Psychology

How do we begin to describe our love for our children? Pamela Richardson shows us with her passionate memoir of life with and without her estranged son, Dash. From age five Dash suffered Parental Alienation Syndrome at the hands of his father. Indoctrinated to believe his mother had abandoned him, after years of monitored phone calls and impeded access eight-year-old Dash decided he didn't want to be "forced" to visit her at all; later he told her he would never see her again if she took the case to court.

But he didn't count on his indefatigable mother's fierce love. For eight more years Pamela battled Dash's father, the legal system, their psychologist, the school system, and Dash himself to try and protect her son - first from his father, then from himself. A Kidnapped Mind is a heartrending and mesmerizing story of a Canadian mother's exile from and reunion with her child, through grief and beyond, to peace.

"I've got to stop being so nice." How often has Dr. Evelyn Sommers heard that from her clients over the years? The Tyranny of Niceness identifies and confronts our most fundamental social dysfunction - niceness.

For over 15 years, Sommers, a Toronto psychologist, has treated many twisted lives created by being nice. She interweaves the case histories of her clients with her own observations to present a frightening, yet hopeful, picture of a society that promotes silence and obedience over individuality and honesty. Through her stories and analysis, we see that letting go of niceness, without being rude or uncivil, means a new way of relating to others and a new honesty with oneself.

Understanding how right-brain and left-brain differences influence our habits, thoughts, and actions.

Human behaviour is lopsided. When cradling a newborn child, most of us cradle the infant to the left. When posing for a portrait, we tend to put our left cheek forward. When kissing a lover, we usually tilt our head to the right. Why is our behaviour so lopsided and what does this teach us about our brains? How have humans instinctively used this information to make our images more attractive and impactful? Can knowing how left-brain right-brain differences shape our opinions, tendencies, and attitudes help us make better choices in art, architecture, advertising, or even athletics?

Side Effects delves into how lateral biases in our brains influence everyday behaviour and how being aware of these biases can be to our advantage.

Powerful strategies to combat the design flaws of the human brain that make life in the twenty-first century unreasonably difficult.

If other animals could study us the way we study them, they would be puzzled by our unique ability to inflict misery on ourselves. We expend a lot of energy replaying past anguish, anticipating future distress, and stewing in self-righteous anger. Other animals would call us out for being oddly paradoxical creatures who long to be happy but who are the source of their own suffering, We worry about things we have no control over. We complain about not being understood while casting a critical eye on others. We stubbornly defend our beliefs despite contradictory evidence. Complicating all of this is our struggle to adapt to a complex world that we created. who struggle to adapt to a confusing world that we ourselves created.

In our defence, we haven’t yet mastered our neuron-packed brains, whose incredible complexity evolved over millennia in a very different world than today’s. The result of this evolutionary journey? Five design features that often morph into design flaws in need of fixing.

Hard to Be Human corrals the best insights from psychology, neuroscience, physics, and philosophy to reveal powerful strategies for the five big battles we each face in the war with our misguided, misbehaving selves. Tapping into deeply personal stories to ground the concepts in real life, Cadsby reveals how we can overcome our design flaws to be smarter, happier, and better adapted to the complexities of life in the twenty-first century.

Brain injuries can result in highly specific and surprising changes in behaviour that have revealed to us how the mind works.

The brain is the most complicated object in the known universe. After spending millennia trying to understand our ever-changing world, the brain is now turning its capacities for reasoning, remembering, and understanding inward, as it tries to understand itself.

The biggest breakthroughs in neuroscience have come mostly by accident. These accidents didn’t happen in research labs. They happened on railway job sites, in showers, on bicycles, in cars, or on buses. And others were the result of infections from uncommon diseases.

When an individual suffers brain damage as the result of an accident or illness, the negative effects can be profound — life altering and lifelong — yet the insights offered by the effects of these injuries have been revolutionary for neuroscientists. Through an examination of landmark cases of traumatic brain injury, Dr. Lorin J. Elias explains how each case has expanded our understanding of the mind.