Brain Science Neuroscience

How does a neural network become a brain? While neurobiologists investigate how nature accomplishes this feat, computer scientists interested in AI strive to achieve this through technology. The Self-Assembling Brain tells the stories of both fields, exploring the historical and modern approaches taken by the scientists pursuing answers to the quandary: What information is necessary to make an intelligent neural network? As Peter Robin Hiesinger argues, "the information problem" underlies both fields.

There's a revolution taking place that most businesses are still unaware of. The understanding of how our brains work has radically shifted, exploding long-held myths about our everyday cognitive performance and fundamentally changing the way we engage and succeed in the workplace. Combining their expertise in both neuropsychology and management consulting, neuropsychologist Friederike Fabritius and leadership expert Dr. Hans W. Hagemann present simple yet powerful strategies.

The march of climate change is stunning and vicious, with rising seas, extreme weather, and oppressive heat blanketing the globe. But its effects on our very brains constitute a public-health crisis that has gone largely unreported. Based on seven years of research, this book by the award-winning journalist and trained neuroscientist Clayton Page Aldern, synthesizes the emerging neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral economics of global warming and brain health. A masterpiece of literary journalism, this book shows readers how a changing environment is changing us today, from the inside out.

Throughout history, two perspectives on the world have dueled in our minds: the extrinsic—that of mechanism and physics—and the intrinsic—that of feelings, thoughts, and ideas. The intrinsic perspective allows us to tell stories about our lives, to chart our anger and our lust, to understand our psychologies. The extrinsic allows us to chart the physical world, to build upon it, and to travel across it. These perspectives have never been reconciled; they almost seem to exist on different planes of thought.

Why do minds exist? How did mud and stone develop into beings that can experience longing, regret, love, and compassion - beings that are aware of their own experience? Until recently, science offered few answers to these existential questions. Journey of the Mind is the first book to offer a unified account of the mind that explains how consciousness, language, the Self, and civilization emerged incrementally out of chaos.

How does the brain work? How different is a human brain from other creatures' brains? Is the human brain still evolving? In this fascinating book, Michael O'Shea provides a non-technical introduction to the main issues and findings in current brain research, and gives a sense of how neuroscience addresses questions about the relationship between the brain and the mind.

Why do you love? Why do you lie? What makes you happy? Every thought you have comes from one place: your brain. But what makes it tick? How much of it have we decoded, and how much of it remains an impenetrable mystery? Join author and cartoonist Jorge Cham and neuroscientist Dwayne Godwin on a deep dive into the fascinating world of the human brain, in which they will explore questions such as: What is consciousness? Where is you in the brain? And do we have free will? All while illuminating everything we know (and DON’T know) about one of the most complex objects in the known universe.

We’ve come a long way. The earliest human had a brain as small as a child’s fist; ours are four times bigger, with spectacular abilities and potential we are only just beginning to understand. This is How the Mind Changed, a seven-million-year journey through our own heads, packed with vivid stories, groundbreaking science, and thrilling surprises. Discover how memory has almost nothing to do with the past.

The entirety of the human brain’s 4-billion-year story can be summarised as the culmination of five evolutionary breakthroughs, starting from the very first brains, all the way to the modern human brains. Each breakthrough emerged from new sets of brain modifications, and equipped animals with a new suite of intellectual faculties. These five breakthroughs are the organising map to this book, and they make up our itinerary for our adventure back in time. Each breakthrough also has fascinating corollaries to breakthroughs in AI.

Nurturing Our Humanity offers a new perspective on our personal and social options in today's world, showing how we can build societies that support our great human capacities for consciousness, caring, and creativity. It brings together findings—largely overlooked—from the natural and social sciences debunking the popular idea that we are hard-wired for selfishness, war, rape, and greed. Its groundbreaking new approach reveals connections between disturbing trends like climate change denial and regressions to strongman rule.

In today's technological society, with an unprecedented amount of information at our fingertips, learning plays a more central role than ever. In How We Learn, Stanislas Dehaene decodes its biological mechanisms, delving into the neuronal, synaptic and molecular processes taking place in the brain. He explains why youth is such a sensitive period, during which brain plasticity is maximal, but also assures us that our abilities continue into adulthood, and that we can enhance our learning and memory at any age.

In Idiot Brain, Dr. Dean Burnett celebrates blind spots, blackouts, insomnia, and all the other downright laughable things our minds do to us while also exposing the many mistakes we've made in our quest to understand how our brains actually work. This is the best kind of popular science - lucid, funny, and whip smart - from a debut author who will be tickling funny bones and firing neurons for a long time to come.

An astonishing new scientific discovery called neuroplasticity is overthrowing the centuries-old notion that the adult human brain is fixed and unchanging. It is, instead, able to change its own structure and function, even into old age. In this revolutionary look at the brain, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Norman Doidge, M.D., provides an introduction to both the brilliant scientists championing neuroplasticity and the people whose lives they’ve transformed.

Brilliantly exploring today's cutting edge brain research, Mind Wide Open allows readers to understand themselves and the people in their lives as never before. Using a mix of experiential reportage, personal storytelling, and fresh scientific discovery, Steven Johnson describes how the brain works and how its systems connect to the day-to-day realities of individual lives.

In the mid-20th century, Michael S. Gazzaniga made one of the great discoveries in the history of neuroscience: split-brain theory, the notion that the right and left hemispheres of the brain can act independently from each other and have different strengths.

"... illuminating ..." - The Dalai Lama. Sacred Pathways (proofread and corrected, 2024) explains how the brain areas that support Near-Death Experiences are also the basis for mystic experience during our lives. It's a 21st century synthesis of science and spirituality by brain scientist Todd Murphy, in which spiritual, religious, and mystic states of consciousness are explained with neuroscience. Edited and re-edited to make the science easy to understand, it's a readable introduction to the science of the spiritual. Murphy uses Darwin's theory of evolution to understand the human death-...

Parker describes the discovery of tetrahydocannbinol (THC), the main psychoactive component of cannabis, and the further discovery of cannabinoid receptors in the brain. She explains that the brain produces chemicals similar to THC, which act on the same receptors as THC, and shows that the endocannabinoid system is involved in all aspects of brain functioning.

A path-breaking journey into the brain, showing how perception, thought, and action are products of "maps" etched into your gray matter - and how technology can use them to read your mind.

Neuroscientist Camilla Nord reveals how the small things we do to lift our mood during the course of a day - a piece of chocolate, a coffee, chatting to a friend - often work on the same pathways in our brain as the latest pharmacological treatments for mental health disorders. Whether they help us to manage pain, learn from experience or expend energy on the things that are important for our survival, these conscious actions are part of a complex self-regulating process that is unique to each individual and the constant backdrop to our everyday lives.

This title consists of 3 separate titles, namely: Title 1 - Synesthesia (Learn what causes this condition, how to notice signs, as well as how to verify whether you have it or not.), title 2 - The Placebo Effect (what is it and does it truly work? What are its health advantages, its medical benefits?), and title 3 - NLP training, Narcolepsy, Acupuncture, and Alzheimer’s (learn now how to improve your health and help those people in your life that are suffering from Alzheimer’s and narcolepsy).