Best of the Brain from Scientific American

Best of the Brain from Scientific American PDF Author: Floyd E. Bloom
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Publisher description

Best of the Brain from Scientific American

Best of the Brain from Scientific American PDF Author: Floyd E. Bloom
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Publisher description

The Scientific American Day in the Life of Your Brain

The Scientific American Day in the Life of Your Brain PDF Author: Judith Horstman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470500514
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 18

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Book Description
Have you ever wondered what’s happening in your brain as you go through a typical day and night? This fascinating book presents an hour-by-hour round-the-clock journal of your brain’s activities. Drawing on the treasure trove of information from Scientific American and Scientific American Mind magazines as well as original material written specifically for this book, Judith Horstman weaves together a compelling description of your brain at work and at play. The Scientific American Day in the Life of Your Brain reveals what’s going on in there while you sleep and dream, how your brain makes memories and forms addictions and why we sometimes make bad decisions. The book also offers intriguing information about your emotional brain, and what’s happening when you’re feeling love, lust, fear and anxiety—and how sex, drugs and rock and roll tickle the same spots. Based on the latest scientific information, the book explores your brain’s remarkable ability to change, how your brain can make new neurons even into old age and why multitasking may be bad for you. Your brain is uniquely yours – but research is showing many of its day-to-day cycles are universal. This book gives you a look inside your brain and some insights into why you may feel and act as you do. The Scientific American Day in the Life of Your Brain is written in the entertaining, informative and easy-to-understand style that fans of Scientific American and Scientific American Mind magazine have come to expect.

The Scientific American Book of Love, Sex and the Brain

The Scientific American Book of Love, Sex and the Brain PDF Author: Judith Horstman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118109538
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Who do we love? Who loves us? And why? Is love really a mystery, or can neuroscience offer some answers to these age-old questions? In her third enthralling book about the brain, Judith Horstman takes us on a lively tour of our most important sex and love organ and the whole smorgasbord of our many kinds of love-from the bonding of parent and child to the passion of erotic love, the affectionate love of companionship, the role of animals in our lives, and the love of God. Drawing on the latest neuroscience, she explores why and how we are born to love-how we're hardwired to crave the companionship of others, and how very badly things can go without love. Among the findings: parental love makes our brain bigger, sex and orgasm make it healthier, social isolation makes it miserable-and although the craving for romantic love can be described as an addiction, friendship may actually be the most important loving relationship of your life. Based on recent studies and articles culled from the prestigious Scientific American and Scientific American Mind magazines, The Scientific American Book of Love, Sex, and the Brain offers a fascinating look at how the brain controls our loving relationships, most intimate moments, and our deep and basic need for connection.

The Scientific American Brave New Brain

The Scientific American Brave New Brain PDF Author: Judith Horstman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470602813
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
This fascinating and highly accessible book presents fantastic but totally feasible projections of what your brain may be capable of in the near future. It shows how scientific breakthroughs and amazing research are turning science fiction into science fact. In this brave new book, you'll explore: How partnerships between biological sciences and technology are helping the deaf hear, the blind see, and the paralyzed communicate. How our brains can repair and improve themselves, erase traumatic memories How we can stay mentally alert longer—and how we may be able to halt or even reverse Alzheimers How we can control technology with brain waves, including prosthetic devices, machinery, computers—and even spaceships or clones. Insights into how science may cure fatal diseases, and improve our intellectual and physical productivity Judith Horstman presents a highly informative and entertaining look at the future of your brain, based on articles from Scientific American and Scientific American Mind magazines, and the work of today’s visionary neuroscientists.

The Brain Electric

The Brain Electric PDF Author: Malcolm Gay
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374139849
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Leading neuroscience researchers are racing to unlock the secrets of the mind. On the cusp of decoding brain signals that govern motor skills, they are developing miraculous technologies that will enable paraplegics and wounded soldiers to move prosthetic limbs and will give all of us the power to manipulate computers and other objects through thought alone. These fiercely competitive scientists are vying for government and venture capital funding, prestige, and wealth. Part life-altering cure, part science fiction, part Defense Department dream, these cutting edge brain-computer interfaces promise to improve lives-but they also hold the potential to augment soldiers' combat capabilities. In The Brain Electric, Malcolm Gay follows the dramatic emergence of these technologies, taking us behind the scenes in operating rooms, startups, and research labs, where the future is unfolding. With access to many of the field's top scientists, Gay illuminates this extraordinary race-where science, medicine, profit, and war converge-for the first time. But this isn't just a story about technology. At the heart of the scientists' research is a group of brave patient-volunteers, whose lives are given new meaning through these experiments. The Brain Electric asks us to rethink our relationship to technology, our bodies, even consciousness itself, challenging our assumptions about what it means to be human.

