Neuroscience History

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE A “mesmerizing” (The New York Times Book Review) true story about a shocking crime and a mysterious illness that will forever change your notions of how we punish and how we heal—an expansion on one of the most popular This American Life episodes of...

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2022 by Literary Hub A leading microbiologist tackles the scientific and sociopolitical impact of viruses in twelve striking essays. Invisible in the food we eat, the people we kiss, and inside our own bodies, viruses flourish—with the power to shape not only...

In recent years, the advent of MRI technology seems to have unlocked the secrets of the human mind, revealing the sources of our deepest desires, intentions, and fears. As renowned psychiatrist and scholar Sally Satel and psychologist Scott O. Lilienfeld demonstrate in Brainwashed, however, the explanatory power of brain scans in particular and neuroscience more generally has been vastly overestimated.

Unpacks and pulls the curtain back on what happens to our brains and our behaviors each time we addictively engage social media and the influencers we encounter there. Individuals seeking to widen their tribes of friends, fans, and followers have an abundance of resources for building their...

With profound implications for our most foundational assumptions about gender, Gender Mosaic explains why there is no such thing as a male or female brain. For generations, we've been taught that women and men differ in profound and important ways. Women are more sensitive and emotional, whereas...

Alzheimer’s disease, a haunting and harrowing ailment, is one of the world’s most common causes of death. Alzheimer’s lingers for years, with patients’ outward appearance unaffected while their cognitive functions fade away. Patients lose the ability to work and live independently, to remember and recognize. There is still no proven way to treat Alzheimer’s because its causes remain unknown. Mind Thief is a comprehensive and engaging history of Alzheimer’s that demystifies efforts to understand the disease.

"With easygoing authority... [Fridland] offers context, and a welcoming spirit, to the many contentious realignments in our language."—The Wall Street Journal “Smart and funny—I loved it!" —Mignon Fogarty, author of New York Times bestseller Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for...

Most of us spend a significant part of the day in front of a screen. Our work and social lives play out through our computers, tablets and phones: on email, social media, video conference calls and gaming servers. But what is all this screen time doing to our health, our sleep, and our relationships? Professor Pete Etchells studies the way we use screens, and how they can affect us. In UNLOCKED, he delves into the real science behind the panic about our alleged device addiction and withering attention spans.

From the author of the New York Times bestseller Mind Wide Open comes a groundbreaking assessment of popular culture as it's never been considered before: through the lens of intelligence.Forget everything youâ€ve ever read about the age of dumbed-down, instant-gratification culture. In...

Dive into the fascinating world of how both your brain and AI learn through supervised learning! In this engaging and accessible book, neuroscientist Dr. Tursun Alkam takes you on a journey to explore the incredible learning capabilities of the human brain and the revolutionary world of Artificial Intelligence.

Dr. Dino Martins, an awarding-winning entomologist of Kenya's Turkana Basin, where life was born, unspools the hidden, squirming world of parasites—some of the most misunderstood, and important, creatures with whom we share the Earth (and our bodies!). “May this tusk root out the lice of the...

A young queer millennial physicist unveils some of the most mind-bending physics concepts in the universe—and uses them to illuminate their own fascinating life story “I see physics everywhere,” Karmela Padavic-Callaghan writes. “It offers itself to me when I try to make sense of all the...

From the world’s great concert halls to Los Angeles’s Skid Row, violinist Vijay Gupta’s searing memoir of prodigy, ambition, collapse, and renewal reveals how music is not just performance but also survival, a lifeline of human connection when everything else falls away—for readers of...

In this eye-opening chronicle of scientific research on the brain in the early Cold War era, the acclaimed historian Andreas Killen traces the complex circumstances surrounding the genesis of our present-day fascination with this organ. The 1950s were a transformative, even revolutionary decade...

A kaleidoscopic journey through the secret history of hues—and the story of the obsessive genius behind the definitions of colors we use today, from the beloved author of Word by Word begonia (n.): 3 -s : a deep pink that is bluer, lighter, and stronger than average coral (see coral 3b)...

From the acclaimed author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler comes a stirring manifesto on love in the modern age. Who wrote the book of love? In an impassioned polemic, Ron Rosenbaum—who has written books on the mysteries of Hitler’s evil, the magic of Shakespeare’s words, and...

Developing a cybernetic model of subjectivity and personhood that honors disability experiences to reconceptualize the category of the human.

What Are the Chances? reveals how psychology and neuroscience explain the significance of the idea of luck. Barbara Blatchley explores how people react to random events in a range of circumstances, examining the evidence that the belief in luck helps us cope with a lack of control. She tells the stories of lucky and unlucky people as well as the accidental discoveries that fundamentally changed what we know about the brain.

Peter Bandettini covers the essentials of fMRI, providing insight and perspective from his nearly three decades of research. He describes other brain imaging and assessment methods; the sources of fMRI contrasts; the basic methodology, from hardware to pulse sequences; brain activation experiment design strategies; and data and image processing. A unique, stand-alone chapter addresses major controversies in the field, outlining 26 challenges that have helped shape fMRI research.

In 1918, a world war raged, and a lethal strain of influenza circled the globe. In the midst of all this death, a bizarre disease appeared in Europe. Eventually known as encephalitis lethargica, or sleeping sickness, it spread worldwide, leaving millions dead or locked in institutions. Then, in 1927, it disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived. Asleep, set in 1920s and '30s New York, follows a group of neurologists through hospitals and asylums as they try to solve this epidemic and treat its victims - who learned the worst fate was not dying of it, but surviving it.