Today, the opioid crisis often feels intractable. This book offers a wider perspective on its underlying causes, examining the biological, psychological, and social aspects of addiction and the interactions among them.Jay Schulkin, a behavioral neuroscientist, and Bryce Huebner, a philosopher, explore the complexities of opioid addiction through a distinctive combination of neuroscientific knowledge and pragmatist thought. They detail the biological and neurological processes that ...

By integrating sociological, psychological, and biological perspectives, this book aims to demystify and destigmatize a challenging and taboo topic – suicide. It weaves current theories and statistics on suicide into a larger message of how suicide can affect almost anyone, and how urgent prevention needs are. Written in an accessible manner, it assumes no pre-existing knowledge of suicide. The broad nontechnical overview will appeal to general readers and a wide range of disciplines, incl...

A dialogue between contemporary neuroscience and John Dewey’s seminal philosophical work Experience and Nature, exploring how the bodily roots of human meaning, selfhood, and values provide wisdom for living.The intersection of cognitive science and pragmatist philosophy reveals the bodily basis of human meaning, thought, selfhood, and values. John Dewey's revolutionary account of pragmatist philosophy Experience and Nature (1925) explores humans as comple...

This Element introduces a biological approach to cognition, which highlights the significance of allostatic regulation and the navigation of challenges and opportunities. It argues that cognition is best understood as a juggling act, which reflects numerous ongoing attempts to minimize disruptions while prioritizing the sources of information that are necessary to satisfy social and biological needs; and it provides a characterization of the architectural constraints, neurotransmitters, an...

Pragmatism—a pluralistic philosophy with kinships to phenomenology, Gestalt psychology, and embodied cognitive science—is resurging across disciplines. It has growing relevance to literary studies, the arts, and religious scholarship, along with branches of political theory, not to mention our understanding of science. But philosophies and sciences of mind have lagged behind this pragmatic turn, for the most part retaining a central-nervous-system orientation, which pragmatists reject as t...

Pragmatism—a pluralistic philosophy with kinships to phenomenology, Gestalt psychology, and embodied cognitive science—is resurging across disciplines. It has growing relevance to literary studies, the arts, and religious scholarship, along with branches of political theory, not to mention our understanding of science. But philosophies and sciences of mind have lagged behind this pragmatic turn, for the most part retaining a central-nervous-system orientation, which pragmatists reject as t...

In this sweeping exploration of the relatively recent obesity epidemic, Michael L. Power and Jay Schulkin probe evolutionary biology, history, physiology, and medical science to uncover the causes of our growing girth. The unexpected answer? Our own evolutionary success.For most of the past few million years, our evolutionary ancestors' survival depended on being able to consume as much as possible when food was available and to store the excess energy for periods when it was scarc...

In Effort: A Behavioral Neuroscience Perspective on the Will, author Jay Schulkin presents a two-fold thesis: there is no absolute separation of the cognitive and non-cognitive brain, and there are diverse cognitive systems, many of which are embodied in motor systems that underlie self-regulation. Central to this thesis is that dopamine is the one neurotransmitter that underlies the diverse senses of effort, and is apparent in most everyday activity, whether solving a problem in ...

The human brain is the most complex object in the known universe. The field of neuroscience has made remarkable strides in recent years in understanding aspects of the brain, yet we still struggle with seemingly fundamental questions about how the brain works. What lessons can we learn from neuroscience’s successes and failures? What kinds of questions can neuroscience answer, and what will remain out of reach?In The Brain in Context, the bioethicist Jonathan D. Moreno and...

Although we usually identify our abilities to reason, to adapt to situations, and to solve problems with the mind, recent research has shown that we should not, in fact, detach these abilities from the body. This work provides an integrative framework for understanding how these abilities are affected by visceral reactions. Schulkin presents provocative neuroscientific research demonstrating that thought is not on one side and bodily sensibility on the other; from a biological point of vie...

Extreme Fear, Shyness, and Social Phobia assembles a stellar group of researchers to discuss the origins, development, and outcomes of extreme fear and shyness. By selecting the foremost experts from disparate fields, the editors provide a thorough and timely examination of the subject and present state-of-the-art research for psychologists, neuroscientists, and clinicians interested in the development and outcome of these emotions in mental health. This book is divided into three...

What's so special about music? We experience it internally, yet at the same time it is highly social. Music engages our cognitive/affective and sensory systems. We use music to communicate with one another--and even with other species--the things that we cannot express through language. Music is both ancient and ever evolving. Without music, our world is missing something essential.In Reflections on the Musical Mind, Jay Schulkin offers a social and behavioral neuroscienti...