Agents In My Brain

Agents in My Brain gives vivid descriptions of the grandiose delusions and paranoid delusions that type-one manic depressives get. It also shows that when you get the right medication and some talk therapy, you can recover. Bill Hannon has led support groups for the Depression & Bipolar Support Alliance since 1987. He is a guest lecturer in college psychology classes. Bill now lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. Bipolar disorders directly affect over 2.5% of the US population, and indirectly affect many more friends and family members. Bill Hannon has written a moving and gritty first-hand account of Bipolar I disorder. He describes its effects, how treatment works, and insights into why treatment sometimes doesnt work. He explores in great detail his experiences with delusional thinking as part of a years-long story of recovery and perseverance. Recommended to those patients, family and friends looking to understand themselves and others with affective disorders. This book is also prescribed for professionals seeking to better appreciate what their patients experience outside (or inside) the office walls. Warren Pendergast M.D. Medical Director Emeritus. NC Physicians Health Program Agents in My Brain offers an extremely interesting and painful glimpse into the mind of an individual suffering from manic depressive illnessAs a professor of psychology who teaches a course on the psychobiology of mental disorders, I am always on the lookout for books that provide first-hand accounts of mental dysfunction. This one fills a void in my reading list. Lawrence Wichlinski Ph.D. Professor of Psychology, Carleton College In Agents in My Brain, Bill tells the story of his struggle to find the right combination of medical professionals, medications, and support systems to understand and to manage his bipolar behavior. The journey was difficult, confusing, and often overwhelming. Yet Bill survived AND thrived! An inspirational story, Agents in My Brain is a testament to the spirit to overcome within each of us. I thank Bill for having the courage to share his life experiences with those of us who continue to search for the total cure. (Bills regular closing comment in our bi-monthly support groups). Cindy. Co-facilitator with Bill Hannon, for the Depression & Bipolar Support Alliance support group

Science journalist John Horgan presents a radical new perspective on the mind-body problem and related issues such as consciousness, free will, morality and the meaning of life. Horgan argues that science will never discover an objectively true solution to the mind-body problem because such a solution does not exist. Horgan explores his thesis by delving into the professional and personal lives of nine mind-body experts, including neuroscientist Christof Koch, cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, child psychologist Alison Gopnik, complexologist Stuart Kauffman, legal scholar and psychoanalyst Elyn Saks, philosopher Owen Flanagan, novelist Rebecca Goldstein, evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, and economist Deirdre McCloskey.

Amidst a world filled with dangerous criminals, terrorists and government conspiracies, stands the Agency - an ultra secret organization who's mission is to protect the innocent and safeguard the World. This legendary organization brings together the greatest minds, the most talented agents and cutting edge technologies.However, something unusual is about to happen: a brilliant new recruit with unusual methods is about to join the Agency. His name : Jon Le Bon. He will forever change the balance of power between good and evil.

In this groundbreaking new book, a Harvard-trained neurologist shows how you can attain lifelong mental fitness. Utilizing the latest breakthroughs in research, Dr. Jeff Victoroff has developed a definitive, life-changing plan that provides you with the powerful, scientifically based methods you need to protect your brain from aging and memory loss. Starting today, you too can save your brain. If you are over forty years old, you already know the bad news: names may be harder to remember; a word may sometimes elude you as you speak; you may sometimes misplace your glasses, your car keys (or even your car!). But medical research is lifting the veil of mystery off the process of brain aging and offering up strong evidence that you do not necessarily have to accept deteriorating brain function as you get older. From the benefits of exercise to the effects of stress relief, from what you eat and drink to the kind of work you do, from the natural substances that are most likely to help to the new medications your doctor can prescribe, this book outlines literally hundreds of preventive measures you can take to keep your mind sharper, stronger, and healthier your whole life. Among the many topics covered in this book are: * Amazing new studies revealing who is most likely to get Alzheimer's disease--and how we can all reduce our risk * Powerful evidence showing how the Brain-Saving Diet can boost your defenses against memory loss * How stress, depression, anger, and low self-esteem can literally threaten the structure of our brains, and what we should all be doing about it * The surprising discovery that inflammation is slowly cooking our brain cells, and how we can stop it * The two ways you can literally add new brain cells! A book that will change the way you live, eat, and work, Saving Your Brain is a wake-up call to those people who have long since learned the wonders of taking care of their body--and now have the very real chance to provide the same lifesaving care for their brain.

