Download or read book When Brains Dream Understanding the Science and Mystery of Our Dreaming Minds written by Antonio Zadra and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A truly comprehensive, scientifically rigorous and utterly fascinating account of when, how, and why we dream. Put simply, When Brains Dream is the essential guide to dreaming." —Matthew Walker, author of Why We Sleep Questions on the origins and meaning of dreams are as old as humankind, and as confounding and exciting today as when nineteenth-century scientists first attempted to unravel them. Why do we dream? Do dreams hold psychological meaning or are they merely the reflection of random brain activity? What purpose do dreams serve? When Brains Dream addresses these core questions about dreams while illuminating the most up-to-date science in the field. Written by two world-renowned sleep and dream researchers, it debunks common myths that we only dream in REM sleep, for example—while acknowledging the mysteries that persist around both the science and experience of dreaming. Antonio Zadra and Robert Stickgold bring together state-of-the-art neuroscientific ideas and findings to propose a new and innovative model of dream function called NEXTUP—Network Exploration to Understand Possibilities. By detailing this model’s workings, they help readers understand key features of several types of dreams, from prophetic dreams to nightmares and lucid dreams. When Brains Dream reveals recent discoveries about the sleeping brain and the many ways in which dreams are psychologically, and neurologically, meaningful experiences; explores a host of dream-related disorders; and explains how dreams can facilitate creativity and be a source of personal insight. Making an eloquent and engaging case for why the human brain needs to dream, When Brains Dream offers compelling answers to age-old questions about the mysteries of sleep.
Download or read book When Brains Dream written by Antonio Zadra and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A truly comprehensive, scientifically rigorous and utterly fascinating account of when, how, and why we dream. Put simply, When Brains Dream is the essential guide to dreaming." —Matthew Walker, author of Why We Sleep Questions on the origins and meaning of dreams are as old as humankind, and as confounding and exciting today as when nineteenth-century scientists first attempted to unravel them. Why do we dream? Do dreams hold psychological meaning or are they merely the reflection of random brain activity? What purpose do dreams serve? When Brains Dream addresses these core questions about dreams while illuminating the most up-to-date science in the field. Written by two world-renowned sleep and dream researchers, it debunks common myths that we only dream in REM sleep, for example—while acknowledging the mysteries that persist around both the science and experience of dreaming. Antonio Zadra and Robert Stickgold bring together state-of-the-art neuroscientific ideas and findings to propose a new and innovative model of dream function called NEXTUP—Network Exploration to Understand Possibilities. By detailing this model’s workings, they help readers understand key features of several types of dreams, from prophetic dreams to nightmares and lucid dreams. When Brains Dream reveals recent discoveries about the sleeping brain and the many ways in which dreams are psychologically, and neurologically, meaningful experiences; explores a host of dream-related disorders; and explains how dreams can facilitate creativity and be a source of personal insight. Making an eloquent and engaging case for why the human brain needs to dream, When Brains Dream offers compelling answers to age-old questions about the mysteries of sleep.
Download or read book When Brains Dream written by Antonio Zadra and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive, eye-opening exploration of what dreams are, where they come from, what they mean, and why we have them. Questions on the origins and meaning of dreams are as old as humankind, and as confounding and exciting today as when nineteenth-century scientists first attempted to unravel them. Why do we dream? Do dreams hold psychological meaning or are they merely the reflection of random brain activity? What purpose do dreams serve? When Brains Dream addresses these core questions about dreams while illuminating the most up-to-date science in the field. Written by two world-renowned sleep and dream researchers, it debunks common myths that we only dream in REM sleep, for example—while acknowledging the mysteries that persist around both the science and experience of dreaming. Antonio Zadra and Robert Stickgold bring together state-of-the-art neuroscientific ideas and findings to propose a new and innovative model of dream function called NEXTUP—Network Exploration to Understand Possibilities. By detailing this model’s workings, they help readers understand key features of several types of dreams, from prophetic dreams to nightmares and lucid dreams. When Brains Dream reveals recent discoveries about the sleeping brain and the many ways in which dreams are psychologically, and neurologically, meaningful experiences; explores a host of dream-related disorders; and explains how dreams can facilitate creativity and be a source of personal insight. Making an eloquent and engaging case for why the human brain needs to dream, When Brains Dream offers compelling answers to age-old questions about the mysteries of sleep.
