Cutting-edge, user-friendly, and comprehensive: the revolutionary guide to the brain, now fully revised and updated At birth each of us is given the most powerful and complex tool of all time: the human brain. And yet, as we well know, it doesn't come with an owner's manual—until now. In this unsurpassed resource, Dr. Pierce J. Howard and his team distill the very latest research and clearly explain the practical, real-world applications to our daily lives. Drawing from the frontiers of psychology, neurobiology, and cognitive science, yet organized and written for maximum usability, The Owner's Manual for the Brain, Fourth Edition, is your comprehensive guide to optimum mental performance and well-being. It should be on every thinking person's bookshelf. What are the ingredients of happiness? Which are the best remedies for headaches and migraines? How can we master creativity, focus, decision making, and willpower? What are the best brain foods? How is it possible to boost memory and intelligence? What is the secret to getting a good night's sleep? How can you positively manage depression, anxiety, addiction, and other disorders? What is the impact of nutrition, stress, and exercise on the brain? Is personality hard-wired or fluid? What are the best strategies when recovering from trauma and loss? How do moods and emotions interact? What is the ideal learning environment for children? How do love, humor, music, friendship, and nature contribute to well-being? Are there ways of reducing negative traits such as aggression, short-temperedness, or irritability? What is the recommended treatment for concussions? Can you delay or prevent Alzheimer's and dementia? What are the most important ingredients to a successful marriage and family? What do the world's most effective managers know about leadership, motivation, and persuasion? Plus 1,000s more topics!

The Functions of Sleep is the result of a symposium held in New Mexico in 1977. The objective of the said symposium is to clarify and ultimately answer questions regarding the functions of sleep. Many perspectives are presented in the attempt to answer the main question of the function of sleep, including the examination of the developmental, neurophysiological, metabolic, behavioral, and clinical correlates of normal and disturbed sleep. The first two chapters focus on the previous studies done regarding the functions of sleep, specifically the methodological issues and clinical implications of the theories. This book also emphasizes the study of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and its different aspects such as reticular formation activity, motivational function, regulation, and growth hormone secretion. Other topics covered in this book include the interrelations of human sleep in terms of neuroendocrine and neuropharmacologic; ontogenetic and clinical studies; sleep pathologies; and brain state and memory. Sleep can be studied in a wide range of scientific fields. Students and researchers in the fields of biology, psychology, neurology, psychobiology, and medicine will find this book very useful.

Designed primarily as a text this volume is an up-to-date and integrated overview of physiological sleep mechanisms, brain function, psychological ramifications of sleep, dimensions of dreaming, and clinical disorders associated with sleep. It is accessibly written with specially boxed material that enhances the text. Authored by a researcher/clinician/professor with more than 25 years of experience in sleep studies, Understanding Sleep and Dreaming provides a solid basis for those who are not expert in this area. It offers a good foundation for those who will continue sleep studies, while at the same time offering enough information for those who will apply this knowledge in other ways such as clinicians in their individual practices or researchers for whom sleep may be part of a specific study. It is an excellent text for courses on sleep at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

A comprehensive proposal for a conceptual framework for describing conscious experience in dreams, integrating philosophy of mind, sleep and dream research, and interdisciplinary consciousness studies. Dreams, conceived as conscious experience or phenomenal states during sleep, offer an important contrast condition for theories of consciousness and the self. Yet, although there is a wealth of empirical research on sleep and dreaming, its potential contribution to consciousness research and philosophy of mind is largely overlooked. This might be due, in part, to a lack of conceptual clarity and an underlying disagreement about the nature of the phenomenon of dreaming itself. In Dreaming, Jennifer Windt lays the groundwork for solving this problem. She develops a conceptual framework describing not only what it means to say that dreams are conscious experiences but also how to locate dreams relative to such concepts as perception, hallucination, and imagination, as well as thinking, knowledge, belief, deception, and self-consciousness. Arguing that a conceptual framework must be not only conceptually sound but also phenomenologically plausible and carefully informed by neuroscientific research, Windt integrates her review of philosophical work on dreaming, both historical and contemporary, with a survey of the most important empirical findings. This allows her to work toward a systematic and comprehensive new theoretical understanding of dreaming informed by a critical reading of contemporary research findings. Windt's account demonstrates that a philosophical analysis of the concept of dreaming can provide an important enrichment and extension to the conceptual repertoire of discussions of consciousness and the self and raises new questions for future research.