Showing results for "The Engineering Book" in Psychology & Mental Health

Around 250,000 people have had their genomes sequenced, and scientists expect that number to rise to one billion by 2025. Professor Steven J. Heine argues that the first thing we will do on receiving our DNA test results is to misinterpret them completely. Despite breathless (often lightly researched) media coverage about newly discovered "cancer" or "divorce" or "IQ" genes, the prospect of a DNA test forecasting how your life is going to turn out is vanishingly small.

For centuries, poets and philosophers extolled the benefits of a walk in the woods: Beethoven drew inspiration from rocks and trees; Wordsworth composed while tromping over the heath; Nikola Tesla conceived the electric motor while visiting a park. Intrigued by our storied renewal in the natural world, Florence Williams sets out to uncover the science behind nature's positive effects on the brain.

Does your dog get sad when you leave for the day? Does your cat purr because she loves you? Do bears attack when they’re angry? You can’t very well ask them. In fact, scientists haven’t been able to reach a consensus on whether animals even have emotions like humans do, let alone how to study them. Yet studies of animal emotion are critical for understanding human emotion and mental illness. In The Nature of the Beast, pioneering neuroscientist David J. Anderson describes a new approach to solving this problem.

A path-breaking journey into the brain, showing how perception, thought, and action are products of "maps" etched into your gray matter - and how technology can use them to read your mind.

In A Story of Us, they present this rich narrative and explain how the evolution of our genes relates to the evolution of our cultures. Newson and Richerson take listeners through seven stages of human evolution, beginning seven million years ago with the apes that were the ancestors of humans and today's chimps and bonobos. The story ends in the present day and offers a glimpse into the future.

""His groundbreaking work has changed the very ways we consider our health and examine disease.” —Barack Obama From Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institute of Health, 2007 recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and 15-year head of the Human Genome Project, comes one...

Interweaving her vast knowledge of neurology, sociology, psychology, and philosophy with fascinating down-to-earth examples and lively personal anecdotes, developmental psychologist, neuroscientist, and dyslexia expert Wolf probes the question, "How do we learn to read and write?" This ambitious and provocative new book offers an impassioned look at reading, its effect on our lives, and explains why it matters so greatly in a digital era.

Everything All at Once is an exciting, inspiring call to unleash the power of the nerd mindset that exists within us all. Nye believes we'll never be able to tackle our society's biggest, most complex problems if we don't even know how to solve the small ones. Step by step, he shows his listeners the key tools behind his everything-all-at-once approach: radical curiosity, a deep desire for a better future, and a willingness to take the actions needed to make it a reality.

A pioneering neuroscientist shows how the long-sought merger of brains with machines is about to become a paradigm-shifting reality. Imagine living in a world where people use their computers, drive their cars, and communicate with one another simply by thinking. In this stunning and inspiring...

Every man has the potential for a great body, insane sex, and an unreal life. (Seriously) Want to lose body fat? That's easy—you can drop 20 pounds in 6 weeks. Want bigger muscles? Done. A 50-pound increase to your bench press, coming right up. Want to be smarter? Not a problem—the...

What do Wikipedia, Zip Car’s business model, Barack Obama's presidential campaign, and a small group of lobster fishermen have in common? They all show the power and promise of human cooperation in transforming our businesses, our government, and our society at large. Because today, when the...

What shapes our sense of place, our sense of time, and our memory? How is technology changing the way we make sense of the world and of ourselves? Our screens offer us connection, especially now in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, but there are certain depths of connection our screens can’t...

In the early 1800s, a century before there was any concept of the gene, physicians in insane asylums began to record causes of madness in their admission books. Almost from the beginning, they pointed to heredity as the most important of these causes. As doctors and state officials steadily lost faith in the capacity of asylum care to stem the terrible increase of insanity, they began emphasizing the need to curb the reproduction of the insane. They became obsessed with identifying weak or tainted families and anticipating the outcomes of their marriages.

Darwin developed the theory of sexual selection to explain why the animal world abounds in stunning beauty, from the brilliant colors of butterflies and fishes to the songs of birds and frogs. He argued that animals have "a taste for the beautiful" that drives their potential mates to evolve features that make them more sexually attractive and reproductively successful. But if Darwin explained why sexual beauty evolved in animals, he struggled to understand how.

"Creativity is the unique and defining trait of our species, and its ultimate goal, self-understanding", begins Edward O. Wilson's sweeping examination of the humanities and its relationship to the sciences. By studying fields as diverse as paleontology, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience, Wilson demonstrates that human creativity began not 10,000 years ago, as we have long assumed, but over 100,000 years ago in the Paleolithic Age.

The unprecedented access to other humans that technology provides has ironically freed us from engaging with them. According to social psychologist Adam Waytz, our increasingly human-free lives come with a serious cost that we’ve already begun to pay: the loss of our humanity. Humans have superpowers. More than any other psychological stimulus, our presence can make experiences feel significant, inspire moral behavior, and encourage action. The Power of Human shows us how to rehumanize and harness these unique abilities to improve our lives, beginning with our jobs.

Rachel Herz uncovers the fascinating and surprising facts that affect food consumption. Why You Eat What You Eat mixes the social with the scientific to uncover how psychology, neurology, and physiology shape our relationship with food and how food alters the relationships we have with ourselves and with one another.

Rolf Nelson of Wheaton College has been widely published in the fields of psychology and visual perception. Seeing Eye to I examines the human visual system, from basic processes like perceiving color and shape to recognizing and categorizing objects to self-awareness. Professor Nelson also demonstrates how the human brain constructs a representation of the world replete with meaning, a task beyond the capability of any current computer.

This is an audio summary of Brain Rules, a book that explores how brain sciences might influence the way we teach our children and the way we work.