Brain Mysteries

"One of America's most courageous young journalists" and the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling memoir Brain on Fire investigates the shocking mystery behind the dramatic experiment that revolutionized modern medicine (NPR). Doctors have struggled for centuries to define insanity--how...

In Sweden, hundreds of refugee children fall into a state that resembles sleep for months or years at a time. In Le Roy, a town in upstate New York, teenage girls develop involuntary twitches and seizures that spread like a conta­gion. In the U.S. Embassy in Cuba, employees experience headaches...

The current state of confusion about the real nature of spiritual experience is due to a lack of understanding of how the brain functions as a channel for the expression of consciousness. In this book, Gopi Krishna challenges scientists and psychiatrists alike to stop ignoring the important part the physical brain plays in our development.

For 200 years, a noble Venetian family has suffered from an inherited disease that strikes their members in middle age, stealing their sleep, eating holes in their brains, and ending their lives in a matter of months. In Papua New Guinea, a primitive tribe is nearly obliterated by a sickness whose chief symptom is uncontrollable laughter. Across Europe, millions of sheep rub their fleeces raw before collapsing. What these strange conditions share is their cause: prions.

People in Adenville are breathing a sigh of relief. It seems that Tom D. Fitzgerald, the Great Brain, has truly reformed. For months, not one kid has been swindled and not one stunt has been pulled. But when he gets a new bike for Christmas, the Great Brain heads full speed into his old ways...

Each of us will know physical pain in our lives, but none of us knows when it will come or how long it will stay. Today as much as 10 percent of the population of the United States suffers from chronic pain. It is more widespread, misdiagnosed, and undertreated than any major disease. While recent research has shown that pain produces pathological changes to the brain and spinal cord, many doctors and patients still labor under misguided cultural notions and outdated scientific dogmas.

Do you perform unnecessary rituals in your daily routine? Are you a hoarder, afraid to throw out anything, no matter how useless? Are you unable to control runaway thoughts? If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, you may be among the five million Americans who suffer from OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder), a mental disorder that can wreak havoc in the daily lives of its sufferers and their families. Dr. Jeffrey M. Schwartz can help.

With a 4-page full-color insert, and black-and-white illustrations throughout Why do some innocent kids grow up to become cold-blooded serial killers? Is bad biology partly to blame? For more than three decades Adrian Raine has been researching the biological roots of violence and establishing...

“Holding brain science in one hand and rich emotional presence in the other, this book feels timely and necessary.”—Shauna Niequist, New York Times bestselling author of Present Over Perfect Why is there such a gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? The host of Ask...

How does one begin to treat such cases, to counsel people whose lives may be changed forever? How does one train the next generation of clinicians to deal with the moral and medical aspects of brain disease? Dr. Ropper and his colleague answer these questions by taking the listener into a rarified world where lives and minds hang in the balance.

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.

Archaeologist Louise Cantor returns home to Sweden, and makes a devastating discovery: her only child, twenty-eight-year-old Henrik, dead in his bed. The police rule his death a suicide, but she knows he was murdered; her quest to find out what really happened to Henrik takes her across the globe to Barcelona, where her son kept a secret apartment; Sydney, Australia, to find Aron, her estranged ex-husband and Henrik's father; and to Maputo, Mozambique, where she learns the awful truth behind an AIDS hospice.

""A breakthrough book. In a world of increasingly specialized knowledge, it takes a particular gift and some stubbornness to cut across the fields of neuroscience, psychiatry, philosophy and psychology and to ask the fundamental question: Why it is that we can allow our best selves to be...

There are plenty of books that profess to tell you the meaning of life. But where can you go to find answers to the little mysteries of life that drive you nuts until you find their solution? Imponderables are questions that cannot be answered by numbers or measurements or standard reference books, and Feldman has devoted his life to the eradication of all imponderables.

People behave in strange ways. We sometimes giggle when someone falls down, swear we've been to places we haven't, or continue believing in something despite scientific evidence to the contrary. For more than a decade, Scientific American MIND's long-running feature "Ask the Brains" has addressed questions from their readers on the quirks and quandaries of human behavior, psychology, and neurology. Here, in Ask the Brains, Part 1, they’ve compiled some of the best and most interesting inquiries about the human brain.

The long-awaited craft book from Steve Almond, based on three decades of writing, failing, and trying again. In Truth is the Arrow, Mercy is the Bow, Steve Almond shares the insights gleaned from three decades as a beloved teacher and mentor, and a considerably less-beloved literary rabble...

When Mia Sinclair-Kroner wakes from a coma, all she can remember are the movies she’s known and loved. Her college friends quickly assemble for a weekend party, in an effort to help her remember. But with old friends come old wounds, and it soon becomes clear that Mia’s accident might not have been an accident at all.

The Memory Thief is the remarkable true story of a team of doctors who - through years of scientific sleuthing and observant care - discover a surprising connection between opioids and memory, one that holds promise and peril for any one of us.

When CIA Agent Cameron Hansen receives a call from his friend Mitzi Lenz, an FBI pathologist, regarding her missing father, they soon are embroiled in a desperate race to thwart Hansen's old enemy, Juan Carlos Perez, a powerful tech magnate and international drug trafficker. Perez is doing secret experimental brain implant operations on victims kidnapped from Mexican farms. As Cameron and Mitzi struggle to understand the purpose of the hi-tech implants, Perez draws closer to his ambitious goal.

Matt, a shy but engaging and resourceful student, discovers that his recently deceased father was involved in research that could enable the construction of the world's first conscious machine. Matt's enquiries lead to him being kidnapped, as he is caught in the crossfire between two groups pursuing that goal - one led by a Russian billionaire and another backed by the US military. Matt has to do more than simply survive. He has to harness these powerful forces to his own ends, and his life as well as his family's is at stake.