A composite picture of a girl in a strait-jacket sitting inside an eye. This is surrounded by four color wedges; clock-wise they are brown, green, blue and purple.

When I drink, am I killing my brain cells? Does cramming for an exam work? Why can't you tickle yourself? Can you improve your brain with video games? Written with a light touch, but using hard science, this book will answer all the questions you've ever had about how that amazing three pounds in your skull works.

One of the nation’s chief architecture critics reveals how the environments we build profoundly shape our feelings, memories, and well-being, and argues that we must harness this knowledge to construct a world better suited to human experience Taking us on a fascinating journey through some of the world’s best and worst landscapes, buildings, and cityscapes, Sarah Williams Goldhagen draws from recent research in cognitive neuroscience and psychology to demonstrate how people’s experiences of the places they build are central to their well-being, their physical health, their communal and social lives, and even their very sense of themselves. From this foundation, Goldhagen presents a powerful case that societies must use this knowledge to rethink what and how they build: the world needs better-designed, healthier environments that address the complex range of human individual and social needs. By 2050 America’s population is projected to increase by nearly seventy million people. This will necessitate a vast amount of new construction—almost all in urban areas—that will dramatically transform our existing landscapes, infrastructure, and urban areas. Going forward, we must do everything we can to prevent the construction of exhausting, overstimulating environments and enervating, understimulating ones. Buildings, landscapes, and cities must both contain and spark associations of natural light, greenery, and other ways of being in landscapes that humans have evolved to need and expect. Fancy exteriors and dramatic forms are never enough, and may not even be necessary; authentic textures and surfaces, and careful, well-executed construction details are just as important. Erudite, wise, lucidly written, and beautifully illustrated with more than one hundred color photographs, Welcome to Your World is a vital, eye-opening guide to the spaces we inhabit, physically and mentally, and a clarion call to design for human experience.

A foundational volume for seekers in formation programs and a “refresher” study volume for individuals and congregational study groups. We live in a world increasingly separated from the Christian tradition and the basic understanding of the faith that previous ages might have taken for granted. The voices of faith seem increasingly strident and off-putting to many. There is a need for a calmer, basic introduction to faith that recognizes the value of doubt and the questions raised in a secular society. A systematic introduction to Christianity for newcomers needs to begin with a discussion of faith itself and then move on to a discussion of such Christian basics as God, Trinity, Church, sin, atonement, prayer, and Christian living.

This is the perfect book for an intellectually bored individual. In it, the author shares a serendipitous collection of his thoughts on a wide variety of conventional and unconventional topics. Professor Eisenberg has spent the past six decades challenging his students to think outside the proverbial box. Whenever he would ask them a question, and they answered, I dont know, he would say,I know that you dont know, but what do you think? Using this Socratic Method opened their minds and encouraged them to take risks. Convinced that a good question outweighs a hundred trite answers, the author has included a section of the book in which he asks himself a question and then proceeds to answer it. His favorite question is, What one word best describes your life? His answer was, Creative. The reader should come away from this book with a deeper understanding of why he chose the title, Welcome to my mind. He enthusiastically agrees with the following quotation. Whatever we possess becomes double value when we have the opportunity of sharing it with others. Jean-Nicholas Bouilly (1763-1842)

This up-and-coming author has a style all her own. Welcome To My Mind is a collaboration of experience, opinion, humor, fiction, and bluntness rolled into a literary treasure for like-minded people. If you are easily offended, this is probably not the book for you. However, if you can relate to a chick that is a little crazy, kind of funny, has a potty mouth, and tells it like it is entertaining, then step right up and have a peek into her mind. She has no filter but a huge imagination, and weird is a side effect of awesome. Welcome!

How children think is one of the most enduring mysteries--and difficulties--of parenthood. The marketplace is full of gadgets and tools that claim to make your child smarter, happier, or learn languages faster, all built on the premise that manufacturers know something about your child's brain that you don't. These products are easy to sell, because good information about how children's minds really work is hard to come by. In their new book, neuroscientists Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang separate fact from fiction about the inner workings of young minds. Martialing results from new studies and classic research, Aamodt and Wang provide the most complete answers out there on this subject. It liberates readers from superstitions and speculation, such as Freud's idea that all relationships are modeled on one's mother, or that it's not safe to eat sushi while pregnant. And it will reveal new truths about everything from how to make your baby sleep, to why we love to snuggle, to how children learn, forget, play, talk, walk, and feel. Welcome to Your Child's Brain is eye-opening and necessary, soon to become a staple for parents and children alike.