Books about Neuroscientist from Amazon.com

No organization can survive without iconoclasts -- innovators who single-handedly upturn conventional wisdom and manage to achieve what so many others deem impossible.



Though indispensable, true iconoclasts are few and far between. In Iconoclast, neuroscientist Gregory Berns explains why. He explores the constraints the human brain places on innovative thinking, including fear of failure, the urge to conform, and the tendency to interpret sensory information in familiar ways.



Through vivid accounts of successful innovators ranging from glass artist Dale Chihuly to physicist Richard Feynman to country/rock trio the Dixie Chicks, Berns reveals the inner workings of the iconoclast's mind with remarkable clarity. Each engaging chapter goes on to describe practical actions we can each take to understand and unleash our own potential to think differently -- such as seeking out new environments, novel experiences, and first-time acquaintances.



Packed with engaging stories, science-based insights, potent practices, and examples from a startling array of disciplines, this engaging book will help you understand how iconoclasts think and equip you to begin thinking more like an iconoclast yourself..
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In this technology-driven age, it's tempting to believe that science can solve every mystery After all, science has cured countless diseases and even sent humans into space. But as Jonah Lehrer argues in this sparkling debut, science is not the only path to knowledge. In fact, when it comes to understanding the brain, art got there first.

Taking a group of artists — a painter, a poet, a chef, a composer, and a handful of novelists — Lehrer shows how each one discovered an essential truth about the mind that science is only now rediscovering. We learn, for example, how Proust first revealed the fallibility of memory; how George Eliot discovered the brain's malleability; how the French chef Escoffier discovered umami (the fifth taste); how Cézanne worked out the subtleties of vision; and how Gertrude Stein exposed the deep structure of language — a full half-century before the work of Noam Chomsky and other linguists. It's the ultimate tale of art trumping science.

More broadly, Lehrer shows that there's a cost to reducing everything to atoms and acronyms and genes. Measurement is not the same as understanding, and art knows this better than science does. An ingenious blend of biography, criticism, and first-rate science writing, Proust Was a Neuroscientist urges science and art to listen more closely to each other, for willing minds can combine the best of both, to brilliant effect..
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"I had never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla," writes Robert Sapolsky in this witty and riveting chronicle of a scientist's coming-of-age in remote Africa.

An exhilarating account of Sapolsky's twenty-one-year study of a troop of rambunctious baboons in Kenya, A Primate's Memoir interweaves serious scientific observations with wry commentary about the challenges and pleasures of living in the wilds of the Serengeti -- for man and beast alike. Over two decades, Sapolsky survives culinary atrocities, gunpoint encounters, and a surreal kidnapping, while witnessing the encroachment of the tourist mentality on the farthest vestiges of unspoiled Africa. As he conducts unprecedented physiological research on wild primates, he becomes evermore enamored of his subjects -- unique and compelling characters in their own right -- and he returns to them summer after summer, until tragedy finally prevents him.

By turns hilarious and poignant, A Primate's Memoir is a magnum opus from one of our foremost science writers..
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Do religious experiences come from God, or are they merely the random firing of neurons in the brain? Drawing on his own research with Carmelite nuns, neuroscientist Mario Beauregard shows that genuine, life-changing spiritual events can be documented. He offers compelling evidence that religious experiences have a nonmaterial origin, making a convincing case for what many in scientific fields are loath to consider—that it is God who creates our spiritual experiences, not the brain.

Beauregard and O'Leary explore recent attempts to locate a "God gene" in some of us and claims that our brains are "hardwired" for religion—even the strange case of one neuroscientist who allegedly invented an electromagnetic "God helmet" that could produce a mystical experience in anyone who wore it. The authors argue that these attempts are misguided and narrow-minded, because they reduce spiritual experiences to material phenomena.

