Psychological Science

After several years living abroad, the fictional protagonist of Galatea 2.2 - Richard Powers - returns to the US as Humanist-in-Residence at the enormous Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences. There he runs afoul of Philip Lentz, a cognitive neurologist intent upon modeling the human brain. Lentz involves Powers in an outlandish and irresistible project: to train a neural net on a canonical list of Great Books. Through repeated tutorials, the device grows gradually more worldly, until it demands to know its own name, sex, race, and reason for existing.

The penalty for Dani Cumali's murder: $84,000. Theo works in the Criminal Audit Office. He assesses each crime that crosses his desk and makes sure the correct debt to society is paid in full. These days, there's no need to go to prison—provided that you can afford to pay the penalty for the crime you've committed. If you're rich enough, you can get away with murder. But Dani's murder is different. When Theo finds her lifeless body, and a hired killer standing over her and calmly calling the police to confess, he can't let her death become just an entry on a balance sheet.

The Earth has been invaded by the Illyri, a beautiful, civilized, yet ruthless alien race. Humanity has been conquered, but still it fights the invaders. The Resistance grows stronger, for it is the young people of Earth who battle the Illyri.

When her stepmother dies, Caro returns to her childhood home in the rural English countryside. She hadn’t seen Elizabeth in years, but the remote farmhouse offers refuge from a bad relationship and a chance to start again. But going through Elizabeth’s belongings unearths memories Caro would rather stay buried. In particular, the story her stepmother would tell her about two little girls and the terrible thing they do. As heavy snow traps Caro in the village, where her neighbours stare and whisper, Caro is forced to question why Elizabeth hated her so much and what she was hiding.

All across the country, people are waking up to lives different than the ones they fell asleep to. Are they suffering from False Memory Syndrome, a mysterious, new disease that afflicts people with vivid memories of a life they never lived? Or is something far more sinister behind the fracturing of reality all around him? Miles away, neuroscientist Helena Smith is developing a technology that allows us to preserve our most intense memories and relive them. If she succeeds, anyone will be able to re-experience a first kiss, the birth of a child, the final moment with a dying parent.

These lectures were intended by Ouspensky as introductory material for people interested in the work in England. This material is still unmatched as a brief statement of the work's psychological ideas. Designed to be read aloud at weekly meetings of small groups of people interested in the work, they are almost a basic primer of Gurdjieff's psychological ideas on consciousness and spiritual development.

It all starts with the radio. Dorothy's husband has left for work, and she is at the kitchen sink washing the dishes, listening to classical music. Suddenly, the music fades out and a soft, close, dreamy voice says, "Don't worry, Dorothy." A couple weeks later, there is a special interruption in regular programming. The announcer warns all listeners of an escaped sea monster. That afternoon, the seven-foot-tall lizard man walks through Dorothy's kitchen door. She is frightened at first, but there is something attractive about the monster, and the two begin a tender, clandestine affair.

A man is severely injured in a mysterious accident, receives an outrageous sum in legal compensation, and has no idea what to do with it. Then, one night, an ordinary sight sets off a series of bizarre visions he can’t quite place. How he goes about bringing his visions to life---and what happens afterward---makes for one of the most riveting, complex, and unusual novels in recent memory.

In the wake of their Aunt Amity's suicide, Scott and Madeline Madden are summoned to Caveat, the eerie, decaying mansion in the Hollywood hills in which they were raised. But their decadent and reclusive cousins, the malicious wheelchair-bound Claimayne and his sister, Ariel, do not welcome Scott and Madeline's return to the childhood home they once shared. While Scott desperately wants to go back to their shabby South-of-Sunset lives, he cannot pry his sister away from this haunted "House of Usher in the Hollywood Hills" that is a conduit for the supernatural.

One night in an isolated college town in the hills of Southern California, a first-year student stumbles into her dorm room, falls asleep - and doesn't wake up. She sleeps through the morning, into the evening. Her roommate, Mei, cannot rouse her. Neither can the paramedics, nor the perplexed doctors at the hospital. When a second girl falls asleep, and then a third, Mei finds herself thrust together with an eccentric classmate as panic takes hold of the college and spreads to the town.

