Psychology > Giveaways

[close] A fun book of no-time-to-lose, far out predicaments that you need to find a way out of (it's NOT a how-to book).

Each short, edge-of-your-seat story in "Outsmart the Unexpected" unfolds an unusual, no-time-to-lose, and sometimes life and death predicament, and then challenges you to come up with a solution to help one of the characters out the situation they suddenly find themselves in. They're a fun way to develop your creativity, exercise your brain, stretch your imagination, and jump start your ability to think and react quickly, especially in situations where things are happening very fast. Use them to develop the skill to creatively solve problems when they suddenly arise.

In some, you may need to suspend your disbelief to play along. Some will make your head spin. Others may make your heart pound. Still others will make you go hmmm. But all will challenge you to think outside your comfort zone, to look for solutions from different angles, and to not necessarily limit yourself to what you see and what the obvious solution could be. They will stretch your mind and help you to develop your ability to formulate best possible solution in situations where you must quickly decide upon a course of action and there's little available information to work with.

Try your hand at inventing different endings and discussing and debating the possible solutions or interesting outcomes that you came up with. Do You think that the best solutions come from asking the right questions? Get your brain buzzing thinking up what those questions would be. Do you enjoy making up your own endings? Let your imagination run wild.

Dive into the unexpected and bring your creative side along with you!
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[close] Why does life speed up as we get older? Why does the clock in your head sometimes move at a different speed from the one on the wall? Time rules our lives, but how much do we understand it? And is it possible to retrain our brains and improve our relationship with it?

Drawing on the latest research from the fields of psychology, neuroscience, and biology, and using original research on the way memory shapes our understanding of time, the acclaimed writer and BBC broadcaster Claudia Hammond delves into the mysteries of time perception. Along the way, she introduces us to an extraordinary array of characters willing to go to great lengths in the interests of research, including the French speleologist Michel Siffre, who spends two months in an ice cave in complete darkness.

Time Warped offers insight into how to manage our time more efficiently, speed time up and slow it down at will, plan for the future with more accuracy, and, ultimately, use the warping of time to our own advantage. [close]

[close] Western Medicine may save your life, but to heal your life you need Energy Medicine. Although we have twice the life expectancy of our ancestors, the quality of our lives is increasingly diminished by chronic physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health issues due to a pervasive lack of knowledge of their core causes and treatment. Weaving together mind-body health information with scientific studies and true-life stories of healing, The Other Medicine…That Really Works restores the knowledge that is your birthright. This comprehensive guide to a healing way of life will help you learn the key to working with health issues, taking you beyond symptom elimination into growth, transformation, and radiant joy. You will discover: -- How and why mind-body health information was lost from the Western culture. -- The function and anatomy of your body energy systems. -- The key to activating the healing process in your life. -- How to recognize your own healing -- What can block healing and how to work with it. -- Everyday energy medicine that you can put into practice now. You will never see medicine or healing the same way again. [close]

[close] Touted by Publisher's Weekly as "required reading for those women who struggle with body-image issues—and even those who don’t," Mirror, Mirror Off the Wall belongs on your summer reading list.

When Kjerstin Gruys became engaged to the love of her life, she was thrilled—until it came time to shop for a wedding dress. Having overcome an eating disorder years before, Gruys found herself struggling to maintain a positive self-image as her pending nuptials imposed a new set of impossible beauty standards. She decided to embark on a bold plan for boosting her self-esteem while refocusing her attention on the beautiful world around her. A memoir of discovery, Mirror Mirror Off the Wall charts Gruys’ awakening as she vows to give up mirrors and other reflective surfaces, relying instead on her friends and her fiancé to help her gauge both her appearance and her outlook on life. The result? A renewed focus on what truly matters, regardless of smeared makeup, crooked eyebrows, or messy hair.

In the honest, witty, self-aware voice that has made her blog so popular, Gruys explores what it means to be a feminist in a society where femininity is subject to destructive ideals of beauty and sex appeal. Having worked in the fashion industry before becoming a sociologist, Gruys draws on her frontline expertise to explore the gender inequities created by society’s obsession with a flawless female body image. Putting a human face on an important issue with humorous and poignant scenes from Gruys’ life, Mirror Mirror off the Wall sparks important conversations about body image and reclaiming the power to redefine beauty. [close]

[close] During the Cold War, an alliance between American scientists, pharmaceutical companies, and the US military pushed the medical establishment into ethically fraught territory. Doctors and scientists at prestigious institutions were pressured to produce medical advances to compete with the perceived threats coming from the Soviet Union. In Against Their Will, authors Allen Hornblum, Judith Newman, and Gregory Dober reveal the little-known history of unethical and dangerous medical experimentation on children in the United States. Through rare interviews and the personal correspondence of renowned medical investigators, they document how children—both normal and those termed "feebleminded"—from infants to teenagers, became human research subjects in terrifying experiments. They were drafted as "volunteers" to test vaccines, doused with ringworm, subjected to electric shock, and given lobotomies. They were also fed radioactive isotopes and exposed to chemical warfare agents. This groundbreaking book shows how institutional superintendents influenced by eugenics often turned these children over to scientific researchers without a second thought. Based on years of archival work and numerous interviews with both scientific researchers and former test subjects, this is a fascinating and disturbing look at the dark underbelly of American medical history.
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[close] The inherent discontinuity in golf—18 different holes, intervals between every shot, slow play, time waiting on the tee, breaks between rounds—poses one of the game’s greatest challenges: maintaining focus and rhythm on the course.

