Play: Game Theory in Life, Business, and Beyond, award-winning Professor Scott P. Stevens of James Madison University has designed a course meant for anyone looking to gain that knowledge. In 24 insightful lectures, he presents you with the fundamentals of game theory in a manner that is both engaging and easy to understand.

    To start building a more straightforward, accurate understanding of current breakthroughs in neuroscience, you have to start by shattering popular brain myths.Each of these 24 lectures takes as its focus a single powerful, prevalent brain myth, and uses it as a launch pad from which to explore myriad topics in neuroscience: decision making, memory, dreams, emotions, neuroplasticity, consciousness, mental illness, and much more.Our memory is an accurate, objective record of the past. Our senses reflect the world as it really exists. Our dreams have hidden meanings. We are only using 10% of our total brain power. Modern technology (including social media) is making us less intelligent. Dr. Viskontas doesn't just settle for obliterating these and other myths. Instead, she replaces them with scientific facts gathered from experiments, research, and case studies. The result is an eye-opening adventure into the latest understanding of why the brain works the way it does.Whatever order you enjoy these lectures in, you'll be left with insights that will help you better determine the hard scientific truths behind the breaking news (and myths) of tomorrow.

    There are good reasons that language fascinates us so. It not only defines humans as a species, placing us head and shoulders above even the most proficient animal communicators, but it also beguiles us with its endless mysteries. For example: * How did different languages come to be? * Why isn’t there just a single language? * How does a language change, and when it does, is that change indicative of decay or growth? * How does a language become extinct? Dr. John McWhorter, one of America’s leading linguists and a frequent commentator on network television and National Public Radio, addresses these and other questions as he takes you on an in-depth, 36-lecture tour of the development of human language, showing how a single tongue spoken 150,000 years ago has evolved into the estimated 6,000 languages used around the world today.An accomplished scholar, Professor McWhorter is also a skilled popularizer, whose book The Power of Babel was called "startling, provocative, and remarkably entertaining," by the San Diego Union-Tribune.The London Times called him "a born teacher." And Steven Pinker, best known as the author of The Language Instinct, offered this praise for the book: "McWhorter’s arguments are sharply reasoned, refreshingly honest, and thoroughly original."Course Lecture Titles1. What Is Language? 2. When Language Began 3. How Language Changes—Sound Change 4. How Language Changes—Building New Material 5. How Language Changes—Meaning and Order 6. How Language Changes—Many Directions 7. How Language Changes—Modern English 8. Language Families—Indo-European 9. Language Families—Tracing Indo-European 10. Language Families—Diversity of Structures 11. Language Families—Clues to the Past 12. The Case Against the World’s First Language 13. The Case For the World’s First Language 14. Dialects—Subspecies of Species 15. Dialects—Where Do You Draw the Line? 16. Dialects—Two Tongues in One Mouth 17. Dialects—The Standard as Token of the Past 18. Dialects—Spoken Style, Written Style 19. Dialects—The Fallacy of Blackboard Grammar 20. Language Mixture—Words 21. Language Mixture—Grammar 22. Language Mixture—Language Areas 23. Language Develops Beyond the Call of Duty 24. Language Interrupted 25. A New Perspective on the Story of English 26. Does Culture Drive Language Change? 27. Language Starts Over—Pidgins 28. Language Starts Over—Creoles I 29. Language Starts Over—Creoles II 30. Language Starts Over—Signs of the New 31. Language Starts Over—The Creole Continuum 32. What Is Black English? 33. Language Death—The Problem 34. Language Death—Prognosis 35. Artificial Languages 36. Finale—Master Class

    The truth is, while metaphysics is among the oldest strands of philosophical thought—an inquiry into the very nature ofreality—metaphysics is also on the cutting edge of today’s scientific discoveries.

    The heart of this accessible series is a thorough examination of decision making at three key levels. First, you'll look at decisions made at the individual level, where, among the many things you'll learn is that intuition is more than just a gut instinct and, in fact, represents a powerful pattern recognition capability. Then, you'll explore decisions made at the group level, where you'll try to answer the question of whether groups are "smarter" and more capable of making critical decisions than individuals. And finally, you'll pull back to analyze organizational decision making, in which Professor Roberto demonstrates how some organizations have encouraged and reliably performed vigilant decision making in the face of risky scenarios. Whether you're the head of a Fortune 500 company, a government agency, or an everyday household, you constantly make decisions important to you and those immediately around you. These lectures offer you a toolbox of practical knowledge and skills that you can apply to various decisions - whether large or small - in your everyday life and work. Professor Roberto's lively lectures are packed with useful anecdotes, tools, and advice designed to improve your own ability to make informed decisions. As you explore the intriguing process of making a good decision, you'll strengthen your grip on individual theories of decision making and the situations that illustrate them. Disclaimer: Please note that this recording may include references to supplemental texts or print references that are not essential to the program and not supplied with your purchase.©2009 The Teaching Company, LLC (P)2009 The Great Courses

    Kasser launches an ambitious and exciting inquiry into what makes science science, using the tools of philosophy to ask: * Why is science so successful? * Is there such a thing as the scientific method? * How do we distinguish science from pseudoscience? * Is science rational, cumulative, and progressive? Focusing his investigation on the vigorous debate over the nature of science that unfolded during the past 100 years, Professor Kasser covers important philosophers such as Karl Popper, W. V. Quine, Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, Imre Lakatos, Carl Hempel, Nelson Goodman, and Bas van Fraassen.All of these thinkers responded in one way or another to logical positivism, the dominant movement influencing the philosophy of science during the first half of the 20 th century. Logical positivism attempted to ground science exclusively in what could be known through direct experience and logic.It sounds reasonable, but logical positivism proved to be riddled with serious problems, and its eventual demise is an object lesson in how truly difficult it is—perhaps impossible—to secure the logical foundations of a subject that seems so unassailably logical: science.

