Psychology

Why do so many of us stop learning new skills as adults? Are we afraid to fail? Have we forgotten the sheer pleasure of being a beginner? Or is it simply a fact that you can't teach an old dog new tricks?

Inspired by his young daughter's insatiable need to know how to do almost everything, and stymied by his own rut of mid-career competence, Tom Vanderbilt begins a year of learning purely for the sake of learning. He tackles five main skills (and picks up a few more along the way), choosing them for their difficulty to master and their distinct lack of career marketability--chess, singing, surfing, drawing, and juggling.

What he doesn't expect is finding himself having rapturous experiences singing Spice Girls songs in an amateur choir, losing games of chess to eight-year-olds, and dodging scorpions at a surf camp in Costa Rica. Along the way, he interviews dozens of experts to explore the fascinating psychology and science behind the benefits of becoming an adult beginner. Weaving comprehensive research and surprising insight gained from his year of learning dangerously, Vanderbilt shows how anyone can begin again--and, more important, why they should take those first awkward steps. Ultimately, he shares how a refreshed sense of curiosity opened him up to a profound happiness and a deeper connection to the people around him--and how small acts of reinvention, at any age, can make life seem magical.

A groundbreaking and timely book about how evolutionary biology can explain our black-and-white brains, and a lesson in how we can escape the pitfalls of binary thinking.

Several million years ago, natural selection equipped us with binary, black-and-white brains. Though the world was arguably simpler back then, it was in many ways much more dangerous. Not coincidentally, the binary brain was highly adept at detecting risk--the ability to analyze threats and respond to changes in the sensory environment was essential to our survival as a species.

Since then, the world has evolved--but we, for the most part, have not. Confronted with a panoply of shades of gray, our brains have a tendency to "force quit" to sort the things we see, hear, and experience into manageable but simplistic categories. We stereotype, pigeonhole, and, above all, draw lines where in reality there are none.

In Black-and-White Thinking, the renowned psychologist Kevin Dutton pulls back the curtains of the mind to reveal a new way of thinking about a problem as old as humanity itself. While our instinct for categorization often leads us astray, encouraging polarization, rigid thinking, and sometimes outright denialism, it is an essential component of the mental machinery we use to make sense of the world.

Using the latest advances in psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology, Dutton shows how we can optimize our tendency to categorize and fine-tune our minds to avoid the pitfalls of too little--and too much--complexity. He reveals the enduring importance of three "super-categories"--Fight versus Flight, Us versus Them, and Right versus Wrong--and argues that they remain essential not only to convincing others to change their minds but to changing the world for the better.

Black-and-White Thinking is a science-based wake-up call for an era of increasing extremism and a thought-provoking, uplifting guide to training our gray matter to see that gray really does matter.

This book is about pleasure. It's also about pain. Most important, it's about how to find the delicate balance between the two, and why now more than ever finding balance is essential. We're living in a time of unprecedented access to high-reward, high-dopamine stimuli: drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, texting, sexting, Facebooking, Instagramming, YouTubing, tweeting... The increased numbers, variety, and potency is staggering. The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation. As such we've all become vulnerable to compulsive overconsumption.

In Dopamine Nation, Dr. Anna Lembke, psychiatrist and author, explores the exciting new scientific discoveries that explain why the relentless pursuit of pleasure leads to pain...and what to do about it. Condensing complex neuroscience into easy-to-understand metaphors, Lembke illustrates how finding contentment and connectedness means keeping dopamine in check. The lived experiences of her patients are the gripping fabric of her narrative. Their riveting stories of suffering and redemption give us all hope for managing our consumption and transforming our lives. In essence, Dopamine Nation shows that the secret to finding balance is combining the science of desire with the wisdom of recovery.

A top expert on human trauma argues that we vastly overestimate how common PTSD is and fail to recognize how resilient people really are

After 9/11, mental health professionals flocked to New York to handle what everyone assumed would be a flood of trauma cases. Oddly, the flood never came.

