Neuroscience, Consciousness and Spirituality presents a variety of perspectives by leading thinkers on contemporary research into the brain, the mind and the spirit. This volumes aims at combining knowledge from neuroscience with approaches from the experiential perspective of the first person singular in order to arrive at an integrated understanding of consciousness. Individual chapters discuss new areas of research, such as near death studies and neuroscience research into spir...

This volume features a collection of essays on consciousness, which has become one of the hot topics at the crossroads between neuroscience, philosophy, and religious studies. Is consciousness something the brain produces? How can we study it? Is there just one type of consciousness or are there different states that can be discriminated? Are so called “higher states of consciousness” that some people report during meditation pointing towards a new understanding of consciousness?Me...

Ever wondered what's going on inside your head?You are your brain. Everything that makes you you, and all your experiences of the world, are somehow conjured up by 1.4 kilograms of grey matter inside your skull. That might seem impossible, but science has advanced so much that we now understand not just its structures and inner workings but also how it can give rise to perception, consciousness, emotions, memories, intelligence, sleep and more.HOW YO...

The remarkable story of how today's brain scanning techniques were developed, told by one of the field's pioneersIt is now possible to witness human brain activity while we are talking, reading, or thinking, thanks to revolutionary neuroimaging techniques like magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). These groundbreaking advances have opened infinite fields of investigation—into such areas as musical perception, brain development in utero, and faulty brain connections lea...

The spectacular success of the scientific enterprise over the last four hundred years has led to the promise of an all encompassing vision of the natural world. In this elegant picture, everything we observe is based upon just a few fundamental processes and entities. The almost infinite variety and complexity of the world is thus the product of emergence. But the concept of emergence is fraught with controversy and confusion. This book ponders the question of how emergence should be under...

Much of contemporary behavioral or cognitive neuroscience is concerned with discovering the neural basis of psychological processes such as attention, cognition, consciousness, perception, and memory. In sharp divergence from this field, An Odyssey Through the Brain, Behavior and the Mind can be regarded as an elaborate demonstration that the large scale features of brain electrical activity are related to sensory and motor processes in various ways but are not organised i...

Two New York Times–bestselling authors unveil new research showing what meditation can really do for the brain.In the last twenty years, meditation and mindfulness have gone from being kind of cool to becoming an omnipresent Band-Aid for fixing everything from your weight to your relationship to your achievement level. Unveiling here the kind of cutting-edge research that has made them giants in their fields, Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson show us the...

This book explains, in simple but accurate terms, how orthodox quantum mechanics works. The author, a distinguished theoretical physicist, shows how this theory, realistically interpreted, assigns an important role to our conscious free choices. Stapp claims that mainstream biology and neuroscience, despite nearly a century of quantum physics, still stick essentially to failed classical precepts in which mental intentions have no effect upon our bodily actions. He shows how quantum mechani...

This book is devoted to the executive, emotional, social, and integrative functions of the prefrontal cortex (PFC). The PFC has usually been studied only with its executive function or with its emotional function, but recent studies indicate that the PFC plays important roles in integrating executive and emotional functions as well as in social behavior. The first part of the book reviews the functional organization of the PFC in human and nonhuman primates. The subsequent part focuses on ...

What is this strange mental world that seems so essential to being human?The conscious mind brings together sensations, perceptions, thoughts and memories to generate the seamless movie of a person's life. It makes us aware of the world around us and our own self. How all this emerges from a kilogram of brain cells is one of the greatest unanswered questions.In Your Conscious Mind leading brain scientists and New Scientist take you on a jou...

Positive PsychologyHave you ever wondered:How can I feel truly fulfilled in my life and actions?How can I finally meet my life and career goals?How can I work toward Happiness?How can I turn pessimism to eternal Optimism?You are in luckPositive Psychology: Research and Applications of the Science of Happin...

Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) can occur through road traffic incidents, falls, or violence, and is therefore an extremely prevalent type of injury, constituting a significant burden on health care around the world. As more people are able to recover physically from TBI, it is important to consider how to help repair the cognitive functions of the brain. The cognitive functions could be greatly maximized by appropriate Neuropsychological rehabilitation, which occurs within months of the dama...