Search Results for: the idea of the brain

A Beginner’s Guide to Immortality is a celebration of unusual lives and creative thinkers who punched through ordinary cultural norms while becoming successful in their own niches. In his latest and greatest work, world-renowned science writer Cliff Pickover studies such colorful characters as Truman Capote, John Cage, Stephen Wolfram, Ray Kurzweil, and Wilhelm Rontgen, and their curious ideas. Through these individuals, we can better explore life’s astonishing richness and glimpse the diversity of human imagination. Part memoir and part surrealistic perspective on culture, A Beginner’s Guide to Immortality gives readers a glimpse of new ways of thinking and of other worlds as he reaches across cultures and peers beyond our ordinary reality. He illuminates some of the most mysterious phenomena affecting our species. What is creativity? What are the religious implications of mosquito evolution, simulated Matrix realities, the brain’s own marijuana, and the mathematics of the apocalypse? Could we be a mere software simulation living in a matrix? Who is Elisabeth Kobler-Ross and Emanuel Swedenborg? Did church forefathers eat psychedelic snails? How can we safely expand our minds to become more successful and reason beyond the limits of our own intuition? How can we become immortal?

Some people are meant to travel the globe, to unwrap its secrets and share them with the world. And some people have no sense of direction, are terrified of pigeons, and get motion sickness from tying their shoes. These people are meant to stay home and eat nachos.

Geraldine DeRuiter is the latter. But she won’t let that stop her.

Hilarious, irreverent, and heartfelt, All Over the Place chronicles the years Geraldine spent traveling the world after getting laid off from a job she loved. Those years taught her a great number of things, though the ability to read a map was not one of them. She has only a vague idea of where Russia is, but she now understands her Russian father better than ever before. She learned that what she thought was her mother’s functional insanity was actually an equally incurable condition called “being Italian.” She learned what it’s like to travel the world with someone you already know and love — how that person can help you make sense of things and make far-off places feel like home. She learned about unemployment and brain tumors, lost luggage and lost opportunities, and just getting lost in countless terminals and cabs and hotel lobbies across the globe. And she learned that sometimes you can find yourself exactly where you need to be — even if you aren’t quite sure where you are.

Arthur’s adventures are now available on audio. This special collection includes:

ARTHUR’S FIRST SLEEPOVER: What could top a sleepover in the backyard with Buster and the Brain? When rumors start that a spaceship has landed in the neighborhood the idea of camping under the stars takes on a whole new meaning. Arthur’s sister D.W. is so sure that he will see an alien on his overnight that she gives him her camera. When they hear muffled footsteps approaching their tent and see strange flashes of light, it seems D.W. was right! Or was she?

ARTHUR’S TOOTH: Arthur, tired of being the only one in his class who still has all his baby teeth, waits impatiently for his loose tooth to fall out.

ARTHUR’S BIRTHDAY: Arthur’s friends must decide which party to attend when Francine schedules her birthday party for the same day as Arthur’s birthday party.

ARTHUR’S PET BUSINESS: Arthur’s determination to prove he is responsible enough to have a puppy brings him a menagerie of animals to care for.

ARTHUR’S NEW PUPPY: Arthur is delighted when he finally gets his new puppy, Pal, but his “accidents” and all-night barking make life miserable for the entire family, until Arthur comes up with a solution.

ARTHUR WRITES A STORY: What makes a story entertaining? That’s the question Arthur asks himself when Mr. Ratburn gives a creative writing assignment to the class. When D.W. yawns through Arthur’s first story, he worries that his tale isn’t exciting enough. Is the setting to humdrum? Maybe he needs to research his subject more thoroughly. With every new angle, Arthur’s story takes one more hilarious step further away from his original idea — but is the end result really the tale he wants to tell?

Arthur’s adventures are now available on audio. This special collection includes:

ARTHUR’S FIRST SLEEPOVER: What could top a sleepover in the backyard with Buster and the Brain? When rumors start that a spaceship has landed in the neighborhood the idea of camping under the stars takes on a whole new meaning. Arthur’s sister D.W. is so sure that he will see an alien on his overnight that she gives him her camera. When they hear muffled footsteps approaching their tent and see strange flashes of light, it seems D.W. was right! Or was she?

ARTHUR’S TOOTH: Arthur, tired of being the only one in his class who still has all his baby teeth, waits impatiently for his loose tooth to fall out.

ARTHUR’S BIRTHDAY: Arthur’s friends must decide which party to attend when Francine schedules her birthday party for the same day as Arthur’s birthday party.

ARTHUR’S PET BUSINESS: Arthur’s determination to prove he is responsible enough to have a puppy brings him a menagerie of animals to care for.

