This book argues that the profounded questions raised by cognitive neuroscience may best be answered through a dialogue with religion.

Corballis argues that mind-wandering has many constructive and adaptive features. These range from mental time travel?the wandering back and forth through time, not only to plan our futures based on past experience, but also to generate a continuous sense of who we are--to the ability to inhabit the minds of others, increasing empathy and social understanding. Through mind-wandering, we invent, tell stories, and expand our mental horizons. Mind wandering , hardly the sign of a faulty network or aimless distraction, actually underwrites creativity, whether as a Wordsworth wandering lonely as a cloud, or an Einstein imagining himself travelling on a beam of light. Corballis takes readers on a mental journey in chapters that can be savored piecemeal, as the minds of readers wander in different ways, and sometimes have limited attentional capacity.

Wonder's seminars on whole-brain thinking have been enthusiastically received by such corporations as IBM, Kodak, and Dow Corning. Partly through her teachings, American business is discovering that peak job performance requires not only logic and efficiency but also intuition and creativity--in other words, both the left and right sides of the brain. Illustrated.

The explosion of new research in cognitive neuroscience has revealed fascinating dimensions of the human brain/mind system. But even as it brings us closer to understanding how the mind works, science is producing more, and perhaps even larger questions. What further powers and abilities are latent within us? The Wondering Brain argues that the profound questions raised by cognitive neuroscience may best be answered through a dialogue with religion. Kelly Bulkeley argues that cognitive neuroscience, seen in the light of religion, is a unique source of insight into the natural groundings of faith, morality, love, ecstasy, and revelation. And religion, seen in the light of cognitive neuroscience, is a powerful cultural system whose most valuable function is to stretch and expand our basic cognitive capacities. Kelly Bulkeley's deep engagement with both religious thinking and the workings of cognitive neuroscience makes for a constantly surprising book, full of stories that catch the reader in the unexpected place between two supposedly irreconcilable ways of being in the world.

"Children who get distracted easily will relate to Sadie and will realize they can focus on their positive qualities." —Oregon Coast Youth Book Preview Center Sadie feels like her thoughts are soaring into the clouds and she can’t bring them back down to earth. She has trouble paying attention, which makes keeping track of schoolwork, friends, chores, and everything else really tough. Sometimes she can only focus on her mistakes. When Sadie talks to her parents about her wandering, dreaming mind, they offer a clever plan to help remind Sadie how amazing she is. Includes a Note to Parents and Caregivers with more information on ADHD, self-esteem, and helping children focus on the positives.

Over 900,000 copies sold! According to researchers, the vast majority--a whopping 75-98 percent--of the illnesses that plague us today are a direct result of our thought life. What we think about truly affects us both physically and emotionally. In fact, fear alone triggers more than 1,400 known physical and chemical responses in our bodies, activating more than thirty different hormones! Today our culture is undergoing an epidemic of toxic thoughts that, left unchecked, create ideal conditions for illnesses. Supported by current scientific and medical research, Dr. Caroline Leaf gives readers a prescription for better health and wholeness through correct thinking patterns, declaring that we are not victims of our biology. She shares with readers the "switch" in our brains that enables us to live happier, healthier, more enjoyable lives where we achieve our goals, maintain our weight, and even become more intelligent. She shows us how to choose life, get our minds under control, and reap the benefits of a detoxed thought life.

Rooted in neuroscience, psychology and evolutionary biology, this study explores what happens when we stop paying attention and the effect on our behavior. If we’ve done our job well—and, let’s be honest, if we’re lucky—you’ll read to the end of this description. Most likely, however, you won’t. Somewhere in the middle of the next paragraph, your mind will wander off. Minds wander. That’s just how it is. That may be bad news for me, but is it bad news for people in general? Does the fact that as much as fifty percent of our waking hours find us failing to focus on the task at hand represent a problem? Michael Corballis doesn’t think so. With The Wandering Mind, he shows us why, rehabilitating woolgathering and revealing its incredibly useful effects. Drawing on the latest research from cognitive science and evolutionary biology, Corballis shows us how mind-wandering not only frees us from moment-to-moment drudgery, but also from the limitations of our immediate selves. Mind-wandering strengthens our imagination, fueling the flights of invention, storytelling, and empathy that underlie our shared humanity; furthermore, he explains, our tendency to wander back and forth through the timeline of our lives is fundamental to our very sense of ourselves as coherent, continuing personalities. Full of unusual examples and surprising discoveries, The Wandering Mind mounts a vigorous defense of inattention—even as it never fails to hold the reader’s. Praise for The Wandering Mind “[A] conversational, sincere and amusing book about the tendency of our minds to stray from whatever it is we are actually supposed to be focusing on. . . . [An] engaging exploration of the subject.” —Times Higher Education, Book of the Week “Michael Corballis, the scientist, takes you by the hand and weaves through an avalanche of information from psychology, literature, history, and more to elucidate my favorite mental state—mind wandering. His high capacity for erudition, lucidity, and warmth have never shined more brightly.” —Michael S. Gazzaniga “The Wandering Mind is a pleasure to read—a lively book that will appeal to a broad spectrum of readers.” —Thomas Suddendorf, author of The Gap