Mental Brain

Brain plasticity, also known as neuroplasticity, is a term that refers to the brain's ability to change and adapt as a result of experience. Rewire Your Brain tackles the topic of neuroplasticity from a unique viewpoint. It provides you with a foundational understanding of the science behind this phenomenon.

Oliver Sacks' compassionate, compelling tales of people struggling to adapt to different neurological conditions have fundamentally changed the way we think of our own brains, and of the human experience. In Musicophilia, he examines the powers of music through the individual experiences of patients, musicians, and everyday people. He explores how catchy tunes can subject us to hours of mental replay, and how a surprising number of people acquire nonstop musical hallucinations that assault them night and day. Yet far more frequently, music goes right....

Discover key Cognitive Behavioral Therapy principles that will enable you to become a happier, more fulfilled, more effective, and more content person. This guide teaches simple clear techniques that will enable you to start living life to the fullest.

Mental wellness issues are at an all-time high, and most quick-fixes fail to provide a long-term solution. While billions of dollars are spent annually on feel-better products, most exclusively target the brain and come with a slew of damaging side effects. Mental Fitness outlines the groundbreaking research on the gut-brain-heart axis to improve mood, thinking, and energy through nutrition, mindset, and movements.

Welcome to the better half of your life. The New York Times best-selling author of The Female Brain explains how a woman’s brain gets “upgraded” in midlife, inspiring and guiding women to unlock their full potential. With guidance for navigating the perimenopausal and menopausal storm while it lasts, and actionable science-backed steps for preserving brain health for the rest of your life, The Upgrade is a stunning road map, told through intimate stories, to a new brain state and its incredible possibilities.

The Aesthetic Brain takes the listener on a wide-ranging journey through the world of beauty, pleasure, and art. Chatterjee uses neuroscience to probe how an aesthetic sense is etched in our minds and evolutionary psychology to explain why aesthetic concerns feature centrally in our lives. Along the way, Chatterjee addresses fundamental questions: What is beauty? Is beauty universal? How is beauty related to pleasure? What is art? Should art be beautiful? Do we have an instinct for art?

Chief CNN medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta helped countless people keep their brains sharp and effortlessly productive with KEEP SHARP. In 12 Weeks to a Sharper You, he now provides a step-by-step 12-week program to help you put his transformational ideas into daily practice. This workbook makes it easy to apply Gupta’s groundbreaking tips and research to establish healthy behaviors for life. The 12-week program will help you feel less anxious, sleep better, improve energy, think more clearly, and become more resilient to daily stress.

Dr. Oliver Sacks argues the migraine cannot be understood simply as an illness, but must be viewed as a complex condition with a unique role to play in each individual's life.

Why are some people so quick to recover from a setback while others wallow in despair? Why are some people so highly attuned to others that they seem psychic, while other people put both feet in it over and over again? Why are some people always up and others always down? In this hotly anticipated book, award-winning, pioneering neuroscientist Richard J. Davidson answers these questions by offering an entirely new model of our emotions - their origins, their power, and their malleability.

In Trauma and Memory, best-selling author Dr. Peter Levine (creator of the Somatic Experiencing approach) tackles one of the most difficult and controversial questions of PTSD/trauma therapy: Can we trust our memories? While some argue that traumatic memories are unreliable and not useful, others insist that we absolutely must rely on memory to make sense of past experience. Dr. Levine suggests that there are elements of truth in both camps.

The idea that “thoughts become things” has become a meme in popular culture. It’s held as a firm proposition in metaphysics, and some spiritual teachers ascribe infinite powers to the mind. But are these claims scientifically accurate? What does the scientific evidence tell us about the scope of the human mind to transform thoughts into reality?

Barbara Arrowsmith-Young was born with severe learning disabilities that caused teachers to label her slow, stubborn - or worse. As a child, she read and wrote everything backward, struggled to process concepts in language, continually got lost, and was physically uncoordinated. She could make no sense of an analogue clock. But by relying on her formidable memory and iron will, she made her way to graduate school, where she chanced upon research that inspired her to invent cognitive exercises to “fix” her own brain.

Most of us would agree that there’s a clear—and even obvious—connection between the things we believe and the way we behave. But what if our actions are driven not by our conscious values and beliefs but by hidden motivations we’re not even aware of? The “hidden brain” is Shankar Vedantam’s shorthand for a host of brain functions, emotional responses, and cognitive processes that happen outside our conscious awareness but have a decisive effect on how we behave.

Are you truly in danger or has your brain simply "tricked" you into thinking you are? In The Worry Trick, psychologist and anxiety expert David Carbonell shows how anxiety hijacks the brain and offers effective techniques to help you break the cycle of worry, once and for all. Anxiety is a powerful force. It makes us question ourselves and our decisions, causes us to worry about the future, and fills our days with dread and emotional turbulence.

This groundbreaking book explores the recent revolution in psychotherapy that has brought an understanding of the social nature of people's brains to a therapeutic context. Louis Cozolino is a master at synthesizing neuroscientific information and demonstrating how it applies to psychotherapy practice. New material on altruism, executive function, trauma, and change round out this essential book.

Have you ever felt stuck in the same toxic cycles—self-doubt, unhealthy relationships, or negative thoughts that just won’t go away? Maybe you don’t think of yourself as toxic, but sometimes, in certain situations, you notice behaviors you’re not proud of. You’re not alone. And most importantly—you’re not doomed to stay this way. This book isn’t about judging yourself or others. It’s about understanding where toxic patterns come from, how they take root, and how to finally let them go so you can build a life that feels lighter, healthier, and more fulfilling.

Images and sounds of war, natural disasters, and human-made devastation explicitly surround us and implicitly leave their imprint in our muscles, our belly and heart, our nervous systems, and the brains in our skulls. We each experience more digital data than we are capable of processing in a day, and this is leading to a loss of empathy and human contact. This loss of leisurely, sustained, face-to-face connection is making true presence a rare experience for many of us, and is neurally ingraining fast pace and split attention as the norm.

The answers to these questions are right behind our eyes. The greatest technology we have ever discovered on our planet is the three-pound organ carried in the vault of the skull. This book is not simply about what the brain is; it is about what it does. The magic of the brain is not found in the parts it’s made of but in the way those parts unceasingly reweave themselves in an electric, living fabric.

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.

We all know how to nudge our brains to perform better. A strong cup of coffee helps us get through a dull meeting, and a brisk walk helps us think more clearly. But what if some nudges could optimise how we focus, create and process information even more effectively, to take mental performance to new heights?