A Sense of Self: Memory, the Brain, and Who We Are

A Sense of Self: Memory, the Brain, and Who We Are PDF Author: Veronica O'Keane
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393541932
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
How do our brains store—and then conjure up—past experiences to make us who we are? A twinge of sadness, a rush of love, a knot of loss, a whiff of regret. Memories have the power to move us, often when we least expect it, a sign of the complex neural process that continues in the background of our everyday lives. This process shapes us: filtering the world around us, informing our behavior and feeding our imagination. Psychiatrist Veronica O’Keane has spent many years observing how memory and experience are interwoven. In this rich, fascinating exploration, she asks, among other things: Why can memories feel so real? How are our sensations and perceptions connected with them? Why is place so important in memory? Are there such things as “true” and “false” memories? And, above all, what happens when the process of memory is disrupted by mental illness? O’Keane uses the broken memories of psychosis to illuminate the integrated human brain, offering a new way of thinking about our own personal experiences. Drawing on poignant accounts that include her own experiences, as well as what we can learn from insights in literature and fairytales and the latest neuroscientific research, O’Keane reframes our understanding of the extraordinary puzzle that is the human brain and how it changes during its growth from birth to adolescence and old age. By elucidating this process, she exposes the way that the formation of memory in the brain is vital to the creation of our sense of self.

Soberful

Soberful PDF Author: Veronica Valli
Publisher: Sounds True
ISBN: 1683648307
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Book Description
How to stop drinking, stay stopped, and develop emotional skills for a life of excitement and connection ... without the hangover. “No thanks—I’m not drinking tonight.” In a culture that equates alcohol with enjoyment and social acceptance, making this simple statement can make us feel like we’re depriving or even punishing ourselves. “When we realize we don’t want to drink anymore or can no longer drink safely, it can feel like the only choices are to spiral out of control or embrace a joyless life,” says psychotherapist and sobriety expert Veronica Valli. “But it’s not true! Sobriety can be a path filled with fun, excitement, belonging, relaxation, and romance.” Soberful offers a practical and straightforward program on how to get sober and stay sober by increasing your self-worth, energy, and participation in life. Valli begins by debunking widespread beliefs about alcohol and sobriety, including the illusion that alcohol itself is the problem. Then she takes you into the heart of her method for building an alcohol-free life that works—the Five Pillars of Sustainable Sobriety: • Movement—Taking care of your body for physical and emotional health • Connection—Using self-compassion as a foundation for creating healthy and authentic relationships • Balance—Learning how to disarm the triggers that make you want to drink • Process—Validating, honoring, and accepting the past to move forward into the future • Growth—How to keep changing, keep learning, and keep choosing to stay sober throughout the journey of your life “When we change how we experience the world, we can stop trying to escape our feelings with alcohol,” Valli says. As a leader and pioneer in the field with 21 years of sobriety, Valli now shares the same steps that worked for her and her clients. Written with gentle humor and compassion, Soberful provides a road map to a life beyond drinking—one that is expansive, fulfilling, and joyously free.

The Sense of an Ending

The Sense of an Ending PDF Author: Julian Barnes
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307957330
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 158

Book Description
BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A novel that follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single setting, The Sense of an Ending has the psychological and emotional depth and sophistication of Henry James at his best, and is a stunning achievement in Julian Barnes's oeuvre. Tony Webster thought he left his past behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.

Veronica Mars: An Original Mystery by Rob Thomas

Veronica Mars: An Original Mystery by Rob Thomas PDF Author: Rob Thomas
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0804170711
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
From Rob Thomas, the creator of the television series and movie phenomenon Veronica Mars, comes the first book in a thrilling mystery series that picks up where the feature film left off. Ten years after graduating from high school in Neptune, California, Veronica Mars is back in the land of sun, sand, crime, and corruption. She’s traded in her law degree for her old private investigating license, struggling to keep Mars Investigations afloat on the scant cash earned by catching cheating spouses until she can score her first big case. Now it’s spring break, and college students descend on Neptune, transforming the beaches and boardwalks into a frenzied, week-long rave. When a girl disappears from a party, Veronica is called in to investigate. But this is no simple missing person’s case; the house the girl vanished from belongs to a man with serious criminal ties, and soon Veronica is plunged into a dangerous underworld of drugs and organized crime. And when a major break in the investigation has a shocking connection to Veronica’s past, the case hits closer to home than she ever imagined. In Veronica Mars, Rob Thomas has created a groundbreaking female detective who’s part Phillip Marlowe, part Nancy Drew, and all snark. With its sharp plot and clever twists, The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line will keep you guessing until the very last page.

Mama's Girl

Mama's Girl PDF Author: Veronica Chambers
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1573225991
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Book Description
On the streets of Brooklyn in the 1970s, Veronica Chambers mastered the whirling helixes of a double-dutch jump rope with the same finesse she brought to her schoolwork, her often troubled family life, and the demands of being overachieving and underprivileged. Her mother—a Panamanian immigrant—was too often overwhelmed by the task of raising Veronica and her difficult younger brother on her meager secretary's salary to applaud her daughter's achievements. From an early age, Veronica understood that the best she could do for her mother was to be a perfect child—to rewrite her Christmas wish lists to her mother's budget, to look after her brother, to get by on her own. Though her mother seemed to bear out the adage that "black women raise their daughters and mother their sons," Veronica never stopped trying to do more, do better, do it all. And now, as a successful young woman who's achieved more than her mother dared hope for her, she looks back on their mother-daughter bond. The critically acclaimed Mama's Girl is a moving, startlingly honest memoir, in which Chambers shares some important truths about what we all really want from our mothers—and what we can give in return.

