Sergei Korsakoff, Alois Alzheimer, James Parkinson, Hans Asperger and other eminent scientists, are all names which have become synonymous with a disease, a syndrome, or an autistic disorder. Although the names of these psychiatrists and neurologists are familiar, we often know little about the individuals themselves and the circumstances surrounding their discoveries. What exactly did they discover, and who were their patients? Douwe Draaisma expertly reconstructs the lives of these and e...

OVER ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD'A remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain' Oliver Sacks'Utterly wonderful . . . without question one of the most important books about the brain you will ever read; yet it is beautifully written, immensely approachable, and full of humanity' Iain McGilchrist MA, author of The Master and His EmissaryMeet the ninety-year-old doctor who is sti...

A famed neuroscientist explores the emotions that make life worth living in "clear, accessible, and at times eloquent prose" ( San Francisco Chronicle).In the seventeenth century, the philosopher Spinoza examined the role emotion played in human survival and culture. Yet, the neurobiological roots of joy and sorrow remained a mystery. Today, we spend countless resources doctoring our feelings with alcohol, prescription drugs, health clubs, therapy, vacatio...

Mad, bad and sad. From the depression suffered by Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath to the mental anguish and addictions of iconic beauties Zelda Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe. From Freud and Jung and the radical breakthroughs of psychoanalysis to Lacan's construction of a modern movement and the new women-centred therapies. This is the story of how we have understood mental disorders and extreme states of mind in women over the last two hundred years and how we conceive of them today, when ...

The first book to put the physical symptoms of stress in their historical and cultural context.This fascinating history of psychosomatic disorders shows how patients throughout the centuries have produced symptoms in tandem with the cultural shifts of the larger society. Newly popularized diseases such as "chronic fatigue syndrome" and "total allergy syndrome" are only the most recent examples of patients complaining of ailments that express the truths about the cu...

Entertaining and educational, Douwe Draaisma's Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older raises almost as many questions as it answers. Draaisma applies a blend of scholarship, poetic sensibility and keen observation in exploring the nature of autobiographical memory, covering subjects such as déjà-vu, near death experiences and the effect of severe trauma on memory recall, as well as human perceptions of time at different stages in life. A highly accessible and personal read, this book will not...

What is dreaming, and what causes it? Why are dreams so strange and why are they so hard to remember? Replacing dream mystique with modern dream science, J. Allan Hobson provides a new and increasingly complete picture of how dreaming is created by the brain. Focusing on dreaming to explain the mechanisms of sleep, this book explores how the new science of dreaming is affecting theories in psychoanalysis, and how it is helping our understanding of the causes of mental illness. J. Allan Hob...

'One of the clearest and best-illustrated attempts to explain the virtually inaccessible, the brain' SUNDAY TIMESBrain scans reveal our thoughts, memories - even our moods - as clearly as an X-ray reveals our bones. We can watch a person's brain literally light up as it registers a joke, or glow dully when it recalls an unhappy memory.MAPPING THE MIND shows how these cans can be used to help explain aspects of our behaviour and how behavioural eccentricitie...

About one American in five receives a diagnosis of major depression over the course of a lifetime. That's despite the fact that many such patients have no mood disorder; they're not sad, but suffer from anxiety, fatigue, insomnia, or a tendency to obsess about the whole business. "There is a term for what they have," writes Edward Shorter, "and it's a good old-fashioned term that has gone out of use. They have nerves." In How Everyone Became Depressed , Edward Shorter, a distinguished prof...

Written by one of the world’s leading neuroscientists, Making Up the Mind is the first accessible account of experimental studies showing how the brain creates our mental world.Uses evidence from brain imaging, psychological experiments and studies of patients to explore the relationship between the mind and the brainDemonstrates that our knowledge of both the mental and physical comes to us through models created by our brainShows how the brain m...

What can a brain scan, or our reaction to a Caravaggio painting, reveal about the deep seat of guilt?How can reading Heidegger, or conducting experiments on rats, help us to cope with anxiety in the face of the world's economic crisis?Can ancient remedies fight sadness more effectively than anti-depressants?What does the neuroscience of acting tell us about how we feel empathy, and fall for an actor on stage?What can writing poetry tell us about how joy work...

This acclaimed account by Stuart Sutherland, the best-selling author of Irrationality, of his own manic depression remains unique in its honesty and perception. As an eminent psychologist who suffered a severe mental breakdown, Sutherland provides us with an original and insightful description of his illness, its often bizarre consequences, and an analysis of the origins of mental illness. Essential reading for students and anyone affected by or interested in mental illness, Sutherland des...