Download or read book The Science of Fate written by Hannah Critchlow and published by Hodder & Stoughton. This book was released on 2019-05-02 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: **THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER** 'A truly fascinating - if unnerving - read' DAILY TELEGRAPH 'Acute, mind-opening, highly accessible - this book doesn't just explain how our lives might pan out, it helps us live better' BETTANY HUGHES 'A humane and highly readable account of the neuroscience that underpins our ideas of free will and fate' PROFESSOR DAVID RUNCIMAN *** So many of us believe that we are free to shape our own destiny. But what if free will doesn't exist? What if our lives are largely predetermined, hardwired in our brains - and our choices over what we eat, who we fall in love with, even what we believe are not real choices at all? Neuroscience is challenging everything we think we know about ourselves, revealing how we make decisions and form our own reality, unaware of the role of our unconscious minds. Did you know, for example, that: * You can carry anxieties and phobias across generations of your family? * Your genes and pleasure and reward receptors in your brain will determine how much you eat? * We can sniff out ideal partners with genes that give our offspring the best chance of survival? Leading neuroscientist Hannah Critchlow draws vividly from everyday life and other experts in their field to show the extraordinary potential, as well as dangers, which come with being able to predict our likely futures - and looking at how we can alter what's in store for us. Lucid, illuminating, awe-inspiring The Science of Fate revolutionises our understanding of who we are - and empowers us to help shape a better future for ourselves and the wider world.
Download or read book Improbable Destinies written by Jonathan B. Losos and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-08-08 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major new book overturning our assumptions about how evolution works Earth’s natural history is full of fascinating instances of convergence: phenomena like eyes and wings and tree-climbing lizards that have evolved independently, multiple times. But evolutionary biologists also point out many examples of contingency, cases where the tiniest change—a random mutation or an ancient butterfly sneeze—caused evolution to take a completely different course. What role does each force really play in the constantly changing natural world? Are the plants and animals that exist today, and we humans ourselves, inevitabilities or evolutionary flukes? And what does that say about life on other planets? Jonathan Losos reveals what the latest breakthroughs in evolutionary biology can tell us about one of the greatest ongoing debates in science. He takes us around the globe to meet the researchers who are solving the deepest mysteries of life on Earth through their work in experimental evolutionary science. Losos himself is one of the leaders in this exciting new field, and he illustrates how experiments with guppies, fruit flies, bacteria, foxes, and field mice, along with his own work with anole lizards on Caribbean islands, are rewinding the tape of life to reveal just how rapid and predictable evolution can be. Improbable Destinies will change the way we think and talk about evolution. Losos's insights into natural selection and evolutionary change have far-reaching applications for protecting ecosystems, securing our food supply, and fighting off harmful viruses and bacteria. This compelling narrative offers a new understanding of ourselves and our role in the natural world and the cosmos.
Download or read book Leadership and the New Science written by Margaret J. Wheatley and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010-06-21 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bestseller--more than 300,000 copies sold, translated into seventeen languages, and featured in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Miami Herald, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and Fortune; Shows how discoveries in quantum physics, biology, and chaos theory enable us to deal successfully with change and uncertainty in our organizations and our lives; Includes a new chapter on how the new sciences can help us understand and cope with some of the major social challenges of our timesWe live in a time of chaos, rich in potential for new possibilities. A new world is being born. We need new ideas, new ways of seeing, and new relationships to help us now. New science--the new discoveries in biology, chaos theory, and quantum physics that are changing our understanding of how the world works--offers this guidance. It describes a world where chaos is natural, where order exists ''for free.'' It displays the intricate webs of cooperation that connect us. It assures us that life seeks order, but uses messes to get there.Leadership and the New Science is the bestselling, most acclaimed, and most influential guide to applying the new science to organizations and management. In it, Wheatley describes how the new science radically alters our understanding of the world, and how it can teach us to live and work well together in these chaotic times. It will teach you how to move with greater certainty and easier grace into the new forms of organizations and communities that are taking shape.