Mean Eileen

Mean Eileen PDF Author: M. Wade Backman
Publisher: Archway Publishing
ISBN: 1480873365
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Book Description
Determined reader beware, for these luxurious characters and their confounding antics are not for the faint of heart or morally upright. This is the incredible “true” story of a lovelorn white shark, the devil, an impossibly perfect woman, and a billionaire President of the United States---- who seriously suspects he may be God Almighty. To make matters worse, the commander-in-chief, is also worried that he may have inadvertently forfeited his immortal soul to the dark side, before he suddenly comes to realize that his harrowing predicament is even worse than that. He is dying. Zombies and reincarnation seem to be lurking around every sharp-corner in this hellish twister fraught with gratuitous violence, sex, drugs, golf, and of course championship bowling that will permanently warp even the strongest psyche past page one. Fight Club meets Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, sandwiching a disturbed weirdness unseen since the original black and white Twilight Zone TV series.

When She Woke

When She Woke PDF Author: Hillary Jordan
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1616201843
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Book Description
Bellwether Prize winner Hillary Jordan’s provocative new novel, When She Woke, tells the story of a stigmatized woman struggling to navigate an America of a not-too-distant future, where the line between church and state has been eradicated and convicted felons are no longer imprisoned and rehabilitated but chromed—their skin color is genetically altered to match the class of their crimes—and then released back into the population to survive as best they can. Hannah is a Red; her crime is murder. In seeking a path to safety in an alien and hostile world, Hannah unknowingly embarks on a path of self-discovery that forces her to question the values she once held true and the righteousness of a country that politicizes faith.

Sista Talk

Sista Talk PDF Author: Rochelle Brock
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820449531
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 170

Book Description
Sista Talk: The Personal and the Pedagogical is an inquiry into the questions of how Black women define their existence in a society which devalues, dehumanizes, and silences their beliefs. Placing herself inside of the research, Rochelle Brock invites the reader on a journey of self-exploration, as she and seven of her Black female students investigate their collective journey toward self-awareness in the attempt to liberate their minds and souls from ideological domination. Throughout, Sista Talk attempts to understand the ways in which this self-exploration informs her pedagogy. Combining Black feminist and Afrocentric Theory with critical pedagogy, this book frames the parameters for an Afrowomanist pedagogy of wholeness for teaching Black students.

Cowboy Versus Samurai

Cowboy Versus Samurai PDF Author: Michael Golamco
Publisher: Samuel French, Inc.
ISBN: 0573699402
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 85

Book Description
A politically edgy examination of inter-racial dating and identity through irony, humor, and social commentary, Cowboy Versus Samurai is a laugh-out-loud, romantic comedy exploring the sexual dynamics that surface around race when an attractive Korean American woman moves to town. Travis Park is a high school English teacher and the only Korean American man living in a dusty cowboy town known as Breakneck, Wyoming. When a gorgeous, whip-smart Asian American woman moves into town, he immediately falls for her; the only problem is that she only dates white men. In this savagely funny and often-moving re-telling of Edmond Rostand¿s Cyrano De Bergerac, one man must choose allegiance between his cowboy friend (a dim, handsome, Caucasian P.E. teacher named Del) and his Asian Brother-with-a-Capital-B (crazed, militant Asian of Unknown Origin, Chester). He must choose between the Asian American and the American within himself ¿ between Cowboy and Samurai ¿ in a pursuit of a love that may only be as real as the love letters he writes for someone else.

Walkin' the Dog

Walkin' the Dog PDF Author: Walter Mosley
Publisher: Back Bay Books
ISBN: 031605044X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 165

Book Description
Socrates Fortlow, an ex-convict forced to define his own morality in a lawless world, confronts wrongs that most people would rather ignore and comes face-to-face with the most dangerous emotion: hope. It has been nine years since his release from prison, and he still makes his home in a two-room shack in a Watts alley. But he has a girlfriend now, a steady job, and he is even caring for a pet, the two-legged dog he calls Killer. These responsibilities make finding the right path even harder - especially when the police make Socrates their first suspect in every crime within six blocks.--BOOK JACKET. "In each chapter of Walkin' the Dog, Socrates challenges a different conundrum of modern life. In "Blue Lightning, " he is offered a better-paying job but has to consider whether the extra pay is worth the freedom he would have to give up. In "Promise, " he keeps a vow made long ago to a dying friend, and learns that a promise to one person can mean damage to another. In "Mookie Kid, " he gets a telephone and,learns that the price of being able to reach others is that others can contact him - whether he wants to be reached or not."--BOOK JACKET. "Walkin' the Dog builds to a stunning climax as Socrates takes on a rogue cop who has terrorized his neighborhood."--BOOK JACKET.