ARTHUR’S NEW PUPPY: Arthur is delighted when he finally gets his new puppy, Pal, but his “accidents” and all-night barking make life miserable for the entire family, until Arthur comes up with a solution.

ARTHUR WRITES A STORY: What makes a story entertaining? That’s the question Arthur asks himself when Mr. Ratburn gives a creative writing assignment to the class. When D.W. yawns through Arthur’s first story, he worries that his tale isn’t exciting enough. Is the setting to humdrum? Maybe he needs to research his subject more thoroughly. With every new angle, Arthur’s story takes one more hilarious step further away from his original idea – but is the end result really the tale he wants to tell?

Ally was at a breaking point when she woke up in a psych ward at the age of eighteen. She couldn’t put a sentence together, let alone take a shower, eat a meal, or pick up a phone. What had gone wrong? In recent years, she had produced a feature film, a popular reality show for a major network, and had acted in an off-Broadway play. But now, Ally was pushed to a psychotic break after struggling since she was seven years old with physical symptoms that no doctor could explain; everything from joint pain, to night sweats, memory loss, nausea, and brain fog. A doctor in the psych ward was finally able to give her the answers her and her family had desperately been searching for, and the diagnosis that all the previous doctors had missed. She learned that she had Lyme disease-and finally had a breakthrough.

What she didn’t know was that this diagnosis would lead her down some of the most excruciating years of her life before beginning her journey to recovery from eleven years of misdiagnosis and physical pain. She would need to find her courage to heal physically, mentally, and emotionally, and become the survivor she is today.

Set against the backdrop of the fast-paced fashion and entertainment industries, Bite Me shares the heartbreaking and hilarious stories that moved Ally forward on her journey from sickness to health. Its themes will be familiar to more than 300,000 Americans diagnosed with Lyme disease each year, many of whom, like Ally, wondered for years what was wrong with them. Bite Me offers readers hope and ideas for how one can transition from victim to survivor, and shares the spiritual principles and actions that have contributed to her wholeness as a human, mother, and international spokesperson against Lyme disease.

Have you had enough of the vexation that accompanies losing the greatest comeback to your office nemesis? Are you sick of the irritation that follows forgetting the idea that would have made you the next Bill Gates? And it’s all because you’ve been stranded on the john without pen and paper! Often our best ideas strike when we’re distracted by mundane tasks like doing the dishes, driving, or taking a dump. That’s where this journal-slash-activity book comes in. With Brain Dump, you’ll have the perfect bathroom companion right at your fingertips so you can jot down all your best thoughts, fancies, and frustrations.

Alongside journaling pages so you can write down all your brilliant ideas and practice your best doodles, Brain Dump also includes poo-provoking writing prompts — How would you bring about world peace? and What’s your long-term poo plan? — fun facts, brain- teasing puzzles like Sudupoo, and plenty of space to document your poo and help get things moving smoothly. For those moments when nature calls and you’re either suddenly struck with inspiration or stuck sitting on the porcelain throne consumed with boredom, Brain Dump is here to save the day!

This provocative account of our obsession with neuroscience brilliantly illuminates what contemporary neuroscience and brain imaging can and cannot tell us about ourselves, providing a much-needed reminder about the many factors that make us who we are.

What can’t neuroscience tell us about ourselves? Since fMRI — functional magnetic resonance imaging — was introduced in the early 1990s, brain scans have been used to help politicians understand and manipulate voters, determine guilt in court cases, and make sense of everything from musical aptitude to romantic love. <br
>In Brainwashed, psychiatrist and AEI scholar Sally Satel and psychologist Scott O. Lilienfeld reveal how many of the real-world applications of human neuroscience gloss over its limitations and intricacies, at times obscuring — rather than clarifying — the myriad factors that shape our behavior and identities. Brain scans, Satel and Lilienfeld show, are useful but often ambiguous representations of a highly complex system. Each region of the brain participates in a host of experiences and interacts with other regions, so seeing one area light up on an fMRI in response to a stimulus doesn’t automatically indicate a particular sensation or capture the higher cognitive functions that come from those interactions. The narrow focus on the brain’s physical processes also assumes that our subjective experiences can be explained away by biology alone. As Satel and Lilienfeld explain, this “neurocentric” view of the mind risks undermining our most deeply held ideas about selfhood, free will, and personal responsibility, putting us at risk of making harmful mistakes, whether in the courtroom, interrogation room, or addiction treatment clinic.

Although brain scans and other neurotechnologies have provided groundbreaking insights into the workings of the human brain, Brainwashed shows readers that the increasingly fashionable idea that they are the most important means of answering the enduring mysteries of psychology is misguided — and potentially dangerous.