Hypnotic Writing Lab: Leveraging Psychological Triggers for Persuasive Writing What if your words didn’t just tell a story but transformed how people think, feel, and respond? Hypnotic Writing Lab takes you beyond traditional storytelling, diving deep into the psychological triggers that create lasting impact. Whether you’re crafting narratives for influence, entertainment, or persuasion, this book offers the tools to captivate your audience on both conscious and subconscious levels. In this immersive guide, you’ll learn how to: Leverage Subconscious Triggers: Tap into universal human...

Every weekend, in basements and car parks across the country, young men with good white-collar jobs and absent fathers take off their shoes and shirts and fight each other barehanded. Then they go back to those jobs with blackened eyes and loosened teeth and the sense that they can handle anything. Fight Club is the invention of Tyler Durden, projectionist, waiter and dark, anarchic genius. And it's only the beginning of his plans for revenge on the world.

Jeff Winston's life is not how he imagined it would be. An unhappy marriage and unrewarding job - and then he died. Aged 43. And woke up again, back in his college room, in 1963, age 18. With all his memories intact. If he applies those memories, he can be rich - he can have anything he wants - in this new chance at life. Until he dies at 43 and wakes up in his 18-year-old body again...and again in a continuous 25-year cycle, each time starting from scratch at the age of 18 to reclaim lost loves, make a fortune or remedy past mistakes.

Casey Watson is back, doing the job she does best - rolling up her sleeves and fostering the children who, on first meeting, seem like hopeless cases. But when she meets Miller and discovers the truth about his disturbing childhood, even Casey begins to doubt if this child will ever be able to accept love. Found naked and alone on a railway track, Miller was just five when he was first admitted into the care system.

There is a small town in Oregon called Middle Falls. When people die there, one of three things happens to them: They pass on to what is next. They are recycled to an earlier point in their life. They become spirits who are tethered to the spot where they died. This is the story of a tethered spirit.

Seattle police detective Joanne Walker started the year mostly dead, and she’s ending it trying not to be consumed by evil. Literally. She’s proven she can handle the gods and the walking dead. But a cannibalistic serial killer? That’s more than even she bargained for. What’s worse, the brutal demon can only be tracked one way. If Joanne is to stop its campaign of terror, she’ll have to hunt it where it lives: the Lower World, a shamanistic plane of magic and spirits.

The first novel Nabokov wrote while living in America, and the most overtly political novel he ever wrote, Bend Sinister is a modern classic. While it is filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay, it is, first and foremost, a haunting and compelling narrative about a civilized man caught in the tyranny of a police state. Professor Adam Krug, the country's foremost philosopher, offers the only hope of resistance to Paduk, dictator and leader of the Party of the Average Man.

For fans of high-concept thrillers such as Annihilation and The Girl with All the Gifts, this breathtaking dystopian psychological thriller follows an American academic stranded at a Swiss hotel as the world descends into nuclear war - along with 20 other survivors - who becomes obsessed with identifying a murderer in their midst after the body of a young girl is discovered in one of the hotel’s water tanks.

After an explosive showdown with the farmhands on Farm 33, Mr. Whyte urges Cole to travel to Farm 111 to meet the Creator. There, he learns about the Lifeline and the imminent threat that the machines pose to mankind’s very existence. His mission is simple: travel to Lunar Base 9, become part of the inmate population and deliver the virus to the agent on the inside. The only problem is that Lunar Base 9 is a prison filled with gangs, guards, a menacing deputy, and a devious warden who runs a tight ship. It doesn’t take long for Cole to find out that it’s not so easy being the new guy ...

A virus nearly wiped out the human race. In order to survive, people are segregated into three tiers. Those with the best genetic viability get the most resources, and Kate and Eric are lucky enough to end up in Tier One.