Download or read book Inventing Ourselves written by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A tour through the groundbreaking science behind the enigmatic, but crucial, brain developments of adolescence and how those translate into teenage behavior The brain creates every feeling, emotion, and desire we experience, and stores every one of our memories. And yet, until very recently, scientists believed our brains were fully developed from childhood on. Now, thanks to imaging technology that enables us to look inside the living human brain at all ages, we know that this isn't so. Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, one of the world's leading researchers into adolescent neurology, explains precisely what is going on in the complex and fascinating brains of teenagers--namely that the brain goes on developing and changing right through adolescence--with profound implications for the adults these young people will become. Drawing from cutting-edge research, including her own, Blakemore shows: How an adolescent brain differs from those of children and adults Why problem-free kids can turn into challenging teens What drives the excessive risk-taking and all-consuming relationships common among teenagers And why many mental illnesses--depression, addiction, schizophrenia--present during these formative years Blakemore's discoveries have transformed our understanding of the teenage mind, with consequences for law, education policy and practice, and, most of all, parents.
Download or read book The Future of the Mind written by Michio Kaku and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2014-02-25 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The renowned theoretical physicist and national bestselling author of The God Equation tackles the most fascinating and complex object in the known universe: the human brain. “Compelling…Kaku thinks with great breadth, and the vistas he presents us are worth the trip.” —The New York Times Book Review The Future of the Mind brings a topic that once belonged solely to the province of science fiction into a startling new reality. This scientific tour de force unveils the astonishing research being done in top laboratories around the world—all based on the latest advancements in neuroscience and physics—including recent experiments in telepathy, mind control, avatars, telekinesis, and recording memories and dreams. The Future of the Mind is an extraordinary, mind-boggling exploration of the frontiers of neuroscience. Dr. Kaku looks toward the day when we may achieve the ability to upload the human brain to a computer, neuron for neuron; project thoughts and emotions around the world on a brain-net; take a “smart pill” to enhance cognition; send our consciousness across the universe; and push the very limits of immortality.
Download or read book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind written by Julian Jaynes and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2000-08-15 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry
Download or read book Spin written by Robert Charles Wilson and published by Tor Books. This book was released on 2010-07-01 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of Axis and Vortex, the first Hugo Award-winning novel in the environmental apocalyptic Spin Trilogy... One night in October when he was ten years old, Tyler Dupree stood in his back yard and watched the stars go out. They all flared into brilliance at once, then disappeared, replaced by a flat, empty black barrier. He and his best friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what became known as the Big Blackout. It would shape their lives. The effect is worldwide. The sun is now a featureless disk--a heat source, rather than an astronomical object. The moon is gone, but tides remain. Not only have the world's artificial satellites fallen out of orbit, their recovered remains are pitted and aged, as though they'd been in space far longer than their known lifespans. As Tyler, Jason, and Diane grow up, space probe reveals a bizarre truth: The barrier is artificial, generated by huge alien artifacts. Time is passing faster outside the barrier than inside--more than a hundred million years per day on Earth. At this rate, the death throes of the sun are only about forty years in our future. Jason, now a promising young scientist, devotes his life to working against this slow-moving apocalypse. Diane throws herself into hedonism, marrying a sinister cult leader who's forged a new religion out of the fears of the masses. Earth sends terraforming machines to Mars to let the onrush of time do its work, turning the planet green. Next they send humans...and immediately get back an emissary with thousands of years of stories to tell about the settling of Mars. Then Earth's probes reveal that an identical barrier has appeared around Mars. Jason, desperate, seeds near space with self-replicating machines that will scatter copies of themselves outward from the sun--and report back on what they find. Life on Earth is about to get much, much stranger. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book The Two Cultures written by C. P. Snow and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-26 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The importance of science and technology and future of education and research are just some of the subjects discussed here.