    Each part contains six audio tapes and a booklet.

    Clear Science Teaching to Set the Stage for an Awe-Inspiring Course Created for a lay audience and readily accessible, in this course science always takes precedence over drama. The lectures are certainly entertaining, often funny, even awe-inspiring at times, as befits the subject matter. Even though you will be entertained, you will be learning good science. Clear introductions to essential principles of physics support these lectures, including density, quantum theory, gravity, and the General Theory of Relativity. Professor Neil deGrasse Tyson also includes forays into disciplines such as chemistry and biology as needed to explain events in astronomy. For example, Dr. Tyson begins one lecture at a point 13 billion years ago, when all space, matter, and energy in the known universe were contained in a volume less than one-trillionth the size of a pinpoint-about the size of a single atom. By the time he finishes, the cosmos has been stretched, the planets and our Earth formed, and 70 percent of existing Earth species have been wiped out by a gigantic asteroidclearing the way for the evolution of humanity. Along the way he has touched on Einstein's famous equation, E=mc2; on the four forces that were once unified in the early cosmos in a way physicists are still trying to explain; and on the chemical enrichment of the universe by exploding supernovae, which give the universe its necessary supply of heavier elements including oxygen, nitrogen, iron and, most important, carbon. Carbon, we learn, is a "sticky" atom, capable of making more kinds of molecules than all other elements combined. It's the ideal element with which to experiment in the building of life forms and is, of course, the element responsible for the remarkable diversity of life, including us. As Dr. Tyson notes, we are made of stardust, just as the planets are. And he has created a course that explains exactly how that came to be, beginning with a grounding in the basic "machinery" of matter, forces, and energy that has been discovered on Earth and which also reveals itself throughout the universe. The Stark and Violent Beauty of the Universe With this basic foundation in place, explanations of cosmic events fall logically into place, and the realities of the universe-including its eventual demise-are revealed in stark and often violent beauty. You learn: how Saturn's rings were formed, and why they will eventually be lost why low-density conditions are necessary to produce the drama of the northern and southern auroras why even the most jagged and wild of the Earth's mountain ranges are, from a cosmic standpoint, really part of a perfectly smooth sphere how black holes are formed and the extraordinary way in which they can wreak havoc in the universe how asteroids moving through space represent threats of extraordinary consequence to Earth, no matter how long those threats may take to be realized why the seemingly infinite panorama of celestial bodies revealed by the Hubble Space Telescope's famous "Deep Field" so intrigued astronomers how astronomers actually look for new planets, why the odds seem overwhelmingly in favor of some kind of life out there, whether we ever make contact or not. Most important, none of these ideas are presented as isolated "space factoids" that serve no purpose but to entertain. They are there to illustrate and reinforce the key principles of physics and astrophysics that are continually being presented in this course. But the inclusion of real science doesn't prevent Dr. Tyson from having some fun, either. When it's time to show how a black hole might remove one from the universe, he leads you right up to the "event horizon" and slips you in-feet first. Since the event horizon represents the point within which nothing, not even light, can escape, you might think this is a bad idea. And you would be right. But as you plummet toward the "singularity" at the heart of the black hole, you will learn firsthand about the interesting effects of gravity truly unleashed, including what physicists refer to, with a straight face, as "spaghettification." (Actually, Professor Tyson recommends that you be sucked in to a large black hole rather than a small one. You'll still be spaghettified, but it won't happen as quickly.) But make no mistake: Dr. Tyson does not consider the cosmos a laughing matter, this kind of whimsical touch notwithstanding. In spite of his training, he remains, admittedly, still in awe of his subject. And he has created a course that might well produce the same feeling in you.

    CBT illuminates the links between thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and physical health and uses those connections to develop concrete plans for self-improvement. Built on a solid foundation of neurological and behavioral research, CBT is an approach almost anyone can use for promoting greater mental health and improving quality of life. In 24 engaging half-hour lectures, you'll build a robust and effective self-improvement toolkit with the expert guidance of Professor Satterfield of the University of California, San Francisco. You will explore CBT's roots in Socratic and stoic philosophy, build a toolkit of CBT techniques, and hear about the latest research about its outcomes. Additionally this intriguing and practical course allows you to take on the role of medical student, physician, psychologist, and patient. Throughout the course you'll explore issues that cause people to seek out therapy. In some cases you'll get to hear Dr. Satterfield working with a patient, and in others you'll be delving into research to find what causes issues and how CBT helps to resolve them. Everyone has something about their life that they would like to improve. With the tools in CBT and the desire to make your situation better, you can create lasting change in your life.