San Antonio College Library

"Ambitious and much anticipated, this book celebrates the value of recent neuroscientific discoveries as tools for art-historical analysis. Case studies ranging across the whole history of European art demonstrate the relationships between forms of visual expression and the objects of visual attention, emotional connection, and intellectual interest in daily life, thus illuminating the previously hidden meanings of many artistic styles and conventions....

"Rewire Your Brain focuses on the self-help applications and the ongoing research on the aging brain. Rewire Your Brain is also filled with practical suggestions and exercises to help the reader improve his or her memory and relationships--and overcome mild depression, anxiety issues, procrastination, and various other negative thought patterns. Each of the chapters in this book offer key components of the new developments in neuroscience and describe...

In this book the author argues that understanding the neural underpinnings of aesthetic experience can reshape our conceptions of aesthetics and the arts. Drawing on the tools of both cognitive neuroscience and traditional humanist inquiry, she shows that neuroaesthetics offers a new model for understanding the dynamic and changing features of aesthetic life, the relationships among the arts, and how individual differences in aesthetic judgment shape...

"Buddhism shares with science the task of examining the mind empirically; it has pursued, for two millennia, direct investigation of the mind through penetrating introspection. Neuroscience, on the other hand, relies on third-person knowledge in the form of scientific observation. In this book, Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk trained as a molecular biologist, and Wolf Singer, a distinguished neuroscientist--close friends, continuing an ongoing dialogue--offer...

"The New Brain is the story of technology and biology converging to influence the evolution of the human brain. Dramatic advances are now possible, as well as the potential for misuse and abuse." "Dr. Restak, author of more than 15 books on the brain, leads you through the latest research and the expanding field of cognitive science, explains its implications, and even offers practical advice such as how for: understand and mitigate the affects of...

Self-help books like The Secret promise that we can tap into the 'law of attraction' to control our destiny, simply by changing our thoughts. If we strip away the mystique, at the heart of this idea is a fundamental truth that is backed up by the latest breakthroughs in neuroscience: most of the things we want from life health, happiness, wealth, love - are governed by our ability to think, feel and act; in other words, by our brain. Dr Tara Swart,...

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....

Years of neuroscience research have led to the current understanding of the brain as a prediction machine. The problem is that our brains' evolved capacity for avoiding and defending against threats has a slew of by-products, all tightly woven into our day-to-day thinking and behavior, that ensnare us while making our threat-anticipating brains "happy."

Placebos come in all shapes and sizes and have been shown to help treat pain, depression, and alleviate some of the symptoms of Parkinson's disease. In this film, Horizon meets the scientists who are trying to find out why they work. From the man who performed fake operations to alleviate back pain to the scientist studying the effect of fake oxygen on physical performance, placebos have been shown to cause real and measurable physiological changes....

Describes recent scientific understanding of how the brain gets built, providing insight into human behavior and the effects of nature and nurture; and discusses how the brain gets damaged by environmental, internal, and external influences.