Psychology Genius

Designers Don’t Read is a love song to graphic design and graphic designers. Austin Howe is a creative director, writer, advocate, and cheerleader for design - but not a designer. He believes in the "wonder and exuberance of someone who gets paid - by clients to do what he loves". Howe places immense value on curiosity and passion to help designers develop a point of view, a strong voice. He explores the creative process and conceptualization, and delves into what to do when inspiration is lacking.

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives celebrates the benefits that messiness has in our lives: why it’s important, why we resist it, and why we should embrace it instead. Using research from neuroscience, psychology, social science, as well as captivating examples of real people doing extraordinary things, Tim Harford explains that the human qualities we value – creativity, responsiveness, resilience – are integral to the disorder, confusion, and disarray that produce them.

Lawyers. Accountants. Software Engineers. That what Mom and Dad encouraged us to become. They were wrong. Gone is the age of "left-brain" dominance. The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: designers, inventors, teachers, storytellers - creative and emphatic "right-brain" thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn't.

Based on a far-reaching study of thousands of individuals, Finding Flow contends that we often walk through our days unaware of and out of touch with our emotional lives. Our inattention makes us constantly bounce between two extremes: During much of the day, we live filled with the anxiety and pressures of our work and obligations, and during our leisure moments, we tend to live in passive boredom.

Best-selling author, artist, and illustrator Lisa Congdon brings her expertise to this guide to the process of artistic self-discovery. Featuring advice from Congdon herself and interviews with a roster of established artists, illustrators, and creatives, this one-of-a-kind book will show listeners how to identify and nurture their own visual identity, navigate the influence of artists they admire, push through fear and insecurity, and appreciate the value of their personal journey.

At a time when we are all confronted by not one, but many crossroads in our modern lives - identity, technology, trust, politics, and a global pandemic - celebrated mythologist and wilderness guide Martin Shaw delivers Smoke Hole: three metaphors to help us understand our world, one that is assailed by the seductive promises of social media and shadowed by a health crisis that has brought loneliness and isolation to an all-time high.

How can we create and market creative works that achieve longevity? Holiday explores this mystery by drawing on his extensive experience working with businesses and creators such as Google, American Apparel, and the author John Grisham as well as his interviews with the minds behind some of the greatest perennial sellers of our time.

In his international bestseller, The Happiness Advantage, Harvard-trained researcher Shawn Achor described why happiness is the precursor to greater success. Before Happiness is about what comes before both. Because before we can be happy or successful, we need to first develop the ability to see that positive change is possible. Only once we learn to see the world through a more positive lens can we summon all our motivation, emotion, and intelligence to achieve our personal and professional goals.

Stretch identifies key ways for people and organizations to work beyond their resources to achieve higher performance. Based on in-depth research in psychology and management, Scott Sonenshein shows how to accomplish goals, find professional and personal success, and live a richer life. Sonenshein reveals that while we rarely have all we think we need, we usually have more than we imagine.

We live in a society where kids and parents are obsessed with early achievement, from getting perfect scores on SATs to getting into Ivy League colleges to landing an amazing job at Google or Facebook - or even better, creating a start-up with the potential to be the next Google or Facebook or Uber. We see software coders becoming millionaires or billionaires before age 30 and feel we are failing if we are not one of them.

Literature is a technology like any other. And the writers we revere - from Homer, Shakespeare, Austen, and others - each made a unique technical breakthrough that can be viewed as both a narrative and neuroscientific advancement. Literature’s great invention was to address problems we could not solve: not how to start a fire or build a boat, but how to live and love; how to maintain courage in the face of death; how to account for the fact that we exist at all.

We have been spoon-fed the notion that creativity is the province of genius - of those favored, brilliant few whose moments of insight arrive in unpredictable flashes of divine inspiration. And if we are not geniuses, we might as well pack it in and give up. Either we have that gift, or we don’t. But Allen Gannett shows that simply isn’t true. Recent research has shown that there is a predictable science behind achieving commercial success in any creative endeavor, from writing a popular novel to starting up a successful company to creating an effective marketing campaign.

Our brains are noisy; certain regions are always grinding away at involuntary activities like daydreaming, worrying about the future, and self-chatter, taking up to forty-seven percent of our waking time. This is mindwandering—and while it can tug your attention away from the present, cognitive neuroscientist Moshe Bar is here to tell you about the method behind this apparent madness. Mindwandering is the first popular book to explore this multi-faceted phenomenon of your wandering mind and introduces you to the new, exciting research behind it.

What if you could exploit the plasticity of personality to change yourself in specific ways? Would you choose to become less neurotic? More self-disciplined? Less shy? Until now, we’ve been told that we’re stuck with the personality we were born with: The introvert will never break out of their shell, the narcissist will be forever trapped gazing into the mirror.

In Me, Myself, and Us, Brian Little, Ph.D., one of the psychologists who helped re-shape the field, provides the first in-depth exploration of the new personality science and its provocative findings for general readers. The audiobook explores questions that are rooted in the origins of human consciousness but are as commonplace as yesterday's breakfast conversation. Are our first impressions of other people's personalities usually fallacious?

One hundred and ten years ago, Maria Montessori, the first female physician in Italy, devised a very different method of educating children, based on her observations of how they naturally learn. In Montessori, Angeline Stoll Lillard shows that science has finally caught up with Maria Montessori. Lillard presents the research behind nine insights that are foundations of Montessori education, describing how each of these insights is applied in the Montessori classroom.

From the first tickle of curiosity to an unexpected shift in how we perceive the world, there isn’t a person who hasn’t experienced wonder, and yet the why and how of this profoundly beneficial emotion is only just beginning to be scientifically examined. This inspiring book from thought leader Monica Parker explores the power of wonder to transform the way we learn, develop new ideas, drive social change, and ultimately become better humans.

From the former director of GCHQ, learn the methodology used by the British intelligence agencies to reach judgements, establish the right level of confidence and act decisively. Intelligence officers discern the truth. They gather information - often contradictory or incomplete - and, with it, they build the most accurate possible image of the world. With the stakes at their absolute highest, they must then decide what to do.

The Lobotomist explores one of the darkest chapters of American medicine: the desperate attempt to treat the hundreds of thousands of psychiatric patients in need of help during the middle decades of the 20th century. Into this crisis stepped Walter Freeman, MD, who saw a solution in lobotomy, a brain operation intended to reduce the severity of psychotic symptoms. Drawing on Freeman's documents and interviews with Freeman's family, Jack El-Hai takes a penetrating look at the life and work of this complex scientific genius.

In this audiobook, Ellen Langer uses her innovative theory of mindulness, introduced in her influential earlier book, to dramatically enhance the way we learn. Mindful learning takes place with an awareness of context and of the ever-changing nature of information. Learning without this awareness, has severely limited uses and often sets on up for failure. With stunning applications to skills as diverse as paying attention, CPR, investment analysis, psychotherapy, or playing a musical instrument, this audiobook is for all who are curious and intellectually adventurous.