Download or read book Why We Sleep written by Matthew Walker and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Sleep is one of the most important but least understood aspects of our life, wellness, and longevity ... An explosion of scientific discoveries in the last twenty years has shed new light on this fundamental aspect of our lives. Now ... neuroscientist and sleep expert Matthew Walker gives us a new understanding of the vital importance of sleep and dreaming"--Amazon.com.
Download or read book The Oracle of Night written by Sidarta Ribeiro and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2021-08-17 with total page 487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking history of the human mind told through our experience of dreams—from the earliest accounts to current scientific findings—and their essential role in the formation of who we are and the world we have made. "A resounding case for the mystery, beauty and cognitive importance of dreams." —The New York Times What is a dream? Why do we dream? How do our bodies and minds use them? These questions are the starting point for this unprecedented study of the role and significance of this phenomenon. An investigation on a grand scale, it encompasses literature, anthropology, religion, and science, articulating the essential place dreams occupy in human culture and how they functioned as the catalyst that compelled us to transform our earthly habitat into a human world. From the earliest cave paintings—where Sidarta Ribeiro locates a key to humankind’s first dreams and how they contributed to our capacity to perceive past and future and our ability to conceive of the existence of souls and spirits—to today’s cutting-edge scientific research, Ribeiro arrives at revolutionary conclusions about the role of dreams in human existence and evolution. He explores the advances that contemporary neuroscience, biochemistry, and psychology have made into the connections between sleep, dreams, and learning. He explains what dreams have taught us about the neural basis of memory and the transformation of memory in recall. And he makes clear that the earliest insight into dreams as oracular has been elucidated by contemporary research. Accessible, authoritative, and fascinating, The Oracle of Night gives us a wholly new way to understand this most basic of human experiences.
Download or read book Dreaming Souls written by Owen Flanagan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2001-05-17 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What, if anything, do dreams tell us about ourselves? What is the relationship between types of sleep and types of dreams? Does dreaming serve any purpose? Or are dreams simply meaningless mental noise--"unmusical fingers wandering over the piano keys"? With expertise in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, Owen Flanagan is uniquely qualified to answer these questions. And in Dreaming Souls he provides both an accessible survey of the latest research on sleep and dreams and a compelling new theory about the nature and function of dreaming. Flanagan argues that while sleep has a clear biological function and adaptive value, dreams are merely side effects, "free riders," irrelevant from an evolutionary point of view. But dreams are hardly unimportant. Indeed, Flanagan argues that dreams are self-expressive, the result of our need to find or to create meaning, even when we're sleeping. Rejecting Freud's theory of manifest and latent content--of repressed wishes appearing in disguised form--Flanagan shows how brainstem activity during sleep generates a jumbled profusion of memories, images, thoughts, emotions, and desires, which the cerebral cortex then attempts to shape into a more or less coherent story. Such dream-narratives range from the relatively mundane worries of non REM sleep to the fantastic confabulations of deep REM that resemble psychotic episodes in their strangeness. But however bizarre these narratives may be, they can shed light on our mental life, our well being, and our sense of self. Written with clarity, lively wit, and remarkable insight, Dreaming Souls offers a fascinating new way of apprehending one of the oldest mysteries of mental life.
Download or read book Dreaming on Both Sides of the Brain written by Doris E. Cohen and published by Hampton Roads Publishing. This book was released on 2017-11-01 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dream is not just white noise or something that happens to you while you sleep. Dreams are the secret language of your unconscious. This book will teach you how to: • Unlock the secrets of your personal dream language • Explore and interpret the meaning of your dreams • Harness the power of the brain to uncover a life of greater richness and meaning So often when we awake we find that our dreams have either evaporated like mist or seem to be just on the edge of our memory. Many people cannot recall their dreams at all. Cohen has developed a 7-step process to let you tap into the rich repository of your subconscious: 1. Recall and record. 2. Title your dream. 3. Read or repeat aloud. 4. Consider what is uppermost in your life right now. 5. Describe your dream's objects and qualities as if you were talking to a Martian. 6. Summarize the message from the unconscious. 7. Consider the dream's guidance for waking life. Drawing on years of clinical experience and her familiarity with Freud, myth, and sacred writings, Cohen presents a program that results in a life of abundance, texture, and self-awareness.
