Brain Health Neuroscience

We live in a gendered world, where we are ceaselessly bombarded by messages about sex and gender. On a daily basis, we face deeply ingrained beliefs that sex determines our skills and preferences, from toys and colors to career choice and salaries. But what does this constant gendering mean for our thoughts, decisions, and behavior? And what does it mean for our brains? Drawing on her work as a professor of cognitive neuroimaging, Gina Rippon unpacks the stereotypes that surround us from our earliest moments and shows how these messages mold our ideas of ourselves.

Do you wonder how much more you could achieve if you honed your mental muscles and this amazing tool—your brain—in the right way? Our brains drive our bodies and almost everything about our lives, from our moods to our daily habits and our overall success and health, but we often haven’t the faintest clue how to make them work at their best for us.

With poignant insight and humor, Frank Vertosick, Jr., MD, describes some of the greatest challenges of his career, including a six-week-old infant with a tumor in her brain, a young man struck down in his prime by paraplegia, and a minister with a .22-caliber bullet lodged in his skull. Told through intimate portraits of Vertosick's patients and unsparing-yet-fascinatingly detailed descriptions of surgical procedures, When the Air Hits Your Brain illuminates both the mysteries of the mind and the realities of the operating room.

We all know how to nudge our brains to perform better. A strong cup of coffee helps us get through a dull meeting, and a brisk walk helps us think more clearly. But what if some nudges could optimise how we focus, create and process information even more effectively, to take mental performance to new heights?

You don't have to be a scientist to make your brain work for you. Happy Brain, Happy Life is all about how to fine tune your brain to the finest condition possible. We start with what makes a happy and healthy brain, and then we go into how to get there. Once we get there, we talk about the specific actions and behaviors we can use in our daily lives to ensure that you are set for health, wealth, and love.

Maybe you’ve struggled for years with anxiety, depression, ADHD, migraines, PTSD, obsessive thinking, sleep issues or other unwanted conditions. You’ve tried medication, psychotherapy, breathing techniques, yoga, exercise or dietary changes—with no permanent relief. Neurofeedback is an emerging technology that’s helped thousands of people feel better—without medication. It allows you to gently nudge your brain along through training until it learns to operate in a healthier manner.

Neuroscientist Camilla Nord reveals how the small things we do to lift our mood during the course of a day - a piece of chocolate, a coffee, chatting to a friend - often work on the same pathways in our brain as the latest pharmacological treatments for mental health disorders. Whether they help us to manage pain, learn from experience or expend energy on the things that are important for our survival, these conscious actions are part of a complex self-regulating process that is unique to each individual and the constant backdrop to our everyday lives.

Women's brain health is no longer a niche topic. Neuroscience is uncovering answers to questions women have pondered for generations - demystifying everything from puberty, periods, contraception, pregnancy, sex and love to menopause, hormone therapy and dementia. Understanding how the brain is shaped by genetics, hormones and life experiences is vital for women to maintain their health and embrace their unique strengths at every stage of life.

For decades, modern medicine has predominantly focused on restoring health to a conventionally “normal” state for our age and medical history. But shouldn’t we aim to go beyond normal? Whether you’re twenty or eighty years old, have experienced a stroke, battle PTSD, or want to excel as an athlete or top executive, recent breakthroughs in molecular biology have granted us the means not just to repair but to enhance our physical and mental capacities.

Rachel Barr struggled through years of devastating loss, heartache, and uncertainty until neuroscience gave her the first spark of self-belief she had felt in her adult life — and proof that, because of the brain’s near-infinite potential for neuroplastic change, it’s never too late to carve out neural pathways to form new habits, new skills, and new ways of thinking.

Exciting new developments in brain science are continuing the debates on these issues, and the field has now expanded to include biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers. This controversial book clarifies the potentially confusing arguments, and the major theories, while also outlining the amazing pace of discoveries in neuroscience. Covering areas such as the construction of self in the brain, mechanisms of attention, the neural correlates of consciousness, and the physiology of altered states of consciousness, Susan Blackmore highlights our latest findings.

You can learn to play music, no matter what you've been told about your musical talent or aptitude. With the right instruction and methods, learning to play music can be an endless source of joy and fulfillment. And learning to play music isn't just fun, it's also the ideal brain fitness activity. Dr. Turknett, a neurologist, self-taught multi-instrumentalist, and the founder of Brainjo and the Brainjo Method of instruction, distills the principles of learning to play music down into a set of universal "laws" that can be applied to any instrument.

What happens in our brains to make us feel fear, love, hate, anger, joy? Do we control our emotions, or do they control us? Do animals have emotions? How can traumatic experiences in early childhood influence adult behavior, even though we have no conscious memory of them? In The Emotional Brain, Joseph LeDoux investigates the origins of human emotions and explains that many exist as part of complex neural systems that evolved to enable us to survive.

It took a brain surgeon who's spent a lifetime in the operating room experiencing the brain's union of form and function to write this book. Cerebral Entanglements, unlike most books on the brain, looks at the intimate and vital emotions in our lives, and shows as well, how neuroimaging studies can transform our understanding of crucial emotional or mental health concerns.

Chief CNN medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta helped countless people keep their brains sharp and effortlessly productive with KEEP SHARP. In 12 Weeks to a Sharper You, he now provides a step-by-step 12-week program to help you put his transformational ideas into daily practice. This workbook makes it easy to apply Gupta’s groundbreaking tips and research to establish healthy behaviors for life. The 12-week program will help you feel less anxious, sleep better, improve energy, think more clearly, and become more resilient to daily stress.

Strengthen your social and emotional intelligence by cultivating your innate somatic intelligence. This is powerful applied mind-body science, in the workplace and beyond. Tap the intelligence hidden in posture, gesture, and sensation and you will open the door to more meaning, greater courage, deeper connection, and more powerful leadership than you imagined possible.

Eric R. Kandel, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, is one of the pioneers of modern brain science. His work continues to shape our understanding of how learning and memory work and to break down age-old barriers between the sciences and the arts. In his seminal new audiobook, The Disordered Mind, Kandel draws on a lifetime of pathbreaking research and the work of many other leading neuroscientists to take us on an unusual tour of the brain. He confronts one of the most difficult questions we face: How does our mind, our individual sense of self, emerge from the physical matter of the brain?

Dreaming is one of the most underappreciated functions of the human brain, yet our very survival as a species depends on it. In This Is Why You Dream, dual-trained neuroscientist and neurosurgeon Dr. Rahul Jandial explores the landscape of our subconscious, tracing the latest cutting-edge dream research and brain science to show why humans have retained the ability to dream across millennia, and how we can now harness its wondrous powers to improve our sleeping and waking lives.

Greer Kirshenbaum, PhD. is a neuroscientist, doula, and parent. Her work began with the goal of developing new treatments for poor mental health; she dreamed of creating a new medication to address conditions like anxiety, depression, addiction, and chronic stress. Over time, she realized that science had already uncovered a powerful medicine for alleviating mental health struggles, but the answer wasn’t a pill. It was a preventative approach: when babies' receive nurturing care in the first three years of life, it builds strong, resilient brains.

Throughout history, two perspectives on the world have dueled in our minds: the extrinsic—that of mechanism and physics—and the intrinsic—that of feelings, thoughts, and ideas. The intrinsic perspective allows us to tell stories about our lives, to chart our anger and our lust, to understand our psychologies. The extrinsic allows us to chart the physical world, to build upon it, and to travel across it. These perspectives have never been reconciled; they almost seem to exist on different planes of thought.