Two summers ago, scientists removed a tiny piece of flesh from Philip Ball’s arm and turned it into a rudimentary “mini-brain.” The skin cells, removed from his body, did not die but were instead transformed into nerve cells that independently arranged themselves into a dense network and communicated with each other, exchanging the raw signals of thought. This was life—but whos...(展开全部)

An anatomy of human life, vividly illustrated. . . . Awe-inspiring [and] sublimely uplifting. --Time Having won the National Book Award for How We Die, his best-selling inquiry into the causes and modes of death, Sherwin Nuland now turns his attention to the miraculous resiliency of human life. For this lucid, wonderful, and wonder-filled new book explores the body's mysteri...(展开全部)

What can a brain scan, or our reaction to a Caravaggio painting, reveal about the deep seat of guilt? How can reading Heidegger, or conducting experiments on rats, help us to cope with anxiety in the face of the world's economic crisis? Can ancient remedies fight sadness more effectively than anti-depressants? What does the neuroscience of acting tell us about how we feel empat...(展开全部)

Product Description The first book to use the unexpected discoveries of neuroscience to help us make the best decisions. Since Plato, philosophers have described the decision-making process as either rational or emotional: we carefully deliberate, or we blink and go with our gut. But as scientists break open the mind's black box with the latest tools of neuroscience, they re di...(展开全部)

The dean of American philosophers shares his views on methods of training students to think well. His considerations include inductive and deductive logic, interpreting facts, concrete and abstract thinking, the roles of activity, language, and observation, and many other aspects of thought training. This volume is essential reading for teachers and other education professional...(展开全部)

Product Description The first book to use the unexpected discoveries of neuroscience to help us make the best decisions. Since Plato, philosophers have described the decision-making process as either rational or emotional: we carefully deliberate, or we blink and go with our gut. But as scientists break open the mind's black box with the latest tools of neuroscience, they re di...(展开全部)

How language evolved has been called “the hardest problem in science.” In Adam’s Tongue, Derek Bickerton—long a leading authority in this field—shows how and why previous attempts to solve that problem have fallen short. Taking cues from topics as diverse as the foraging strategies of ants, the distribution of large prehistoric herbivores, and the construction of ecological nic...(展开全部)

Derek Bickerton is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Hawaii. His most recent book, Bastard Tongues, was published in 2008.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer brings to life the most intriguing woman in the history of the world: Cleopatra, the last queen of Egypt. Her palace shimmered with onyx, garnets, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Above all else, Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an ingenious negotiator. Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, ...(展开全部)

Why do three out of four professional football players go bankrupt? How can illiterate jungle dwellers pass a test that tricks Harvard philosophers? And why do billionaires work so hard--only to give their hard-earned money away? When it comes to making decisions, the classic view is that humans are eminently rational. But growing evidence suggests instead that our choices are...(展开全部)