Download or read book Why Science Does Not Disprove God written by Amir D. Aczel and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2014-04-15 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The renowned science writer, mathematician, and bestselling author of Fermat's Last Theorem masterfully refutes the overreaching claims the "New Atheists," providing millions of educated believers with a clear, engaging explanation of what science really says, how there's still much space for the Divine in the universe, and why faith in both God and empirical science are not mutually exclusive. A highly publicized coterie of scientists and thinkers, including Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens, and Lawrence Krauss, have vehemently contended that breakthroughs in modern science have disproven the existence of God, asserting that we must accept that the creation of the universe came out of nothing, that religion is evil, that evolution fully explains the dazzling complexity of life, and more. In this much-needed book, science journalist Amir Aczel profoundly disagrees and conclusively demonstrates that science has not, as yet, provided any definitive proof refuting the existence of God. Why Science Does Not Disprove God is his brilliant and incisive analyses of the theories and findings of such titans as Albert Einstein, Roger Penrose, Alan Guth, and Charles Darwin, all of whose major breakthroughs leave open the possibility— and even the strong likelihood—of a Creator. Bolstering his argument, Aczel lucidly discourses on arcane aspects of physics to reveal how quantum theory, the anthropic principle, the fine-tuned dance of protons and quarks, the existence of anti-matter and the theory of parallel universes, also fail to disprove God.
Download or read book Connecting Paradigms written by Bennett. Matthew S. and published by . This book was released on 2017-08 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Connecting Paradigms: A Trauma-Informed & Neurobiological Framework for Motivational Interviewing Implementation provides an innovative approach to helping those struggling with past trauma to make critical life changes and heal from their pain and suffering. Scientific understanding of the brain, the impact of trauma, and research around behavioral change has grown exponentially over the last several decades. This knowledge is challenging and transforming thinking around how we provide mental health and substance abuse education, medical care, criminal justice, and social work. Connecting Paradigms presents an integrated model combining research in neurobiology, trauma, behavioral change, harm reduction, and Motivational Interviewing into a practical skillset easily implemented across a variety of settings and professions.
Download or read book The Fate of the Tearling written by Erika Johansen and published by Random House. This book was released on 2016-11-29 with total page 487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In less than a year, Kelsea Glynn has transformed from a gawky teenager into a powerful monarch. As she has come into her own as the Queen of the Tearling, the headstrong, visionary leader has also transformed her realm. In her quest to end corruption and restore justice, she has made many enemies - including the evil Red Queen, her fiercest rival, who has set her armies against the Tear. To protect her people from a devastating invasion, Kelsea did the unthinkable - she surrendered herself and her magical sapphires to her enemy, and named the Mace, the trusted head of her personal guards, Regent in her place. But the Mace will not rest until he and his men rescue their sovereign from her prison in Mortmesne. Now the endgame begins and the fate of Queen Kelsea - and the Tearling itself - will finally be revealed . . .
