This volume explores how advances in the fields of evolutionary neuroscience and cognitive psychology are informing media studies with a better understanding of how humans perceive, think and experience emotion within mediated environments. The book highlights interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches to the production and reception of cinema, television, the Internet and other forms of mediated communication that take into account new understandings of how the embodied brain senses and interacts with its symbolic environment. Moreover, as popular media shape perceptions of the promises and limits of brain science, contributors also examine the representation of neuroscience and cognitive psychology within mediated culture.

Brain Culture investigates the American obsession with the health of the brain. Davi Johnson Thornton looks at familiar messages, tracing how brain science and colorful brain images produced by scientific technologies are taken up and distributed in popular media. She tracks the message that, "you are your brain" across multiple contemporary contexts, analyzing its influence on child development, family life, education, and public policy. Our fixation on the brain is not simply a reaction to scientific progress, but a cultural phenomenon tied to values of individualism and limitless achievement.

This is a book about speech and language. It is primarily intended for those interested in speech and its neurophysiological bases: phoneticians, linguists, educators, speech therapists, psychologists, and neuroscientists. Although speech and language are its central topic, it provides information about related topics as well (e.g. structure and functioning of the central nervous system, research methods in neuroscience, theories and models of speech production and perception, learning, and memory). Data on clinical populations are given in parallel with studies of healthy subjects because such comparisons can give a better understanding of intact and disordered speech and language functions. There is a review of literature (more than 600 sources) and research results covering areas such as neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, development of the nervous system, sex differences, history of neurolinguistics, behavioral, neuroimaging and other research methods in neuroscience, linguistics and psychology, theories and models of the nervous system function including speech and language processing, kinds of memory and learning and their neural substrates, critical periods, various aspects of normal speech and language processes (e.g. phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, reading), bilingualism, speech and language disorders, and many others. Newcomers to the field of neurolinguistics will find it as readable as professionals will because it is organized in a way that gives the readers flexibility and an individual approach to the text. The language is simple but all the technical terms are provided, explained, and illustrated. A comprehensive glossary provides additional information.

A renowned neurologist shares the true stories of people unable to get a good night’s rest in The Nocturnal Brain: Nightmares, Neuroscience, and the Secret World of Sleep, a fascinating exploration of the symptoms and syndromes behind sleep disorders. For Dr. Guy Leschziner’s patients, there is no rest for the weary in mind and body. Insomnia, narcolepsy, night terrors, apnea, and sleepwalking are just a sampling of conditions afflicting sufferers who cannot sleep—and their experiences in trying are the stuff of nightmares. Demoniac hallucinations frighten people into paralysis. Restless legs rock both the sleepless and their sleeping partners with unpredictable and uncontrollable kicking. Out-of-sync circadian rhythms confuse the natural body clock’s days and nights. Then there are the extreme cases. A woman in a state of deep sleep who gets dressed, unlocks her car, and drives for several miles before returning to bed. The man who has spent decades cleaning out kitchens while “sleep-eating.” The teenager prone to the serious, yet unfortunately nicknamed Sleeping Beauty Syndrome stuck in a cycle of excessive unconsciousness, binge eating, and uncharacteristic displays of aggression and hypersexuality while awake. With compassionate stories of his patients and their conditions, Dr. Leschziner illustrates the neuroscience behind our sleeping minds, revealing the many biological and psychological factors necessary in getting the rest that will not only maintain our physical and mental health, but improve our cognitive abilities and overall happiness.

Philosophers and neuroscientists address central issues in both fields, including morality, action, mental illness, consciousness, perception, and memory. Philosophers and neuroscientists grapple with the same profound questions involving consciousness, perception, behavior, and moral judgment, but only recently have the two disciplines begun to work together. This volume offers fourteen original chapters that address these issues, each written by a team that includes at least one philosopher and one neuroscientist who integrate disciplinary perspectives and reflect the latest research in both fields. Topics include morality, empathy, agency, the self, mental illness, neuroprediction, optogenetics, pain, vision, consciousness, memory, concepts, mind wandering, and the neural basis of psychological categories. The chapters first address basic issues about our social and moral lives: how we decide to act and ought to act toward each other, how we understand each other’s mental states and selves, and how we deal with pressing social problems regarding crime and mental or brain health. The following chapters consider basic issues about our mental lives: how we classify and recall what we experience, how we see and feel objects in the world, how we ponder plans and alternatives, and how our brains make us conscious and create specific mental states.

Cyberpsychology is a relatively new discipline that is growing at an alarming rate. While a number of cyberpsychology-related journals and books have emerged, none directly address the neuroscience behind it. This book proposes a framework for integrating neuroscience and cyberpsychology for the study of social, cognitive, and affective processes, and the neural systems that support them. A brain-based cyberpsychology can be understood as a branch of psychology that studies the neurocognitive, affective, and social aspects of humans interacting with technology, as well as the affective computing aspects of humans interacting with computational devices or systems. As such, a cyberpsychologist working from a brain-based cyberpsychological framework studies both the ways in which persons make use of devices and the neurocognitive processes, motivations, intentions, behavioural outcomes, and effects of online and offline uses of technology. Cyberpsychology and the Brain brings researchers into the vanguard of cyberpsychology and brain research.