A hopeful and practical guide to taming the challenges of dementia with creative interventions inspired by real stories of sufferers and caregivers alike. If you've ever cared for someone with dementia, you might empathize with Alice, who tumbled down a rabbit hole and discovered herself in an unhappy world where time moved oddly, animals and plants spoke, but mostly to berate you. Familiar objects became terribly out of scale. If you're caring for someone with dementia now, you might feel like someone changed the rules of reality and that you need a guide, preferably someone kinder than the perennially late rabbit. This book supports the journey—taken by both the caregiver and the person with dementia—providing loved ones with practical recommendations and enriched with human empathy. This book helps ease the stress by offering interventions and non-pharmaceutical therapeutic suggestions. It helps decode dementia's visceral world and supports non-cognitive human experiences. It shares stories of real people struggling to survive the challenges presented by dementia paired with practical examples of interventions that target the miseries of dementia behaviors, triggers, and causalities induced by them. The book provides options in the art of caregiving alongside the power of place, furnishings, light, color, technology, nature, and the senses. Barbara Huelat explores options in human engagement, the experience of destinations, positive distractions, familiar settings, furnishings, light, color, technology, nature, and the emotion of the senses. She offers design interventions that support the family caregivers in functional and emotional outcomes. No cure exists for dementia, but the tips, tools, strategies and suggestions include here provide tools for caregivers and those with dementia to make the experience more comfortable and calm.

Taking its cues from both classical and post-classical narratologies, this study explores both forms and functions of the representation of dementia in Anglophone fictions. Initially, dementia is conceptualised as a narrative-epistemological paradox: The more those affected know what it is like to have dementia, the less they can tell about it. Narrative fiction is the only discourse that provides an imaginative glimpse at the subjective experience of dementia in language. The narratological modelling of four ‘narrative modes’ elaborates how the paradox becomes productive in fiction: Depending on the narrative perspective taken, but also on the type of narration, the technique for representing consciousness and the epistemic strategy of narrating dementia, the respective narrative modes come with different prerequisites and possibilities for narrating dementia. The analysis of four contemporary Anglophone dementia fictions based on the developed model reveals their potential functions: Fiction allows readers to learn about the challenges of dementia, grants them perspective-taking, it trains cognitive flexibility, and explores the meaning of memory, knowledge, narrative and imagination, and thus also offers trajectories of a cultural coping with dementia.

Learn how to reduce the impact of environmental toxins on brain development, functioning, and health. The human brain is a marvelously complex organ that has evolved great new capabilities over the past 250,000 years. During most of that period, daily life was vastly different from our lives today. Exercise was not optional - one literally had to run for one’s life, livelihood, and sustenance. The Stone Age diet was not a fad, but the only food available. Periods of fasting arose from food scarcity, and hence the earliest keto-diet was commonplace. Life changed greatly with the advent of agriculture and industry. Diseases that were previously unknown or uncommon began to surface as by-products of civilization’s advance. Changes in our ways of living have altered the nature of illness as well as its diagnosis and treatment. From the 1970s to the present, tens of thousands of chemicals with applications in all aspects of our lives have grown more than 40-fold. Exposure to these new substances has impacted many aspects of our health, especially the delicate parts of the brain and nervous system. In parallel with the changes in our environment, we have seen the growth of brain disorders including Alzheimer’s Disease and autism in previously unimaginable ways. Here, Arnold Eiser elucidates some features of diseases affecting the nervous system that are increasing in incidence with a focus on those disorders that appear related to environmental toxins that modern life has introduced. He takes readers behind the scenes of the science itself to discover the human stories involved in the discovery and management of these illnesses. Offering insights from a variety of scientific disciplines, Eiser clearly and succinctly illustrates the impact of toxins on our brains and how we might better protect ourselves from negative outcomes. With interviews from leading authorities in the field of neuroscience, environmental toxicology, integrative medicine, neurology, immunology, geriatrics, and microbiology (re the gut microbiome), this book offers a robust understanding of the complex threats to our brains, and the healthy brain’s dependence upon many other systems within our bodies. This is a voyage of discovery into the science, history, and human struggle regarding disorders challenging the brain as well as their possible prevention.

Past scholars have tried to classify psychoanalysis as an intrinsically positivist science, with varying degrees of success. Their critics have fared little better with narrow applications of postmodern thought, which focus on smaller areas within psychoanalysis and, as a result, neglect the evolution of the discipline as a whole. In an effort to provide a ground for current psychoanalytic thought, Mark Leffert creates an interreferential schema which balances the influences of postmodernism, complexity theory, and neuroscience as its key factors. Using the heterogeneity of postmodern thought as a starting point, he traces its impact on and implications for the development of the discipline, leading into the realm of complexity theory – which is relatively new to the psychoanalytic literature – and how it informs as well as constrains certain psychoanalytic assumptions. The book then turns to neuroscience, the "hard" scientific study of the complexities of the brain, and how recent research informs psychoanalytic theory and may shed light on aspects of memory, the conscious, and the unconscious. Taken together, these three elements create a firm basis for the current trends in psychoanalysis and the direction of its development in the years to come.

A too-busy brain can interfere with attention, concentration, mood and even the ability to make decisions and solve problems. Annibali shows you how to restore cognitive calm, and provides useful suggestions to help you understand your own brain functions so you can discover which techniques will work for you.