Demystifying the Brain PDF Download

Author: V. Srinivasa Chakravarthy
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9811333203
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 389

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Book Description
This book presents an emerging new vision of the brain, which is essentially expressed in computational terms, for non-experts. As such, it presents the fundamental concepts of neuroscience in simple language, without overwhelming non-biologists with excessive biological jargon. In addition, the book presents a novel computational perspective on the brain for biologists, without resorting to complex mathematical equations. It addresses a comprehensive range of topics, starting with the history of neuroscience, the function of the individual neuron, the various kinds of neural network models that can explain diverse neural phenomena, sensory-motor function, language, emotions, and concluding with the latest theories on consciousness. The book offers readers a panoramic introduction to the “new brain” and a valuable resource for interdisciplinary researchers looking to gatecrash the world of neuroscience.

Author: Sarah McKay
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1409173194
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Understanding how your brain works during the key stages of life is essential to maintaining your health. Dr Sarah McKay is a neuroscientist who knows everything worth knowing about women's brains, and shares it in this cutting-edge, essential book. This is not a book about the differences between male and female brains, nor a book using neuroscience to explain gender-specific behaviours, the 'battle of the sexes' or 'Mars-Venus' stereotypes. This is a book about what happens to the brains of women as they cycle through the phases of life, which are unique to females by virtue of their biology and in particular their hormones. In Demystifying The Female Brain, Dr McKay gives insights into brain development during infancy, childhood and the teenage years (including the onset of puberty) and looks at pregnancy, motherhood, and mental health. The book weaves together findings from the research lab, interviews with neuroscientists and other researchers working in the disciplines of neuroendocrinology, brain development, brain health and ageing, along with stories and case studies.

Author: Dr Sarah McKay
Publisher: Hachette Australia
ISBN: 0733638538
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
For women, understanding how the brain works during the key stages of life - in utero, childhood, puberty and adolescence, pregnancy and motherhood, menopause and old age - is essential to their health. Dr Sarah McKay is a neuroscientist who knows everything worth knowing about women's brains, and shares it in this fascinating, essential book. This is not a book about the differences between male and female brains, nor a book using neuroscience to explain gender-specific behaviours, the 'battle of the sexes' or 'Mars-Venus' stereotypes. This is a book about what happens inside the brains and bodies of women as they move through the phases of life, and the unique - and often misunderstood - effects of female biology and hormones. Dr McKay give insights into brain development during infancy, childhood and the teenage years (including the onset of puberty) and also takes a look at mental health as well as the ageing brain. The book weaves together findings from the research lab, case studies and interviews with neuroscientists and other researchers working in the disciplines of neuroendocrinology, brain development, brain health and ageing. This comprehensive guide explores the brain during significant life stages, including: In utero Childhood Puberty The Menstrual Cycle The Teenage Brain Depression and Anxiety Pregnancy and Motherhood Menopause The Ageing Brain

Author: Todd E. Feinberg
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262038811
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Demystifying consciousness: how subjective experience can be explained by natural brain and evolutionary processes. Consciousness is often considered a mystery. How can the seemingly immaterial experience of consciousness be explained by the material neurons of the brain? There seems to be an unbridgeable gap between understanding the brain as an objectively observed biological organ and accounting for the subjective experiences that come from the brain (and life processes). In this book, Todd Feinberg and Jon Mallatt attempt to demystify consciousness—to naturalize it, by explaining that the subjective, experiencing aspects of consciousness are created by natural brain processes that evolved in natural ways. Although subjective experience is unique in nature, they argue, it is not necessarily mysterious. We need not invoke the unknown or unknowable to explain its creation. Feinberg and Mallatt flesh out their theory of neurobiological naturalism (after John Searle's biological naturalism) that recognizes the many features that brains share with other living things, lists the neural features unique to conscious brains, and explains the subjective–objective barrier naturally. They investigate common neural features among the diverse groups of animals that have primary consciousness—the type of consciousness that experiences both sensations received from the world and affects such as emotions. They map the evolutionary development of consciousness and find an uninterrupted progression over time, without inserting any mysterious forces or exotic physics. Finally, bridging the previously unbridgeable, they show how subjective experience, although different from objective observation, can be naturally explained.

Author: Tim Ash
Publisher: Tim Ash Enterprises Press
ISBN: 1735244503
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Understand what makes us human! This book is about the commonalities all 8,000,000,000 people on earth share. Our ancestors were molded by ruthless survival pressures from the earliest days of life on the planet. Adaptations which worked long ago are still inside of us – also shared with insects and reptiles. Later additions are common to all mammals from the tiniest shrews to the most massive whales. Some capabilities were bolted on relatively recently, and are only shared with our primate cousins. And the runaway explosion of humans on the planet can only be explained by our own bizarre species-level evolution. The only way to understand how our brains work is to examine the complete evolutionary arc. Find out why your primal brain is in charge, and your logical mind is usually asleep Learn what makes people unique among all other animals Understand the biased shortcuts your brain takes to make decisions Discover how culture has evolved us for learning and cooperation Find out how fairness and group conformity impact our behavior Understand the real purpose of memory, sleep, and dreaming Learn how stories allow us to mind-meld with other people Should I read this book? Yes – if you have a brain and want to understand how it works!… Personal development – Improve your memory, strengthen personal relationships and community, understand your motivations and drives, make peace with your emotional nature Relationships – Learn why you have an affinity for certain kinds of cultures and beliefs, understand gender differences and deep-seated emotional needs, get insights into children’s development, create stronger friendships Business – This book can be mined for insights about leadership, group cooperation, motivation, marketing and persuasion, sales, and effective communication