In The End of Trauma, pioneering psychologist George A. Bonanno argues that we failed to predict the psychological response to 9/11 because most of what we understand about trauma is wrong. For starters, it's not nearly as common as we think. In fact, people are overwhelmingly resilient to adversity. What we often interpret as PTSD are signs of a natural process of learning how to deal with a specific situation. We can cope far more effectively if we understand how this process works. Drawing on four decades of research, Bonanno explains what makes us resilient, why we sometimes aren't, and how we can better handle traumatic stress.

Hopeful and humane, The End of Trauma overturns everything we thought we knew about how people respond to hardship.

Throughout our life, we look for ways to keep our minds sharp and effortlessly productive. Now, globetrotting neurosurgeon Dr. Sanjay Gupta offers "the book all of us need, young and old" (Walter Isaacson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Code Breaker) with insights from top scientists all over the world, whose cutting-edge research can help you heighten and protect brain function and maintain cognitive health at any age.

Keep Sharp debunks common myths about aging and mental decline, explores whether there's a "best" diet or exercise regimen for the brain, and explains whether it's healthier to play video games that test memory and processing speed, or to engage in more social interaction. Discover what we can learn from "super-brained" people who are in their eighties and nineties with no signs of slowing down--and whether there are truly any benefits to drugs, supplements, and vitamins. Dr. Gupta also addresses brain disease, particularly Alzheimer's, answers all your questions about the signs and symptoms, and shows how to ward against it and stay healthy while caring for a partner in cognitive decline. He likewise provides you with a personalized twelve-week program featuring practical strategies to strengthen your brain every day.

Keep Sharp is the "must-read owner's manual" (Arianna Huffington) you'll need to keep your brain young and healthy regardless of your age!

Our brain is a muscle. Like our bodies, it needs exercise. In the last few hundred years, we have stopped training our memories and we have lost the ability to memorize large amounts of information--something our ancestors could do with ease.

After discovering that the true purpose of monuments like Easter Island and Stonehenge were to act as memory palaces, Kelly takes this knowledge and introduces us to the best memory techniques humans have ever devised, from ancient times and the Middle Ages to methods used by today's memory athletes. A memory champion herself, Kelly tests all these methods and demonstrate the extraordinary capacity of our brains at any age.

For anyone who needs to memorize a speech or a script, learn anatomy or a foreign language, or prepare for an exam, Memory Craft offers proven techniques and simple strategies for anyone who has trouble remembering names or dates, or for older people who want to keep their minds agile. In addition to getting in touch with our own human and anthropological foundations, Memory Craft shows how all things mnemonic can be playful, creative, and fun.

International best-selling writer and autist Temple Grandin joins psychologist Debra Moore in presenting nine strengths-based mindsets necessary to successfully work with young people on the autism spectrum. Examples and stories bring the approaches to life, and detailed suggestions and checklists help readers put them to practical use.

Temple Grandin shares her own personal experiences and anecdotes from parents and professionals who have sought her advice, while Debra Moore draws on more than three decades of work as a psychologist with kids on the spectrum and those who love and care for them. So many people support the lives of these kids, and this book is for all of them: teachers; special education staff; mental health clinicians; physical, occupational, and speech therapists; parents; and anyone interacting with autistic children or teens.

Readers will come away with new, empowering mindsets they can apply to develop the full potential of every child.

Imagine that two doctors in the same city give different diagnoses to identical patients--or that two judges in the same courthouse give markedly different sentences to people who have committed the same crime. Suppose that different interviewers at the same firm make different decisions about indistinguishable job applicants--or that when a company is handling customer complaints, the resolution depends on who happens to answer the phone. Now imagine that the same doctor, the same judge, the same interviewer, or the same customer service agent makes different decisions depending on whether it is morning or afternoon, or Monday rather than Wednesday. These are examples of noise: variability in judgments that should be identical.

In Noise, Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein show the detrimental effects of noise in many fields, including medicine, law, economic forecasting, forensic science, bail, child protection, strategy, performance reviews, and personnel selection. Wherever there is judgment, there is noise. Yet, most of the time, individuals and organizations alike are unaware of it. They neglect noise. With a few simple remedies, people can reduce both noise and bias, and so make far better decisions.

