Your Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age


Book Description

An award-winning neurologist on the Stone-Age roots of our screen addictions, and what to do about them. The human brain hasn’t changed much since the Stone Age, let alone in the mere thirty years of the Screen Age. That’s why, according to neurologist Richard Cytowic—who, Oliver Sacks observed, “changed the way we think of the human brain”—our brains are so poorly equipped to resist the incursions of Big Tech: They are programmed for the wildly different needs of a prehistoric world. In Your Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age, Cytowic explains exactly how this programming works—from the brain’s point of view. What he reveals in this book shows why we are easily addicted to screen devices; why young, developing brains are particularly vulnerable; why we need silence; and what we can do to push back. In the engaging storytelling style of his popular TED Talk, Cytowic draws an easily comprehensible picture of the Stone Age brain’s workings—the function of neurotransmitters like dopamine in basic instincts for survival such as desire and reward; the role of comparison in emotion, and emotion in competition; and, most significantly, the orienting reflex, one of the unconscious circuits that automatically focus, shift, and sustain attention. Given this picture, the nature of our susceptibility to digital devices becomes clear, along with the possibility of how to break their spell. Full of practical actions that we can start taking right away, Your Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age offers compelling evidence that we can change the way we use technology, resist its addictive power over us, and take back the control we have lost.




Solving Modern Problems With a Stone-Age Brain


Book Description

Like our ancestors, we must do our best to survive, form friendships, win respect, attract mates, and care for our families. In the 21st century, however, the threats to our survival are sometimes hidden. This book presents evolutionary science-based advice for fending off our modern attackers and learning how to be happy in the modern world.




How to Do Space Age Work with a Stone Age Brain


Book Description

Entrepreneurs and small business owners will discover new ways to deal with the toughest challenges in today's fast-paced business world in this book. Quickly learn proven brain-based tips so you can organize your office, email, paper, computer and time to increase your productivity, results and profits. Save time, make more money and reduce your stress. Whether you work in or outside your home, Eve Abbott, the Organizer Extraordinaire, brings you keys to escape email overload, paper piles and endless multi-tasks. Let Eve show you "How to Do Space Age Work with a Stone Age Brain: Using your brain for small business success with less stress" and help you save a guaranteed hour a day. This entertaining, interactive guide offers easy online assessments and is loaded with photos so you can develop your own personal organizing solutions to match your unique brain/work style. Small business owners and entrepreneurs will take time management by brain-style to a new level of success!




Your Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age


Book Description

"An award winning neurologist considers the effect of social media and digital devices on our brains, especially our ability to pay attention"--




The Heart Remembers


Book Description

The highly anticipated final book in the internationally bestselling The Art of Hearing Heartbeats trilogy, a moving story about love’s power to transcend distances and heal seemingly irreparable wounds. Twelve-year-old Ko Bo Bo lives with his uncle U Ba in Kalaw, a town in Burma. An unusually perceptive child, Bo Bo can read people’s emotions in their eyes. This acute sensitivity only makes his unconventional home life more difficult: His father comes to visit him once a year, and he can hardly remember his mother, who, for unclear reasons, keeps herself away from her son. Everything changes when Bo Bo discovers the story of his parents’ great love, which threatens to break down in the whirlwind of political events, and of his mother’s mysterious sickness. Convinced that he can heal her and reunite their family, Bo Bo decides to set out in search of his parents. A gripping, heartwarming tale that takes the reader from Burma to New York and back, The Heart Remembers is a worthy conclusion to Jan-Philipp Sendker’s beloved series.




A Million Years in a Day


Book Description

Who invented beds? When did we start cleaning our teeth? How old are wine and beer? Which came first: the toilet seat or toilet paper? What was the first clock? Every day, from the moment our alarm clock wakes us in the morning until our head hits our pillow at night, we all take part in rituals that are millennia old. Structured around one ordinary day, A Million Years in a Day reveals the astonishing origins and development of the daily practices we take for granted. In this gloriously entertaining romp through human history, Greg Jenner explores the gradual—and often unexpected—evolution of our daily routines. This is not a story of wars, politics, or great events. Instead, Jenner has scoured Roman rubbish bins, Egyptian tombs, and Victorian sewers to bring us the most intriguing, surprising, and sometimes downright silly historical nuggets from our past. Drawn from across the world, spanning a million years of humanity, this book is a smorgasbord of historical delights. It is a history of all those things you always wondered about—and many you have never considered. It is the story of your life, one million years in the making.