Download or read book Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep written by Timothy Verstynen and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A look at the true nature of the zombie brain Even if you've never seen a zombie movie or television show, you could identify an undead ghoul if you saw one. With their endless wandering, lumbering gait, insatiable hunger, antisocial behavior, and apparently memory-less existence, zombies are the walking nightmares of our deepest fears. What do these characteristic behaviors reveal about the inner workings of the zombie mind? Could we diagnose zombism as a neurological condition by studying their behavior? In Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep?, neuroscientists and zombie enthusiasts Timothy Verstynen and Bradley Voytek apply their neuro-know-how to dissect the puzzle of what has happened to the zombie brain to make the undead act differently than their human prey. Combining tongue-in-cheek analysis with modern neuroscientific principles, Verstynen and Voytek show how zombism can be understood in terms of current knowledge regarding how the brain works. In each chapter, the authors draw on zombie popular culture and identify a characteristic zombie behavior that can be explained using neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and brain-behavior relationships. Through this exploration they shed light on fundamental neuroscientific questions such as: How does the brain function during sleeping and waking? What neural systems control movement? What is the nature of sensory perception? Walking an ingenious line between seriousness and satire, Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep? leverages the popularity of zombie culture in order to give readers a solid foundation in neuroscience.
Download or read book The Dreaming Brain written by J. Allan Hobson and published by . This book was released on 1988-05-11 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Waking Dreaming Being written by Evan Thompson and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-18 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A renowned philosopher of the mind, also known for his groundbreaking work on Buddhism and cognitive science, Evan Thompson combines the latest neuroscience research on sleep, dreaming, and meditation with Indian and Western philosophy of mind, casting new light on the self and its relation to the brain. Thompson shows how the self is a changing process, not a static thing. When we are awake we identify with our body, but if we let our mind wander or daydream, we project a mentally imagined self into the remembered past or anticipated future. As we fall asleep, the impression of being a bounded self distinct from the world dissolves, but the self reappears in the dream state. If we have a lucid dream, we no longer identify only with the self within the dream. Our sense of self now includes our dreaming self, the "I" as dreamer. Finally, as we meditate—either in the waking state or in a lucid dream—we can observe whatever images or thoughts arise and how we tend to identify with them as "me." We can also experience sheer awareness itself, distinct from the changing contents that make up our image of the self. Contemplative traditions say that we can learn to let go of the self, so that when we die we can witness its dissolution with equanimity. Thompson weaves together neuroscience, philosophy, and personal narrative to depict these transformations, adding uncommon depth to life's profound questions. Contemplative experience comes to illuminate scientific findings, and scientific evidence enriches the vast knowledge acquired by contemplatives.
Download or read book Dreaming written by J. Allan Hobson and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2002 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on dreaming to explain the mechanisms of sleep and sleep laboratory science, this book explores how the new science of dreaming is affecting theories in psychoanalysis, and how it is helping our understanding of the causes of mental illness.
Download or read book Blue Dreams written by Lauren Slater and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2018-02-20 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The explosive story of the discovery and development of psychiatric medications, as well as the science and the people behind their invention, told by a riveting writer and psychologist who shares her own experience with the highs and lows of psychiatric drugs. Although one in five Americans now takes at least one psychotropic drug, the fact remains that nearly seventy years after doctors first began prescribing them, not even their creators understand exactly how or why these drugs work -- or don't work -- on what ails our brains. Lauren Slater's revelatory account charts psychiatry's journey from its earliest drugs, Thorazine and lithium, up through Prozac and other major antidepressants of the present. Blue Dreams also chronicles experimental treatments involving Ecstasy, magic mushrooms, the most cutting-edge memory drugs, placebos, and even neural implants. In her thorough analysis of each treatment, Slater asks three fundamental questions: how was the drug born, how does it work (or fail to work), and what does it reveal about the ailments it is meant to treat? Fearlessly weaving her own intimate experiences into comprehensive and wide-ranging research, Slater narrates a personal history of psychiatry itself. In the process, her powerful and groundbreaking exploration casts modern psychiatry's ubiquitous wonder drugs in a new light, revealing their ability to heal us or hurt us, and proving an indispensable resource not only for those with a psychotropic prescription but for anyone who hopes to understand the limits of what we know about the human brain and the possibilities for future treatments.
