Psychology Philosophy

Offering a unique insight into human behaviour, this book explains why we behave the way we do and what happens when humans interact with the world and each other. Starting with evolutionary biology and what it physically means to be a human being, this book moves on to include a wide range of topics such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality and how we are evolving as we interact with new technology.

The Backpack: How to Understand and Manage Yourself While Loving Others Along the Way tells the story of Jon, Sofia, and Buddy, whose pathways merge on a life-changing flight. Written by a senior consultant with the Flippen Group (a worldwide leader in self-awareness training), the book brings together an angry passenger, a wise flight attendant, and a down-home cowboy. Their chance meeting leads to the ride of their lives as they fully grasp the importance and meaning of their backpacks. As this engaging story reveals, self-awareness is like a backpack!

A powerful treatise that demonstrates the existence of altruism in nature, with surprising implications for human society. Does altruism exist? Or is human nature entirely selfish? In this eloquent and accessible book, famed biologist David Sloan Wilson provides new answers to this age-old question based on the latest developments in evolutionary science.

How do we make the judgment call between self-interest and caring for others? Drawing on the latest scientific research and interviews with social scientists, spiritual leaders, ex-cons, altruists, and philosophers, Matousek examines morality from a scientific, sociological, and anthropological standpoint. Each chapter features a series of questions, readings, interviews, parables, and anecdotes that zoom in on a particular niche of moral inquiry, making this audiobook both utilitarian and fun.

You've probably heard the advice put on your own oxygen mask before assisting others. This is true both in airplanes and in classrooms. You have to take care of yourself before you can help someone else. If teachers are stressed out and exhausted, how can they have the patience, positive energy, and enthusiasm to provide the best instruction for students? Author Mike Anderson asked that question as a teacher himself, and the answers he found form the basis of The Well-Balanced Teacher.

Bridging the gap between the world of science and the realm of the spiritual, Wallace, a pioneer of modern consciousness research, offers a practical and revolutionary method for exploring the mind that combines the keenest insights of contemporary physics and philosophers with the time-honored meditative traditions of Buddhism.

In this smart and timely book, the distinguished moral philosopher Sissela Bok ponders the nature of happiness and its place in philosophical thinking and writing throughout the ages. With nuance and elegance, Bok explores notions of happiness - from Greek philosophers to Desmond Tutu, Charles Darwin, Iris Murdoch, and the Dalai Lama - as well as the latest theories advanced by psychologists, economists, geneticists, and neuroscientists.

Each of us has a story. Each of us is unique. Heart Printsencourages teachers to open their hearts and eyes to each of the students in their classrooms. It reveals the realities of the classroom when a teacher realizes that each person has a story to tell and each person has a voice to be heard. This work is a story of connections, success, heartbreak and love. It is an impassioned call to learn to teach, love and speak with your heart to change your life. This book is filled with honesty, despair, victories and tears.

As the title suggests, Fromm's is a wholeheartedly balanced view, inspired by great admiration for Freud's achievements but with a clear understanding of the preconceptions which blinkered his vision - notably those stemming from the bourgeois materialism of his society, his certainty of the inferiority of women and his inability to conceive of psychical phenomena for which physiological roots could not be demonstrated.

Child psychiatrist and best-selling author Robert Coles offers a profound meditation on how secular culture has settled into the hearts and minds of Americans. This book is a sweeping essay on the shift from religious control over Western society to the scientific dominance of the mind.

Human analysis differs from every other system of character analysis in that it classifies man into five types according to his biological evolution. No person achieves success or happiness when compelled to do what he naturally dislikes to do, since likes and dislikes stay with him to the grave. One of the biggest modern problems is that of helping men and women to discover and to capitalize on their inborn traits. Each of the five types is discussed in detail, with specific and detailed examples.

For the majority of young adults today, the transition to independence is a time of excitement and possibility. But nearly five million young people experience entry into adulthood as abrupt abandonment, a time of disconnection from school, work, and family. For this growing population of Americans, which includes kids aging out of foster care and those entangled with the justice system, life screeches to a halt when adulthood arrives. Abandoned is the first-ever exploration of this tale of dead ends and broken dreams.

This book proposes that the ability to recognize and respond to the differences between what we "see" and others "see" is the key reason for individuals, groups, and organizations to succeed or to fail. How we perceive differences and respond to them changes the way our brain develops and how our systems are designed.

Everyone knows that boys are falling behind in education. Largely left out of the discussion are parents of boys, who are most aware that their bright, eager sons hit an invisible wall somewhere near fourth grade, after which they become disengaged, discouraged, and disaffected. There are dozens of books on underachieving boys, but most parents brave enough to lift one off the shelf are instantly intimidated by the footnotes, graphs, case studies, and academic-speak addressed almost entirely to educators.

The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, first published in 1895, is a classic psychology text that is both thorough and easy to understand. It is considered seminal work in the study of crowd psychology. In it, Le Bon covers many aspects of crowd psychology and writes that crowd psychology exhibits "impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason".

When Duke University gave free iPods to the freshman class in 2003, critics said they were wasting their money. Yet when the students in practically every discipline invented academic uses for the music players, suddenly the idea could be seen in a new light - as an innovative way to turn learning on its head. Using cutting-edge research on the brain, Cathy N. Davidson show how attention blindness has produced one of our society's greatest challenges.

Am I happy enough? This has been a pivotal question since America's inception. "Am I not happy enough because I am depressed?" is a more recent version. Psychotherapist Gary Greenberg shows how depression has been manufactured---not as an illness but as an idea about our suffering, its source, and its relief. He challenges us to look at depression in a new way.

Let's take stock of young America. Compared to previous generations, American youth have more schooling (college enrollments have never been higher); more money ($100 a week in disposable income); more leisure time (five hours a day); and more news and information (Internet, The Daily Show, RSS feeds). What do they do with all that time and money? They download, upload, IM, post, chat, and network. (Nine of their top ten sites are for social networking.) They watch television and play video games (2 to 4 hours per day).

Great ideas often develop gradually after studying a problem at length--but not always. Sometimes an insight hits like a bolt from the blue. For Archimedes clarity struck while he was taking a bath. For Gustav Mahler it came as the blades of his oars touched the water. And for Albert Einstein, it emerged while he was talking to a friend.

The philosopher Susan Neiman argues that the absence of appealing models of maturity is not an accident: By describing life as a downhill process, we prepare young people to expect - and demand - very little from it. In Why Grow Up?, she challenges our culture of permanent adolescence, turning to thinkers including Kant, Rousseau, and Arendt to find a model of maturity that is not a matter of resignation. In growing up, we move from the boundless trust of childhood to the peculiar mixture of disappointment and exhilaration that comes with adolescence.