Author: Mark Humphries
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691213518
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
The story of a neural impulse and what it reveals about how our brains work We see the last cookie in the box and think, can I take that? We reach a hand out. In the 2.1 seconds that this impulse travels through our brain, billions of neurons communicate with one another, sending blips of voltage through our sensory and motor regions. Neuroscientists call these blips “spikes.” Spikes enable us to do everything: talk, eat, run, see, plan, and decide. In The Spike, Mark Humphries takes readers on the epic journey of a spike through a single, brief reaction. In vivid language, Humphries tells the story of what happens in our brain, what we know about spikes, and what we still have left to understand about them. Drawing on decades of research in neuroscience, Humphries explores how spikes are born, how they are transmitted, and how they lead us to action. He dives into previously unanswered mysteries: Why are most neurons silent? What causes neurons to fire spikes spontaneously, without input from other neurons or the outside world? Why do most spikes fail to reach any destination? Humphries presents a new vision of the brain, one where fundamental computations are carried out by spontaneous spikes that predict what will happen in the world, helping us to perceive, decide, and react quickly enough for our survival. Traversing neuroscience’s expansive terrain, The Spike follows a single electrical response to illuminate how our extraordinary brains work.

Author: Stanley Block
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416561218
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
In this newly revised edition of the award-winning Come to Your Senses: Demystifying the Mind-Body Connection, Dr. Stanley Block offers his Ten-Day Plan to optimize your life -- a breakthrough program that has helped people all over the world heal from post-traumatic stress syndrome, combat trauma, substance abuse, mental illness, pain, and depression. The easy-to-apply method uses Identity System "resting" techniques that enable you to recognize and defuse the self-defeating mental tug-of-war that exists in all of us. Learn how stress, fear, and thought activate the sympathetic nervous system with increased tension, pain, insomnia, anxiety, and depressive symptoms. By literally "coming to your senses" of taste, touch, smell, sight, and sound, you begin to control negative responses, free yourself from a paralyzed state of mind, and live a happy, balanced life. The response is amazing because the results are immediate -- ten days is all it takes -- Dr. Block's techniques take no time out of a busy schedule, they are simply incorporated into whatever activity you are engaged. Bridging the Identity System empowers you to work from your own strength and wisdom to deal with situations that arise in your life.

Author: Antonio Damasio
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1524747564
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
From one of the world’s leading neuroscientists: a succinct, illuminating, wholly engaging investigation of how biology, neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence have given us the tools to unlock the mysteries of human consciousness “One thrilling insight after another ... Damasio has succeeded brilliantly in narrowing the gap between body and mind.” —The New York Times Book Review In recent decades, many philosophers and cognitive scientists have declared the problem of consciousness unsolvable, but Antonio Damasio is convinced that recent findings across multiple scientific disciplines have given us a way to understand consciousness and its significance for human life. In the forty-eight brief chapters of Feeling & Knowing, and in writing that remains faithful to our intuitive sense of what feeling and experiencing are about, Damasio helps us understand why being conscious is not the same as sensing, why nervous systems are essential for the development of feelings, and why feeling opens the way to consciousness writ large. He combines the latest discoveries in various sciences with philosophy and discusses his original research, which has transformed our understanding of the brain and human behavior. Here is an indispensable guide to understand­ing how we experience the world within and around us and find our place in the universe.

Author: David J. Linden
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674076613
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
You've probably seen it before: a human brain dramatically lit from the side, the camera circling it like a helicopter shot of Stonehenge, and a modulated baritone voice exalting the brain's elegant design in reverent tones. To which this book says: Pure nonsense. In a work at once deeply learned and wonderfully accessible, the neuroscientist David Linden counters the widespread assumption that the brain is a paragon of design--and in its place gives us a compelling explanation of how the brain's serendipitous evolution has resulted in nothing short of our humanity. A guide to the strange and often illogical world of neural function, The Accidental Mind shows how the brain is not an optimized, general-purpose problem-solving machine, but rather a weird agglomeration of ad-hoc solutions that have been piled on through millions of years of evolutionary history. Moreover, Linden tells us how the constraints of evolved brain design have ultimately led to almost every transcendent human foible: our long childhoods, our extensive memory capacity, our search for love and long-term relationships, our need to create compelling narrative, and, ultimately, the universal cultural impulse to create both religious and scientific explanations. With forays into evolutionary biology, this analysis of mental function answers some of our most common questions about how we've come to be who we are.

Author: Charles F. Zorumski
Publisher:
ISBN: 019538640X
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Psychiatry is arguably the most misunderstood specialty in modern medicine and psychiatrists are often thought of as part physician, part confessor, part police officer, and part shaman. In Demystifying Psychiatry, two eminent psychiatrists offer an illuminating look at the entire field, offering a clear and informative portrait of a medical specialty often clouded in myth. Zorumski and Rubin range from a basic discussion of what psychiatry is, to the types of illnesses psychiatrists treat, the training of psychiatrists, the treatment of psychiatric disorders (covering medications, psychotherapy, lifestyle interventions, electroconvulsive therapy, and much more), and how families can help with treatment. They caution the consumer about practices that should raise red flags. The book also covers new trends in psychiatry and explores the future of the field, predicting that major advances in genetics and neuroscience will lead to rapid and amazing changes in psychiatry. The book concludes with extensive reference materials that will be valuable both to general readers and medical practitioners.