Packed with original ideas, and offering the same kinds of research-based insights that made Thinking, Fast and Slow and Nudge groundbreaking New York Times bestsellers, Noise explains how and why humans are so susceptible to noise in judgment--and what we can do about it.

From the UK's foremost literary psychoanalyst, a dazzling new book on the universal urge to change our lives.

We live in a world in which we are invited to change--to become our best selves through politics, or fitness, or diet, or therapy. We change all the time--growing older and older--and how we think about change changes over time too.

We want to think of our lives as progress myths--as narratives of positive personal growth--at the same time as we inevitably age and suffer setbacks.

Adam Phillips's sparkling book On Wanting to Change explores the stories we tell about change, and the changes we actually make--and the fact that they don't always go, or come, together.

Drawing on research in social psychology, neuroscience, and biology, Pink debunks the myth of the "no regrets" philosophy of life. And using the largest sampling of American attitudes about regret ever conducted as well as his own World Regret Survey--which has collected regrets from more than 15,000 people in 105 countries--he lays out the four core regrets that each of us has. These deep regrets offer compelling insights into how we live and how we can find a better path forward.

As he did in his bestsellers Drive, When, and A Whole New Mind, Pink lays out a dynamic new way of thinking about regret and frames his ideas in ways that are clear, accessible, and pragmatic. Packed with true stories of people's regrets as well as practical takeaways for reimagining regret as a positive force, The Power of Regret shows how we can live richer, more engaged lives.

For ten years, Arnhild Lauveng suffered as a schizophrenic, going in and out of the hospital for months or even a year at a time. A Road Back from Schizophrenia gives extraordinary insight into the logic (and life) of a schizophrenic. Lauveng illuminates her loss of identity, her sense of being controlled from the outside, and her relationship to the voices she heard and her sometimes terrifying hallucinations. Painful recollections of moments of humiliation inflicted by thoughtless medical professionals are juxtaposed with Lauveng's own understanding of how such patients are outwardly irrational and often violent. She paints a surreal world--sometimes full of terror and sometimes of beauty--in which "the Captain" rules her by the rod and the school's corridors are filled with wolves.

When she was diagnosed with the mental illness, it was emphasized that this was a congenital disease, and that she would have to live with it for the rest of her life. Today, however, she calls herself a "former schizophrenic," has stopped taking medication for the illness, and currently works as a clinical psychologist. Lauveng, though sometimes critical of mental health care, ultimately attributes her slow journey back to health to the dedicated medical staff who took the time to talk to her and who saw her as a person simply diagnosed with an illness--not the illness incarnate.

Spite seems utterly useless. You don't gain anything by hurting yourself just so you can hurt someone else. So why hasn't evolution weeded out all the spiteful people?

As psychologist Simon McCarthy-Jones argues, spite seems pointless because we're looking at it wrong. Spite isn't just what we feel when a car cuts us off or when a partner cheats. It's what we feel when we want to punish a bad act simply because it was bad. Spite is our fairness instinct, an innate resistance to exploitation, and it is one of the building blocks of human civilization. As McCarthy-Jones explains, some of history's most important developments--the rise of religions, governments, and even moral codes--were actually redirections of spiteful impulses.

A provocative, engaging read, Spite shows that if you really want to understand what makes us human, you can't just look at noble ideas like altruism and cooperation. You need to understand our darker impulses as well.

Self-deception does terrible harm to us, to our communities, and to the planet. But if it is so bad for us, why is it ubiquitous? In Useful Delusions, Shankar Vedantam and Bill Mesler argue that, paradoxically, self-deception can also play a vital role in our success and well-being.

The lies we tell ourselves sustain our daily interactions with friends, lovers, and coworkers. They can explain why some people live longer than others, why some couples remain in love and others don't, why some nations hold together while others splinter.

Filled with powerful personal stories and drawing on new insights in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy, Useful Delusions offers a fascinating tour of what it really means to be human.