Neuroscience Creativity

Award-winning author and thought leader Dawson Church, Ph.D., blends cutting-edge neuroscience with intense firsthand experience to show you how you can rewire your brain for happiness—starting right now.

The authors of the best-selling Bold and The Rise of Superman explore altered states of consciousness and how they can ignite passion, fuel creativity, and accelerate problem solving, in this groundbreaking book in the vein of Daniel Pink's Drive and Charles Duhigg's Smarter Faster Better.

In The Soul of Desire, psychiatrist Curt Thompson suggests that underneath all our longings is the desire to be known - and what's more, that this fundamental yearning manifests itself in our deep need to make things of beauty, revealing who we are to others. Weaving together neuroscience and spiritual formation to open up new horizons for thinking not only about the nature of the mind but about what it means to be human, The Soul of Desire is a mature, creative work.

Our brains are noisy; certain regions are always grinding away at involuntary activities like daydreaming, worrying about the future, and self-chatter, taking up to forty-seven percent of our waking time. This is mindwandering—and while it can tug your attention away from the present, cognitive neuroscientist Moshe Bar is here to tell you about the method behind this apparent madness. Mindwandering is the first popular book to explore this multi-faceted phenomenon of your wandering mind and introduces you to the new, exciting research behind it.

In The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity—and will Determine the Fate of the Human Race, George Washington University professor and psychiatrist Daniel Z. Lieberman, MD, and Georgetown University lecturer Michael E. Long present a potentially life-changing proposal: Much of human life has an unconsidered component that explains an array of behaviors previously thought to be unrelated, including why winners cheat, why geniuses often suffer with mental illness, why nearly all diets fail, and more.

What do Pokémon Go and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein have in common? Why do some businesses survive and others fail at the first sign of change? What gives the human brain the edge over computers? The answer: elastic thinking. It's an ability we all possess and one that we can all learn to hone in order to succeed at work and in our everyday lives.

Many of us think of the arts as entertainment - a luxury of some kind. In Your Brain on Art, authors Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross show how activities from painting and dancing to expressive writing, architecture and more are essential to our lives. We're on the verge of a cultural shift in which the arts can deliver potent, accessible and proven solutions for the well-being of everyone.

This overview discusses how important imagination is and the major effect it has on our lives, including the role it plays in hallucinations, moods, and creativity.

In Mind in Motion, psychologist Barbara Tversky shows that spatial cognition isn't just a peripheral aspect of thought, but its very foundation, enabling us to draw meaning from our bodies and their actions in the world. Our actions in real space get turned into mental actions on thought, often spouting spontaneously from our bodies as gestures. Spatial thinking underlies creating and using maps, assembling furniture, devising football strategies, designing airports, understanding the flow of people, traffic, water, and ideas.

Nur wir Menschen sind in der Lage, unsere Lebenswelt immer besser nach unseren eigenen Vorstellungen zu gestalten. Indem wir uns aber immer perfekter an die so gestaltete Lebenswelt anpassen, verlieren wir allzu leicht auch unsere Fähigkeit, immer wieder nach neuen Wegen zu suchen und dabei aus den eigenen Fehlern zu lernen. Doch: Wir sind frei, wir haben die Wahl. Wir können diese selbstverständlich gewordenen Vorstellungen hinterfragen, wir können sie loslassen und uns entscheiden, unser Leben und unser Zusammenleben anders zu gestalten.

If you've ever experienced the blissful feeling of being fully immersed in a project, of ideas come to you naturally, or of getting lost in thought when cooking, playing music, or dancing, then you've accessed the flow state. Sometimes we stumble into it by accident, but what if you could access and unlock the healing properties of the flow state whenever you need it? Dr. Julia F. Christensen shows us how we can use the arts to alter our emotional state, tap into our ability to focus, release our creativity and improve our overall wellbeing.

We all dream, and 98 percent of us can recall our dreams the next morning. Even in today’s modern age, it is human nature to wonder what they mean.Now, groundbreaking science is putting dreams at the forefront of new research into sleep, memory, the concept of self and human socialization. Once a subject of the New Age and spiritualism, the science of dreams is revealed to have a crucial role in the biology and neuroscience of our waking lives.