Golf Flow offers a cartful of time-tested principles and strategies and a bagful of innovative methods and techniques to keep the mind quiet and distraction-free. Gio Valiante, one of the PGA Tour’s most prolific performance consultants, will help you orient your mind and harness your thoughts so you can enter a flow state, or optimal performance zone, in which time, control, effort, and awareness seem both suspended and intensified.

Matt Kuchar, Justin Rose, Stuart Appleby, and many other pros, as well as golfers with much higher handicaps, have benefitted big-time from developing their Golf Flow tools. Actual accounts of conquering mental obstacles by adopting a confident and clear mind-set can be found throughout the book. [close]

[close] If you like history relating to crime, law, medicine, psychology, or genealogy – then this real-life Victorian mystery is for you. Full of incredible twists and turns, it will hold you in its grip from beginning to end with multiple suspects, a lynch mob, perjury and bribery, failed kidnappings, broken family ties, cover-ups, financial devastation, and at least two suicides.

When young schoolteacher Emma Bond was brutally gang-raped and left for dead in her rural Illinois schoolhouse in June 1882, an enduring mystery was born. Although she survived, her recovery was hindered by hysteria, amnesia, and unusual physical complications. The story was covered extensively by the national press, but some of the wounds inflicted upon the victim were so appalling that the press refused to print the ugliest details, referring to them only as “nameless indignities.” Eighteen months went by before three of the six suspects were brought to trial.

After the verdict, however, the public’s unwavering support for the victim began to fade amid persistent theories and rumors that she had lied and that no crime had been committed. At the time, educators, editors, politicians, lawyers, and doctors eagerly weighed in on the case and its ramifications. But with Victorian doctors unable to agree on anything of a physical or a psychological nature, Emma’s life went into a freefall from which she never recovered. The crime also took a heavy toll on local residents, pitting families and neighbors against one another. The fact that the case was never fully resolved gave it a certain staying power, with its many unanswered questions persisting well into the twentieth century.

The author, whose great-great aunt was the victim, concludes the book with her own theory on the crime, based on some new evidence she recently uncovered.(less) [close]

[close] Receive one of the first copies available when Breakpoint comes out on July 23.

What can the human brain and its relationship to the internet tell us about our society, our technologies, and our businesses? A lot, as it turns out. The internet today is a virtual replica of the brain, and the networks that leverage it grow and collapse in ways that are easily predictable if you understand the brain and other biological networks.

We’re living in the midst of a networking revolution. All of the major technology innovations of the 21st century – social networking, cloud computing, search engines, and crowdsourcing, to name a few – leverage the internet and are thus bound by the rules of networks. We’ve seen the exponential growth of these technologies, and they’ve led to a more efficient and tightly connected world. But what many people don’t realize is that all networks eventually reach a breakpoint and collapse. This happens in the brain, it happens in nature, it happened to MySpace, and it will happen to Facebook and Google. It is critical to understand where the breakpoint is in the networks you use in order to achieve optimum success.

Navigating the world of new technologies today can be like walking through a minefield unless you know the path. Imagine what you could do with a roadmap for where things are headed?

In this fascinating look at the future of business and technology, neuroscientist and entrepreneur Jeff Stibel shows how the brain can act as a guide to understanding the future of the internet and the constellation of businesses and technologies that run on it. He’ll show how leaders like Marissa Mayer are using artificial intelligence to literally remake Yahoo! and how startups like oDesk and Kickstarter are using crowdsourcing, the next wave of revolutionary technology, to create something much larger and “smarter” than the sum of their parts.

Stibel offers a fresh perspective about the future of business and technology in a candid and engaging manner. [close]

[close] ADVANCE PAPERBACK GALLEY GIVEAWAY!

The NEW YORK TIMES-bestselling author of TRANSCENDENCE and noted research psychiatrist explores how life's disappointments and difficulties provide us with the lessons we need to become better, bigger, and more resilient human beings.

"Dr. Rosenthal catalyzes conversations around adversity with tales of wisdom and survival that we can all treasure.” – Mehmet C. Oz, M.D.


In THE GIFT OF ADVERSITY, Norman Rosenthal illustrates his message through a series of compact, memorable chapters, each one drawn from episodes in the lives of his patients, colleagues, or himself, and concluded with a take-away maxim on the lesson learned.

Using stories from his own life—including his childhood in apartheid-era South Africa, his years after suffering a violent attack from a stranger, and his career as a clinical psychologist—as well as case studies and discussions with well-known figures like Viktor Frankl and David Lynch, Rosenthal's THE GIFT OF ADVERSITY shows that true innovation, emotional resilience, wisdom, and dignity can only come from confronting and understanding the adversity we have experienced. Even when life is hardest, there are meanings to be found, riches to be harvested, and gifts that can last a lifetime. [close]

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*********SIGNED COPIES*********

"Thought-provoking..." - Publisher's Weekly

When we find ourselves wanting something badly enough, we'll do just about anything to get it--sometimes at the expense of our bodies, brains, banks accounts, and relationships. So why do we sometimes have the irrepressible feeling that we need something--such as food, cigarettes, alcohol, or sex-- that we really just want? And how do we satiate that feeling without indulging it?



In Craving, nationally recognized addiction expert and former Hazelden Medical Director Omar Manejwala, M.D., translates the neurobiology of this phenomenon into accessible terms, explaining why we just can't seem to get enough. He then gives us evidence-based tools and guidance to find satisfaction without having to give in to cravings.

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