Showing titles in Neuroscience & Neuropsychology

From elementary schools to psychotherapy offices, mindfulness meditation is an increasingly mainstream practice. At the same time, trauma remains a fact of life. Drawing on a decade of research and clinical experience, psychotherapist and educator David Treleaven shows that mindfulness meditation - practiced without an awareness of trauma - can exacerbate symptoms of traumatic stress. This raises a crucial question: How can we minimize the potential dangers of mindfulness for survivors while leveraging its powerful benefits?

Explaining that an impaired capacity for connection to self and to others underlies most psychological and many physiological problems, clinicians Laurence Heller, PhD, and Aline LaPierre, PsyD, introduce the NeuroAffective Relational Model™ (NARM), a unified approach to developmental, attachment, and shock trauma that emphasizes working in the present moment. NARM is a somatically based psychotherapy that helps bring into awareness the parts of self that are disorganized and dysfunctional.

What makes you the way you are - and what makes each of us different from everyone else? In Innate, leading neuroscientist and popular science blogger Kevin Mitchell traces human diversity and individual differences to their deepest level: in the wiring of our brains.

Did you know that walking can improve your cognitive skills? That strengthening your muscular core reduces anxiety? That light stretching can combat a whole host of mental and bodily ailments, from stress to inflammation? We all know that exercise changes the way you think and feel. But scientists are just starting to discover exactly how it works. In Move!, Caroline Williams explores the emerging science of how movement opens up a hotline to our minds. Interviewing researchers and practitioners around the world, she reveals how you can work your body to improve your mind.

Is there a right way to study how the brain works? The most common approach involves the study of neural reactions to stimuli presented by an experimenter. György Buzsáki's The Brain from Inside Out examines why the outside-in framework for understanding brain function has become stagnant and points to new directions for understanding neural function. Building upon the success of 2011's Rhythms of the Brain, Professor Buzsáki presents the brain as a foretelling device that interacts with its environment through action and the examination of action's consequence.

With schools becoming more competitive and technology becoming increasingly distracting, today's students face a minefield of obstacles to academic success. Doing well in school isn't just a matter of smarts or more studying: It takes good habits, practical tools - and a healthy brain. Change Your Brain, Change Your Grades draws on Dr. Amen's experience as a neuroscientist and psychiatrist as well as the latest brain science to help you study more effectively, learn faster, and stay focused so you can achieve your academic goals.

Rewire is your personal guide to unpacking the neuroscience behind why we are subconsciously programmed to repeat certain habits and how we can do, or undo, any type of behaviour in order to achieve peak mental wellbeing. Neuroscientist Nicole Vignola will talk you through the principles of neuroplasticity and explain how her neurohack methods can help you change your behavioural patterns, enabling you to control how you react to whatever life throws your way, from regulating our stress response through to overcoming self-limiting beliefs.

Ever since publication of The Polyvagal Theory in 2011, demand for information about this innovative perspective has been constant. Here Stephen W. Porges brings together his most important writings since the publication of that seminal work. At its heart, polyvagal theory is about safety. It provides an understanding that feeling safe is dependent on autonomic states, and that our cognitive evaluations of risk in the environment, including identifying potentially dangerous relationships, play a secondary role to our visceral reactions to people and places.

In this extraordinary audiobook, Dr. Oliver Sacks recounts the stories of patients struggling to adapt to often bizarre worlds of neurological disorder. Here are people who can no longer recognise everyday objects or those they love; who are stricken with violent tics or shout involuntary obscenities, and yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents. If inconceivably strange, these brilliant tales illuminate what it means to be human.

In Social, renowned psychologist Matthew Lieberman explores groundbreaking research in social neuroscience, revealing that our need to connect with other people is even more fundamental, more basic, than our need for food or shelter. Because of this, our brain uses its spare time to learn about the social world-other people and our relation to them.

As with his previous best seller, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, in An Anthropologist on Mars Oliver Sacks uses case studies to illustrate the myriad ways in which neurological conditions can affect our sense of self, our experience of the world and how we relate to those around us. Writing with his trademark blend of scientific rigour and human compassion, he describes patients such as the colour-blind painter or the surgeon with compulsive tics that disappear in the operating theatre - patients for whom disorientation and alienation but also adaptation are inescapable facts of life.

Encompassing 10 mind-blowing (pun intended) lectures, Big Questions of Neuroscience invites you on a profound journey into the secrets of the human brain. Guided by neuroscience professor Suzana Herculano-Houzel, you’ll investigate some of the most perplexing and misunderstood issues in this cutting-edge scientific field. For example: Can you actually train your brain to become more intelligent over time or are you stuck with the brain you’re born with? Why does it take so long for your human brain to develop and what might some evolutionary benefits be for that tardiness?

In The Mind’s Eye, Oliver Sacks tells the stories of people who are able to navigate the world and communicate with others despite losing what many of us consider indispensable senses and abilities: the capacity to recognise faces, the sense of three-dimensional space, the ability to read, the sense of sight. For all of these people, the challenge is to adapt to a radically new way of being in the world - and The Mind’s Eye is testament to the myriad ways that we, as humans, are capable of rising to this challenge.

For half a century, we have been trained to believe that our right brain hemisphere is our emotional brain, while our left brain houses our rational thinking. Now neuroscience shows that it's not that simple: In fact, our emotional limbic tissue is evenly divided between our two hemispheres. Consequently, each hemisphere has both an emotional brain and a thinking brain. In this groundbreaking new book, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor presents these four distinct modules of cells as four characters that make up who we are.

By presenting the autism diagnosis through the lens of a disordered nervous system-that is, by applying Polyvagal Theory-this book opens new avenues for intervention and treatment, while challenging age-old assumptions of what autism means and how it presents itself.

In a world full of "life hacks", you can finally learn how to "hack" into the biochemistry of your brain. The information in this audiobook has helped countless people transform their lives by changing their minds. After finding herself at death's door and then healing from numerous "incurable" diseases, Heather McKean was on a mission to help empower others to have their own success story.

During extraordinary moments of consciousness - shock, meditative states and sudden mystical revelations, out-of-body experiences, or drug intoxication - our senses of time and self are altered; we may even feel time and self dissolving. These experiences have long been ignored by mainstream science. Recent research, however, has located the neural underpinnings of these altered states of mind. In this book, neuropsychologist Marc Wittmann reveals how experiences that disturb or widen our everyday understanding of the self can help solve the mystery of consciousness.

Professor Allison Friederichs will walk you through six lessons that can help you better know your own mind, and thus understand and transform your own methods of communication. You will learn how your brain acquires, processes, and retains information. You can then take that knowledge and apply it whenever you need to convey something to others, with the best possible results. While you may not have any control over how other people communicate, developing your own methods of connection and conversation can have a positive impact on both your personal and professional life.

Introduction to Ecological Psychology is a highly accessible book that offers an overview of the fundamental theoretical foundations of Ecological Psychology. The authors, Julia J. C. Blau and Jeffrey B. Wagman, provide a broad coverage of the topic, including discussion of perception-action as well as development, cognition, social interaction, and application to real world problems.

Perception is the foundation of human experience, but few of us understand how our own perception works. By revealing the startling truths about the brain and perception, Beau Lotto shows that the next big innovation is not a new technology: it is a new way of seeing. In his first major audiobook, Beau Lotto draws on over a decade of pioneering research to show how our brains play tricks on us.