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 ...

Information molecules, such as Cortico-Releasing Factor (CRF), are ancient and widely distributed across diverse organs, playing various regulatory roles. CRF has been associated with a range of human conditions, including fear and anxiety, social contact, and most recently, addiction – in particular the euphoric feelings associated with alcohol consumption. Since its original discovery, research has unearthed that the role of this molecule is much broader than first thought. The scientifi...

Sports are as varied as the people who play them. We run, jump, and swim. We kick, hit, and shoot balls. We ride sleds in the snow and surf in the sea. From the Olympians of ancient Greece to today's professional athletes, from adult pickup soccer games to children's gymnastics classes, people at all levels of ability at all times and in all places have engaged in sport. What drives this phenomenon?In Sport, the neuroscientist Jay Schulkin argues that biology and culture do more th...

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...

Recently, an interest in our understanding of well-being within the context of competition and cooperation has re-emerged within the biological and neural sciences. Given that we are social animals, our well-being is tightly linked to interactions with others. Pro-social behavior establishes and sustains human contact, contributing to well-being. Adaptation and Well-Being is about the evolution and biological importance of social contact. Social sensibility is an essential feature of our c...

We have known for over a thousand years that the brain underlies behavioral expression, but effective scientific study of the brain is only very recent. Two things converge in this book: a great respect for neuroscience and its many variations, and a sense of investigation and inquiry demythologized. Think of it as foraging for coherence.

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 ...

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...

This book explores the cultures of philosophy and the law as they interact with neuroscience and biology, through the perspective of American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes’ Jr., and the pragmatist tradition of John Dewey. Schulkin proposes that human problem solving and the law are tied to a naturalistic, realistic and an anthropological understanding of the human condition. The situated character of legal reasoning, given its complexity, like reasoning in neuroscience, can be notoriously f...

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...

How better information and better access to it improves the quality of our decisions and makes for a more vibrant participatory society.Information is power. It drives commerce, protects nations, and forms the backbone of systems that range from health care to high finance. Yet despite the avalanche of data available in today's information age, neither institutions nor individuals get the information they truly need to make well-informed decisions. Faulty informati...

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...