Seven And A Half Lessons About The Brain

From the author of How Emotions Are Made, a myth-busting primer on the brain, in the tradition of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

Have you ever wondered why you have a brain? Let renowned neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett demystify that big grey blob between your ears. In seven short essays (plus a bite-sized story about how brains evolved), this slim, entertaining and accessible collection reveals mind-expanding lessons from the front lines of neuroscience research. You’ll learn where brains came from, how they’re structured (and why it matters), and how yours works in tandem with other brains to create everything you experience. Along the way, you’ll also learn to dismiss popular myths such as the idea of a 'lizard brain' and the alleged battle between thoughts and emotions, or even between nature and nurture, to determine your behaviour. Sure to intrigue casual readers and scientific veterans alike, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain is full of surprises, humour, and important implications for human nature – a gift of a book that you will want to savour again and again.

'Highly accessible, content-rich and eminently readable . . . Fascinating and informative . . . popular science at its best.' - The Observer 'Subtly radical . . . It presents a revelatory model of consciousness that will be completely new to most readers' - The Guardian 'Best Reads For Summer' Have you ever wondered why you have a brain? Let renowned neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, bestselling author of How Emotions Are Made, demystify that big grey blob between your ears . . . In seven short chapters (plus a brief history of how brains evolved), this slim, entertaining, and accessible book reveals mind-expanding lessons from the front lines of neuroscience research. You’ll learn where brains came from, how they’re structured (and why it matters), and how yours works in tandem with other brains to create everything you experience. Along the way, you’ll also learn to dismiss popular myths such as the idea of a 'lizard brain' and the alleged battle between thoughts and emotions, or even between nature and nurture, to determine your behaviour. Sure to intrigue casual readers and scientific veterans alike, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain is full of surprises, humour, and important implications for human nature - a gift of a book about our most complex and crucial organ.

Presenting state-of-the-art work on the conscious and unconscious processes involved in emotion, this integrative volume brings together leading psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers. Carefully organized, tightly edited chapters address such compelling questions as how bodily responses contribute to conscious experience, whether "unconscious emotion" exists, how affect is transmitted from one person to another, and how emotional responses are produced in the brain. Bringing a new level of coherence to lines of inquiry that often remain disparate, the book identifies key, cross-cutting ideas and themes and sets forth a cogent agenda for future research.

Most psychology research still assumes that mental processes are internal to the person, waiting to be expressed or activated. This compelling book illustrates that a new paradigm is forming in which contextual factors are considered central to the workings of the mind. Leading experts explore how psychological processes emerge from the transactions of individuals with their physical, social, and cultural environments. The volume showcases cutting-edge research on the contextual nature of such phenomena as gene expression, brain networks, the regulation of hormones, perception, cognition, personality, knowing, learning, and emotion.

Preeminent psychologist Lisa Barrett lays out how the brain constructs emotions in a way that could revolutionize psychology, health care, the legal system, and our understanding of the human mind. “Fascinating . . . A thought-provoking journey into emotion science.”—The Wall Street Journal “A singular book, remarkable for the freshness of its ideas and the boldness and clarity with which they are presented.”—Scientific American “A brilliant and original book on the science of emotion, by the deepest thinker about this topic since Darwin.”—Daniel Gilbert, best-selling author of Stumbling on Happiness The science of emotion is in the midst of a revolution on par with the discovery of relativity in physics and natural selection in biology. Leading the charge is psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, whose research overturns the long-standing belief that emotions are automatic, universal, and hardwired in different brain regions. Instead, Barrett shows, we construct each instance of emotion through a unique interplay of brain, body, and culture. A lucid report from the cutting edge of emotion science, How Emotions Are Made reveals the profound real-world consequences of this breakthrough for everything from neuroscience and medicine to the legal system and even national security, laying bare the immense implications of our latest and most intimate scientific revolution.

The fundamental concern of psychotherapy is change. While practitioners are constantly greeted with new strategies, techniques, programs, and interventions, this book argues that the full benefits of the therapeutic process cannot be realized without fundamental revision of the concept of change itself. Applying cybernetic thought to family therapy, Bradford P. Keeney demonstrates that conventional epistemology, in which casue and effect have a linear relationship, does not sufficiently accommodate the reciprocal nature of causation in experience. Written in an unconventional style that includes stories, case examples, and imagined dialogues between an epistemologist and a skeptical therapist, the volume presents a philosophically grounded, ecological framework for contemporary clinical practice.

You will never think about your brain in the same way again. The brain is often portrayed as an organ with different regions dedicated to specific tasks. But that textbook model is wrong. The brain is a dynamic system, constantly modifying its own circuitry to match the demands of the environment and the body in which it finds itself. If you were to zoom into the living, microscopic cosmos inside the skull, you would witness tentacle-like extensions grasping, bumping, sensing, searching for the right connections to establish or forego, like denizens of a country establishing friendships, marriages, neighbourhoods, political parties, vendettas, and social networks. It's a mysterious kind of computational material, an organic three-dimensional textile that adjusts itself to operate with maximum efficiency. The brain is not hardwired, David Eagleman contends--it is livewired. With his new theory of infotropism, Eagleman demonstrates why the fundamental principle of the brain is information maximization: in the same way that plants grow toward light, brains reconfigure to boost data from the outside world. Follow Eagleman on a thrilling journey to discover how a child can function with one half of his brain removed, how a blind man can hit a baseball via a sensor on his tongue, how new devices and body plans can enhance our natural capacities, how paralyzed people will soon be able to dance in thought-controlled robotic suits, how we can build the next generation of devices based on the principles of the brain, and what all this has to do with why we dream at night.