Books

Offers possible neurological explanations for the behaviors commonly demonstrated by zombies in popular culture, mixing tongue-in-cheek satire with serious explorations of how the brain works according to current neuroscience.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES and LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER “Brilliant… riveting, scary, cogent, and cleverly argued.”—Beth Macy, author of Dopesick As heard on Fresh Air This book is about pleasure. It’s also about pain. Most important, it’s about how to find the delicate balance between the two, and why now more than ever finding balance is essential. We’re living in...

"For millennia, we have viewed thinking and feeling as fundamentally opposed processes. According to this persistent, age-old belief, to truly live well we must marshal our logical and rational capacities to master our emotions. This perceived dichotomy lies at the heart of our historical pursuits in theology, philosophy, and psychology. But extraordinary advances in psychology and neuroscience, including neuroimaging and...

What is focus? By focusing on three types of focus—“inner,” “outer,” and “other”—Daniel Goleman’s new book explores how focus affects our daily activities and abilities. Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, draws on his life’s work as a psychologist and journalist to dig into scientific research, specific case studies, and his own experiences to define and describe the concepts of focus as...

Navigation skills are easy to take for granted, but the ability to find our way is a key to humanity's evolutionary success. Sharing illustrative stories of the lost and found, Michael Bond explores the science of our mental maps and their vital relationship with imagination, memory, abstract thinking, and other cognitive functions.