The Man Who Wasn't There

The Man Who Wasn't There PDF Author: Anil Ananthaswamy
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101984325
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
In the tradition of Oliver Sacks, science journalist Anil Ananthaswamy skillfully inspects the bewildering connections among brain, body, mind, self, and society by examining a range of neuropsychological ailments from autism and Alzheimer’s to out-of-body experiences and body integrity identity disorder Award-winning science writer Anil Ananthaswamy smartly explores the concept of self by way of several mental conditions that eat away at patients’ identities, showing we learn a lot about being human from people with a fragmented or altered sense of self. Ananthaswamy travelled the world to meet those who suffer from “maladies of the self” interviewing patients, psychiatrists, philosophers and neuroscientists along the way. He charts how the self is affected by Asperger’s, autism, Alzheimer’s, epilepsy, schizophrenia, among many other mental conditions, revealing how the brain constructs our sense of self. Each chapter is anchored with stories of people who experience themselves differently from the norm. Readers meet individuals in various stages of Alzheimer’s disease where the loss of memory and cognition results in the loss of some aspects of the self. We meet a woman who recalls the feeling of her first major encounter with schizophrenia which she describes as an outside force controlling her. Ananthaswamy also looks at several less­ familiar conditions, such as Cotard’s syndrome, in which patients believe they are dead, and those with body integrity identity disorder, where the patient seeks to have a body part amputated because it “doesn’t belong to them.” Moving nimbly back and forth from the individual stories to scientific analysis The Man Who Wasn’t There is a wholly original exploration of the human self which raises fascinating questions about the mind-body connection.

Evolving Brains

Evolving Brains PDF Author: John Allman
Publisher: W. H. Freeman
ISBN: 9780716760382
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
How did the human brain with all its manifold capacities evolve from basic functions in simple organisms that lived nearly a billion years ago? John Allman addresses this question in Evolving Brains, a provocative study of brain evolution that introduces readers to some of the most exciting developments in science in recent years.

The Scientific American Book of the Brain

The Scientific American Book of the Brain PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781558219656
Category : Brain
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Twenty-six articles first published in Scientific American are arranged in sections on mapping the brain, reasoning and intelligence, memory and learning, behavior, disease of the brain and disorder of the mind, and consciousness. The authors, experts in the various aspects of neuroscience, address such topics as the genetics of cognitive abilities and disabilities, the split brain revisited, the neurobiology of fear, depression, Parkinson's disease, and the puzzle of conscious experience. The material is written at a level accessible to the serious lay person or nonspecialist. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Scientific American: Presenting Psychology

Scientific American: Presenting Psychology PDF Author: Deborah Licht
Publisher: Macmillan Higher Education
ISBN: 1319424945
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 2489

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Book Description
Written by two teachers and a science journalist, Presenting Psychology introduces the basics to psychology through magazine-style profiles and video interviews of real people, whose stories provide compelling contexts for the field’s key ideas.

Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep?

Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep? PDF Author: Timothy Verstynen
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069117315X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
A look at the true nature of the zombie brain Even if you've never seen a zombie movie or television show, you could identify an undead ghoul if you saw one. With their endless wandering, lumbering gait, insatiable hunger, antisocial behavior, and apparently memory-less existence, zombies are the walking nightmares of our deepest fears. What do these characteristic behaviors reveal about the inner workings of the zombie mind? Could we diagnose zombism as a neurological condition by studying their behavior? In Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep?, neuroscientists and zombie enthusiasts Timothy Verstynen and Bradley Voytek apply their neuro-know-how to dissect the puzzle of what has happened to the zombie brain to make the undead act differently than their human prey. Combining tongue-in-cheek analysis with modern neuroscientific principles, Verstynen and Voytek show how zombism can be understood in terms of current knowledge regarding how the brain works. In each chapter, the authors draw on zombie popular culture and identify a characteristic zombie behavior that can be explained using neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and brain-behavior relationships. Through this exploration they shed light on fundamental neuroscientific questions such as: How does the brain function during sleeping and waking? What neural systems control movement? What is the nature of sensory perception? Walking an ingenious line between seriousness and satire, Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep? leverages the popularity of zombie culture in order to give readers a solid foundation in neuroscience.