NCW Libraries

"Memory is far more than a record of the past. In this groundbreaking tour of the mind and brain, one of the world's top memory researchers reveals the powerful role memory plays in nearly every aspect of our lives, from recalling faces and names, to learning, decision-making, trauma and healing. A new understanding of memory is emerging from the latest scientific research. In Why We Remember, pioneering neuroscientist and psychologist Charan Ranganath...

A review of research on learning and infancy, drawn from hundreds of case studies, shows how children by the age of three are virtual learning machines and discusses how parents can help this learning process.

An exploration of human reasoning reveals how to recognize and avoid simple errors in our day-to-day thinking in order to transform the decision-making process.

"When it comes to what we believe, humans see what they want to see. In other words, we have what Julia Galef calls a "soldier" mindset. From tribalism and wishful thinking, to rationalizing in our personal lives and everything in between, we are driven to defend the ideas we most want to believe--and shoot down those we don't. But if we want to get things right more often, argues Galef, we should train ourselves to have a "scout" mindset. Unlike...

"The brain sometimes seems like a physical embodiment of the soul--a mysterious seat of our personality, intellect, and emotions. The roots of this notion run deep in our culture: From ancient philosophical concepts to modern psychological analysis, we've been idealizing the brain's role for eons. But the soul-like qualities of the brain are often more myth than fact, and in emphasizing them, we limit our understanding of ourselves. As neurobiologist...

"This nonfiction book for middle-grade readers examines how animals think and the ways scientists study their cognitive abilities. Illustrated with photographs throughout"--

"In this fascinating nonfiction account, author Nancy F. Castaldo reveals just what's going on inside the minds of animals, and through understanding animal intelligence we discover more about ourselves, including far more similarities than one might expect. Humans may have the biggest brains, but intelligence is not a quality exclusive to only us!"--

"In this book, Charles Taylor explains linguistic holism to people who believe language needs to be thought of as bits of information. According to one influential view of language, one that originated with Hobbes, Locke, and Condillac, language serves to encode information and to communicate it. This theory has been rendered more sophisticated over the last two centuries, but it still gives a central place to the encoding of information. The thesis...

"Use your head. That’s what we tell ourselves when facing a tricky problem or a difficult project. But a growing body of research indicates that we’ve got it exactly backwards. What we need to do, says acclaimed science writer Annie Murphy Paul, is think outside the brain. A host of (3z(Bextra-neural(3y (Bresources—the feelings and movements of our bodies, the physical spaces in which we learn and work, and the minds of those...