Many scientists ignore hard evidence that challenges their materialistic prejudice, clinging to the limited view that our experiences are explainable only by material causes, in the obstinate conviction that the physical world is the only reality. But scientific materialism is at a loss to explain irrefutable accounts of mind over matter, of intuition, willpower, and leaps of faith, of the "placebo effect" in medicine, of near-death experiences on the operating table, and of psychic premonitions of a loved one in crisis, to say nothing of the occasional sense of oneness with nature and mystical experiences in meditation or prayer. Traditional science explains away these and other occurrences as delusions or misunderstandings, but by exploring the latest neurological research on phenomena such as these, The Spiritual Brain gets to their real source.

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Signal Processing for Neuroscientists introduces analysis techniques primarily aimed at neuroscientists and biomedical engineering students with a reasonable but modest background in mathematics, physics, and computer programming. The focus of this text is on what can be considered the 'golden trio' in the signal processing field: averaging, Fourier analysis, and filtering. Techniques such as convolution, correlation, coherence, and wavelet analysis are considered in the context of time and frequency domain analysis. The whole spectrum of signal analysis is covered, ranging from data acquisition to data processing; and from the mathematical background of the analysis to the practical application of processing algorithms. Overall, the approach to the mathematics is informal with a focus on basic understanding of the methods and their interrelationships rather than detailed proofs or derivations. One of the principle goals is to provide the reader with the background required to understand the principles of commercially available analyses software, and to allow him/her to construct his/her own analysis tools in an environment such as MATLAB®.

· Multiple color illustrations are integrated in the text
· Includes an introduction to biomedical signals, noise characteristics, and recording techniques
· Basics and background for more advanced topics can be found in extensive notes and appendices.
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"Human brains are just the most complicated thing that's yet evolved, and we're trying to understand them using our brains," notes philosopher Daniel Dennett. "We're trying to reverse engineer ourselves, to understand what kind of a machine we are."
In Conversations on Consciousness, Susan Blackmore brings together some of the great minds of our time, a who's who of eminent thinkers, all of whom have devoted much of their lives to understanding "what kind of a machine we are." Some of the interviewees are major philosophers (such as John Searle, Ned Block, and David Chalmers) and some are equally renowned scientists (Francis Crick, Roger Penrose, V.S. Ramachandran). All of them talk candidly with Blackmore about some of the key philosophical issues confronting us, in a series of conversations that are revealing, insightful, and stimulating. They ruminate on the nature of consciousness--is it something apart from the brain? Is it even possible to understand the brain, to understand human consciousness? Some of these thinkers say no, it isn't possible, but most believe that we will pierce the mystery surrounding consciousness, and that neuroscience will provide the key. Blackmore goes beyond the issue of consciousness to ask other intriguing questions: Is there free will (a question which yields many conflicted replies, with most saying yes and no); if no, how does this effect the way you live your life; and more broadly, how has your work changed the way you live.
Ranging from the curious (do bees have consciousness?) to the profound (is our sense of having a self just an illusion), these provocative conversations illuminate current thinking on the mind and on human nature itself..
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Will understanding our brains help us to know our minds? Or is there an unbridgeable distance between the work of neuroscience and the workings of human consciousness? In a remarkable exchange between neuroscientist Jean-Pierre Changeux and philosopher Paul Ricoeur, this book explores the vexed territory between these divergent approaches--and comes to a deeper, more complex perspective on human nature.

Ranging across diverse traditions, from phrenology to PET scans and from Spinoza to Charles Taylor, What Makes Us Think? revolves around a central issue: the relation between the facts (or "what is") of science and the prescriptions (or "what ought to be") of ethics. Changeux and Ricoeur ask: Will neuroscientific knowledge influence our moral conduct? Is a naturally based ethics possible? Pursuing these questions, they attack key topics at the intersection of philosophy and neuroscience: What are the relations between brain states and psychological experience? Between language and truth? Memory and culture? Behavior and action? What is a mental representation? How does a sign relate to what it signifies? How might subjective experience be constructed rather than discovered? And can biological or cultural evolution be considered progressive? Throughout, Changeux and Ricoeur provide unprecedented insight into what neuroscience can--and cannot--tell us about the nature of human experience.