Download or read book The Nocturnal Brain written by Dr. Guy Leschziner and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2019-07-23 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A renowned neurologist shares the true stories of people unable to get a good night’s rest in The Nocturnal Brain: Nightmares, Neuroscience, and the Secret World of Sleep, a fascinating exploration of the symptoms and syndromes behind sleep disorders. For Dr. Guy Leschziner’s patients, there is no rest for the weary in mind and body. Insomnia, narcolepsy, night terrors, apnea, and sleepwalking are just a sampling of conditions afflicting sufferers who cannot sleep—and their experiences in trying are the stuff of nightmares. Demoniac hallucinations frighten people into paralysis. Restless legs rock both the sleepless and their sleeping partners with unpredictable and uncontrollable kicking. Out-of-sync circadian rhythms confuse the natural body clock’s days and nights. Then there are the extreme cases. A woman in a state of deep sleep who gets dressed, unlocks her car, and drives for several miles before returning to bed. The man who has spent decades cleaning out kitchens while “sleep-eating.” The teenager prone to the serious, yet unfortunately nicknamed Sleeping Beauty Syndrome stuck in a cycle of excessive unconsciousness, binge eating, and uncharacteristic displays of aggression and hypersexuality while awake. With compassionate stories of his patients and their conditions, Dr. Leschziner illustrates the neuroscience behind our sleeping minds, revealing the many biological and psychological factors necessary in getting the rest that will not only maintain our physical and mental health, but improve our cognitive abilities and overall happiness.
Download or read book The Hidden Lives of Dreams written by Melinda Powell and published by Kings Road Publishing. This book was released on 2020-03-26 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On average, we spend around six years of our lives dreaming. Yet, astonishingly, few of us understand the purpose of dreams and even fewer recognise what our dreaming mind can tell us about ourselves and our world. Melinda Powell, psychotherapist and co-founder of the Dream Research Institute UK, reveals how better understanding our dreams can improve our waking lives. As well as examining the importance of sleep and dreams, The Hidden Lives of Dreams explores the role of light, colour, landscapes, space, healing presence and lucidity in dreams, dispels common misconceptions and addresses our fears of nightmares. Powell shows how to tap into our dreams as a source of guidance and inspiration to enhance our wellbeing and to discover a healthier, more balanced approach to life. 'Exploring the depths of dreaming with an experienced guide like Melinda Powell will bring you closer to your heart, your purpose and your truest self. Highly recommended.' Robert Waggoner
Download or read book Why We Dream written by Alice Robb and published by Picador. This book was released on 2023-12-05 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science journalist and lucid dreamer Alice Robb explores fresh, revelatory research to uncover why we dream and how we can improve our dream life.
Download or read book The Neuroscience of Sleep written by Robert Stickgold and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2010-05-22 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sleep is the natural state of bodily rest, common to all mammals and birds and also seen in many reptiles, amphibians and fish. For most species, regular sleep is essential for survival, yet the specific purposes of sleep are still only partly clear and are the subject of intense research. This volume is comprised of the editors' selection of the most relevant articles on sleep from the Encyclopedia of Neuroscience, resulting in the first comprehensive collection of introductory articles on the neuroscience of sleep. Articles explore sleep's impact on neural functioning, sleep disorders, the relation between sleep and other clinical disorders, a look at sleep from a developmental perspective, and more. - Chapters offer impressive scope with topics addressing neural functioning, disorders, development, and more, carefully selected by one of the most preeminent sleep researchers - Richly illustrated in full color with over 100 figures - Contributors represent the most outstanding scholarship in the field, with each chapter providing fully vetted and reliable expert knowledge
Download or read book The Twenty four Hour Mind written by Rosalind D. Cartwright and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-16 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Twenty-four Hour Mind, sleep researcher Rosalind Cartwright brings together decades of research into the bizarre sleep disorders known as 'parasomnias' to propose a new theory of how the human brain works consistently throughout waking and sleeping hours, based upon research showing that one of the primary purposes of sleep is to aid in regulating emotions and processing experiences that occur during waking hours.