Download or read book What We Are The Evolutionary Roots of Our Future written by Lonnie Aarssen and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-07-05 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Other animals are driven to spend essentially their whole lives just trying to get fed, stay alive, and get laid. That’s about it. The same was true for our proto-human ancestors. And modern humans of course also require a Survival Drive and a Sex Drive in order to leave descendants. But today we spend most of our lives mainly just trying to convince ourselves that our existence is not absurd. In What We Are, Queen’s University biologist, Lonnie Aarssen, traces how our biocultural evolution has shaped Homo sapiens into the only creature that refuses to be what it is — the only creature preoccupied with a deeply ingrained, and absurd sentiment: I have a distinct ‘mental life’—an ‘inner self’—that exists separately and apart from ‘material life’, and so, unlike the latter, need not come to an end. This delusion conceivably gave our distant ancestors some wishful thinking for finding some measure of relief from the terrifying, uniquely human knowledge of the eventual loss of corporeal survival. But this came with an impulsive, nagging doubt — an obsessive underlying uncertainty: ‘self-impermanence anxiety’. Biocultural evolution, however, was not finished. It also gave us two additional, uniquely human, primal drives, both serving to help quell the burden of this anxiety. Legacy Drive generates delusional cultural domains for ‘extension’ of self; and Leisure Drive generates pleasurable cultural domains for distraction – ‘escape’ – from self. Legacy Drive and Leisure Drive, Aarssen argues, represent two of the most profound consequences of human cognitive and cultural evolution. What We Are advances propositions regarding how a visceral susceptibility to self-impermanence anxiety has — paradoxically — played a pivotal role in rewarding the reproductive success of our ancestors, and has thus been a driving force in shaping fundamental motivations and cultural norms of modern humans. More than any other milestone in the evolution of human minds, self-impermanence anxiety, and its mitigating Drives for Legacy and Leisure, account for not just the advance of civilization over the past many thousands of years, but also now, its impending collapse. Effective management of this crisis, Aarssen insists, will require a deeper and more broadly public understanding of its Darwinian evolutionary roots — as laid out in What We Are.
Download or read book Fate and Life written by Michael Allen Fox and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2024-05-14 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some believe that fate rules our lives, while others dismiss the idea outright. Fate remains central to many cultural outlooks, and in our age of conflict, climate change, and pandemic, it features conspicuously in debates about the future. A careful examination of this important idea – its background, many meanings, and significance for everyday life – is not only informative and intriguing but also timely. In Fate and Life Michael Fox confronts the idea of fate head on and demonstrates that how we interpret and apply this concept can make it work for rather than against us. Many discussions characterize fate negatively or as part of the occult, representing it as a supernatural force that stifles our freedom. Fateful ideas have also helped rationalize and promote the persecution of certain groups. But viewed more positively, fate can be understood as the given conditions of existence and the imponderable way certain unanticipated events momentously alter the path we follow over time. Thinking about fate teaches us about who we are, how we see the world, and our evaluation of the possibilities of life. Fate and Life provides a multicultural and global account of how we talk about the idea of fate, how we use and misuse it, and how it contrasts with notions like destiny and karma. Fox’s original perspective – a breakthrough in philosophy and the history of ideas – shows that fate is supported by experience; it is compatible with our sense of agency and purpose; and it helps us make sense of our lives.
Download or read book Einstein s Brain written by Sal Restivo and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-11-19 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reviews the research on Einstein’s brain from a sociological perspective and in the context of the social brain paradigm. Instead of “Einstein, the genius of geniuses” standing on the shoulders of giants, Restivo proposes a concept of Einstein the social being standing on the shoulders of social networks. Rather than challenging Einstein’s uniqueness or the uniqueness of his achievements, the book grounds Einstein and his achievements in a social ecology opposed to the myths of the “I,” individualism, and the very idea of “genius.” “Einstein” is defined by the particular configuration of social networks that he engaged as his life unfolded, not by biological inheritances.
Download or read book Bounce Back written by Susan Kahn and published by Kogan Page Publishers. This book was released on 2019-10-03 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: FINALIST: American Book Fest Best Book Award 2020 - Business: Careers Success. Innovation. Creativity. Growth. We all want these things at work - but the one thing they all have in common is that they involve failure. A fear of failure, or the inability to bounce back and learn from failures, is one of the biggest things that can hold us back in our professional development - so how do we learn how to fail well and develop our resilience? Wherever we work, and whatever role we deliver, we all have the power to change our thinking and our response to failure - Bounce Back is here to help. Written by Business Psychologist Dr Susan Kahn, this book will show you how to embrace failure. Failing fast, failing well, and learning how to be agile and resilient at work is a vital part of being a successful and innovative leader, approaching opportunities with excitement and creativity, and driving forward your personal and professional growth. Packed with practical exercises, inspirational case studies and a useful resilience self-assessment guide, Bounce Back will show you how to invest in your resilience in a deliberate way, and empower you to face risk head-on. From learning how to respond well to critical feedback, to understanding cultural attitudes to failure around the world, this book will help you be a stronger, more resilient you.