Wednesday is Indigo Blue


Book Description

How the extraordinary multisensory phenomenon of synesthesia has changed our traditional view of the brain.




Those We Throw Away Are Diamonds


Book Description

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • Named a Best Nonfiction Book of 2021 by Kirkus • A New York Times Book Review Paperback Row Selection A stunning and heartbreaking lens on the global refugee crisis, from a man who faced the very worst of humanity and survived to advocate for displaced people around the world One day when Mondiant Dogon, a Bagogwe Tutsi born in the Democratic Republic of Congo, was only three years old, his father’s lifelong friend, a Hutu man, came to their home with a machete in his hand and warned the family they were to be killed within hours. Dogon’s family fled into the forest, initiating a long and dangerous journey into Rwanda. They made their way to the first of several UN tent cities in which they would spend decades. But their search for a safe haven had just begun. Hideous violence stalked them in the camps. Even though Rwanda famously has a former refugee for a president in Paul Kagame, refugees in that country face enormous prejudice and acute want. For much of his life, Dogon and his family ate barely enough to keep themselves from starving. He fled back to Congo in search of the better life that had been lost, but there he was imprisoned and left without any option but to become a child soldier. For most refugees, the camp starts as an oasis but soon becomes quicksand, impossible to leave. Yet Dogon managed to be one of the few refugees he knew to go to college. Though he hid his status from his fellow students out of shame, eventually he would emerge as an advocate for his people. Rarely do refugees get to tell their own stories. We see them only for a moment, if at all, in flight: Syrians winding through the desert; children searching a Greek shore for their parents; families gathered at the southern border of the United States. But through his writing, Dogon took control of his own narrative and spoke up for forever refugees everywhere. As Dogon once wrote in a poem, “Those we throw away are diamonds.”




The Man Who Tasted Shapes, revised edition


Book Description

In this medical detective adventure, Cytowic shows how synesthesia, or "joined sensation," illuminates a wide swath of mental life and leads to a new view of what it means to be human. Richard Cytowic's dinner host apologized, "There aren't enough points on the chicken!" He felt flavor also as a physical shape in his hands, and the chicken had come out "too round." This offbeat comment in 1980 launched Cytowic's exploration into the oddity called synesthesia. He is one of the few world authorities on the subject. Sharing a root with anesthesia ("no sensation"), synesthesia means "joined sensation," whereby a voice, for example, is not only heard but also seen, felt, or tasted. The trait is involuntary, hereditary, and fairly common. It stayed a scientific mystery for two centuries until Cytowic's original experiments led to a neurological explanation—and to a new concept of brain organization that accentuates emotion over reason. That chicken dinner two decades ago led Cytowic to explore a deeper reality that, he argues, exists in everyone but is often just below the surface of awareness (which is why finding meaning in our lives can be elusive). In this medical detective adventure, Cytowic shows how synesthesia, far from being a mere curiosity, illuminates a wide swath of mental life and leads to a new view of what is means to be human—a view that turns upside down conventional ideas about reason, emotional knowledge, and self-understanding. This 2003 edition features a new afterword.




Feeling & Knowing


Book Description

From one of the world’s leading neuroscientists: a succinct, illuminating, wholly engaging investigation of how biology, neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence have given us the tools to unlock the mysteries of human consciousness “One thrilling insight after another ... Damasio has succeeded brilliantly in narrowing the gap between body and mind.” —The New York Times Book Review In recent decades, many philosophers and cognitive scientists have declared the problem of consciousness unsolvable, but Antonio Damasio is convinced that recent findings across multiple scientific disciplines have given us a way to understand consciousness and its significance for human life. In the forty-eight brief chapters of Feeling & Knowing, and in writing that remains faithful to our intuitive sense of what feeling and experiencing are about, Damasio helps us understand why being conscious is not the same as sensing, why nervous systems are essential for the development of feelings, and why feeling opens the way to consciousness writ large. He combines the latest discoveries in various sciences with philosophy and discusses his original research, which has transformed our understanding of the brain and human behavior. Here is an indispensable guide to understand­ing how we experience the world within and around us and find our place in the universe.