Changeux and Ricoeur bring an unusual depth of engagement and breadth of knowledge to each other's subject. In doing so, they make two often hostile disciplines speak to one another in surprising and instructive ways--and speak with all the subtlety and passion of conversation at its very best.

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Smokescreen is the gripping tale of a political conspiracy to incapacitate the President of the United States, Clint Walker, who we meet in the opening scene as he is stricken with a torturous headache and is quickly consumed by confusion, memory loss and dementia. He collapses on the floor in convulsions. The Secret Service rushes him to the hospital in a race against death. Caught in the middle of the conspiracy is Eloy Cordova-Santiago, a brilliant young neuroscientist at the National Institutes of Health, whose cutting-edge research in molecular genetics has inadvertently placed his life and the life of the President in mortal danger. From his naive beginnings in Venezuela as an apprentice to the local medicine man to his recognition as a world-class scientific investigator in Washington, Eloy's life is filled with conflict-especially the conflict of his love for two women and the conflict of his Indian-Latino culture with the culture of modern science. But none of his conflicts are as difficult as the conflict of his race against time to save the President and the country from the cynical manipulations of the tobacco industry and other self-serving individuals. Eloy's timely expertise in foiling the conspirators brings the plot to a riveting climax.

A New Kind of Novel

Smokescreen: A Novel of Medical Intrigue is a medical thriller in the tradition of books by Robin Cook, F. Paul Wilson, Michael Palmer, Patrick Lynch, Michael Crichton and Tess Gerritsen. However, many of the works by these authors feature a protagonist who is predictably white (male or female), is an Ivy League graduate with an impeccable academic pedigree, and holds a position at a major hospital.

Some authors, such as Tony Hillerman, with his Navajo Indian protagonists, and Faye Kellerman with her Jewish protagonists, have successfully created novels featuring protagonists from different ethnic backgrounds. What makes these novelists unique is their ability to intertwine a strong story with characters from diverse cultures.

However, Latino protagonists in mysteries and thrillers are very rare. Two writers who are exceptional in this regard and are growing in popularity are Carolina Garcia-Aguilera and Rudolfo Anaya. In the small field of the Latino mystery/thriller (if such a category exists) there are no writers with the scientific or medical background to develop a story where the setting is a research or medical environment and where the science is sound and plausible. In any successful medical thriller, it is crucial that the science is sound. It may not always be 100 percent accurate, but it is at least plausible.

Against this background, Smokescreen: A Novel of Medical Intrigue stands out because it has a Hispanic protagonist who comes from humble beginnings and who becomes successful through hard work, perseverance and providence. The compelling story will appeal to all readers, but especially to the large, emerging market of Latino readers. Latinos are looking for thrillers or mysteries that portray Latinos as bright, articulate scientists, and not just Chicano, low-rider villains. Latino readers want to read about people who come from humble beginnings and become successful through hard work. The protagonist in Smokescreen: A Novel of Medical Intrigue fits that theme. We know the demand for such works is huge as evidenced by the attendance of nearly 50,000 people at the Latino Book and Family Festival this past August-organized by actor Edward James Olmos-demonstrating that this is an emerging but often overlooked market of readers.

In Smokescreen: A Novel of Medical Intrigue, the Latino protagonist is not traditional or clichéd. His conflicts are varied, and include personal conflict associated with cultural transition. The protagonist is an underdog (David) going against the tobacco industry (Goliath). The plot is based on today's headlines, that of the medical community versus the tobacco industry. The twist is timely, a conspiracy to incapacitate the president. The love interest and personal romantic conflicts are present. The hero is an expert. Characters fall in love. The antagonists murder good people. The plot is believable, timely, and all of the parts of the puzzle come together in the climax..
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