Download or read book What s in it for me written by Thomas Prosser and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This punchy and provocative book asks a simple but overlooked question: why do we have the political views that we do? Offering a lively and original analysis of five worldviews – conservatism, national populism, liberalism, the new left and social democracy – Thomas Prosser argues that our views tend to satisfy self-interest, albeit indirectly, and that progressive worldviews are not as altruistic as their adherents believe. But What’s in it for me? is far from pessimistic. Prosser contends that recognition of self-interest makes us more self-reflective, allowing us to see humanity in adversaries and countering the influence of echo chambers. As populist parties rise and liberalism and social democracy decline, this timely intervention argues that to solve our political differences, we must first realise what we have in common.
Download or read book Crossing a Chasm written by Wayne Talbot and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2021-03-11 with total page 730 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author started his working career as an Air Traffic Control Officer in the Royal Australian Air Force, and after resigning his commission, spent thirty-five years in the Information Services industry. In the context of his writings, he describes himself as an analyst, by aspiration, inclination, proclivity, training, and occupation. His books reflect his primary intellectual pursuit: explanations given for human existence by both religions and evolution. Having published several analyses including “Religion: Of God or Man” and “Seeking After God”, he concluded that there was nothing more that he could learn on that subject – the issue remained an enduring mystery. Returning to the other explanation, evolution, he had long wanted to complete a more thorough analysis of evolution theory, than as presented in his earlier publications, “The Dawkins Deficiency” and “Information, Knowledge, Evolution and Self”. This required that he acquire and study dozens of academic books and other publications, seeking to understand the plausibility, and at times hollowness, of scientific explanations. Using his background knowledge of relevant technologies, he was able to identify parallels between modern automation and mechanisation, and human biological processes. One of particular interest was an analysis of the technical similarities between the human sensory system, and modern telemetry systems. With a lifelong passion for a travel, and a modest appetite for adventure, he has trekked in the Khumbu and Annapurna regions of Nepal, the Peruvian Andes, and Patagonia. His hobby, apart from writing, has been a love of all things motorcycling, from touring remote areas, and attending races, to complete restoration of vintage motorcycles. He has motorcycled throughout parts of his native Australia, North America, New Zealand, Iceland, Bolivia, Peru, Turkey, the Himalaya, Morocco, Greece, and eastern Europe. His business and holiday travels have taken him through sixty countries, and all continents, including Antarctica. Evolution is defined as the change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations, resulting in changes in both the genotype and phenotype. The evidence for evolution is primarily circumstantial, being based on fossils of extinct species, physical similarities, and a largely common genome. Charles Darwin believed that all species of organisms arise and develop through the natural selection of small, inherited variations that increase the individual's ability to compete, survive, and reproduce. Today, we know so much more than Darwin did 150 years ago, leading many scientists to discard genetic mutation and natural selection as having the development power previously ascribed to them. What has been missing in the science so far is “systems thinking” - a holistic approach to analysis that focuses on the way that a system's constituent parts interrelate, and how systems work over time and within the context of larger systems. Questioning whether the mind consists of organs of the brain, an emergent property of the brain, or activities of the brain, as scientists suggest, the author has concluded for none of these. The brain being physical, it can only deal with the physical, but the mind deals in the conceptual, which has no physical properties. With his background in related technologies, the author has compared the human nervous system with telemetry systems as used in modern aircraft, vehicles, and other applications. Though implemented differently, the functional requirements remain the same, which has prompted a different perspective on how it could have evolved. The telemetry system in the human body is astounding in its complexity, accuracy, and reliability, leading to the author’s doubts as to its claimed evolutionary origins. Crossing a Chasm is an analysis of the probability that such could be accomplished by innumerable, unguided small steps, over whatever time.