Two neuroscience experts explain how their 4-Step Method can help break destructive thoughts and actions and change bad habits for good. A leading neuroplasticity researcher and the coauthor of the groundbreaking books Brain Lock and The Mind and the Brain, Jeffrey M. Schwartz has spent his career studying the structure and neuronal firing patterns of the human brain. He pioneered the first mindfulness-based treatment program for people suffering from OCD, teaching patients how to achieve long-term relief from their compulsions. For the past six years, Schwartz has worked with psychiatrist Rebecca Gladding to refine a program that successfully explains how the brain works and why we often feel besieged by bad brain wiring. Just like with the compulsions of OCD patients, they discovered that bad habits, social anxieties, self-deprecating thoughts, and compulsive overindulgence are all rooted in overactive brain circuits. The key to making life changes that you want-to make your brain work for you-is to consciously choose to "starve" these circuits of focused attention, thereby decreasing their influence and strength. As evidenced by the huge success of Schwartz's previous books, as well as Daniel Amen's Change Your Brain, Change Your Life, and Norman Doidge's The Brain That Changes Itself, there is a large audience interested in harnessing the brain's untapped potential, yearning for a step-by-step, scientifically grounded and clinically proven approach. In fact, readers of Brain Lock wrote to the authors in record numbers asking for such a book. In You Are Not Your Brain, Schwartz and Gladding carefully outline their program, showing readers how to identify negative brain impulses, channel them through the power of focused attention, and ultimately lead more fulfilling and empowered lives.

We act for reasons. But, it is sometimes claimed, the mental states and events that make up reasons, are not sufficient conditions of actions. Reasons never make actions happen. We- as agents (persons, selves, subjects) - make our actions happen. Actions are done by us, not elicited by reasons. The present essay is an attempt to understand this concept of agent causality. Who -~ or what - is an agent ? And how - in virtue of what - does an agent do things, or refrain from doing them? The first chapter deals with problems in the theory of action that seem to require the assumption that actions are controlled by agents. Chapters two and three then review and discuss theories of agent cau sality. Chapters four and five make up the central parts of the essay in which my own solution is put forth, and chapter six presents some data that seem to support this view. Chapter seven discusses how the theory can be reconciled with neuro-physiological facts. And in the last two chapters the theory is confronted with conflicting viewpoints and phe nomena. Daniel Robinson and Richard Swinburne took time to read parts of the manuscript in draft form. Though they disagree with my main viewpoints on the nature of the self, their conunents were very helpful. I hereby thank them both.

In The Brain from 25,000 Feet, Mark A. Changizi defends a non-reductionist philosophy and applies it to a variety of problems in the brain sciences. Some of the key questions answered are as follows. Why do we see visual illusions, and why are illusions inevitable for any finite-speed vision machine? Why aren't brains universal learning machines, and what does the riddle of induction and its solution have to do with human learning and innateness? The author tackles such questions as why the brain is folded, and why animals have as many limbs as they do, explaining how these relate to principles of network optimality. He describes how most natural language words are vague and then goes on to explain the connection to the ultimate computational limits on machines. There is also a fascinating discussion of how animals accommodate greater behavioral complexity. This book is a must-read for researchers interested in taking a high-level, non-mechanistic approach to answering age-old fundamental questions in the brain sciences.

Could a single human being ever have multiple conscious minds? Some human beings do. The corpus callosum is a large pathway connecting the two hemispheres of the brain. In the second half of the twentieth century a number of people had this pathway cut through as a treatment for epilepsy. They became colloquially known as split-brain subjects. After the two hemispheres of the brain are cortically separated in this way, they begin to operate unusually independently of each other in the realm of thought, action, and conscious experience, almost as if each hemisphere now had a mind of its own. Philosophical discussion of the split-brain cases has overwhelmingly focused on questions of psychological identity in split-brain subjects, questions like: how many subjects of experience is a split-brain subject? How many intentional agents? How many persons? On the one hand, under experimental conditions, split-brain subjects often act in ways difficult to understand except in terms of each of them having two distinct streams or centers of consciousness. Split-brain subjects thus evoke the duality intuition: that a single split-brain human being is somehow composed of two thinking, experiencing, and acting things. On the other hand, a split-brain subject nonetheless seems like one of us, at the end of the day, rather than like two people sharing one body. In other words, split-brain subjects also evoke the unity intuition: that a split-brain subject is one person. Elizabeth Schechter argues that there are in fact two minds, subjects of experience, and intentional agents inside each split-brain human being: right and left. On the other hand, each split-brain subject is nonetheless one of us. The key to reconciling these two claims is to understand the ways in which each of us is transformed by self-consciousness.