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Sweaty palms and dry mouth will be things of the past after you’ve read these helpful books on public speaking.
Must Read books for everyone ~ You Should Read These Even if You Aren’t Into Reading
Complex trauma is one of the most misunderstood psychological conditions, however these books for complex trauma survivors can prove to be really helpful.
Our favorite books of 2020, as chosen by curators Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Cain, Adam Grant, and Daniel Pink
New York Times bestselling author and neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin shifts his keen insights from your brain on music to your brain in a sea of details. The information age is drowning us with an unprecedented deluge of data. At the same time, we’re expected to make more—and faster—decisions about our lives than ever before. No wonder, then, that the average American reports frequently losing car keys or reading glasses, missing appointments, and feeling worn out by the effort required just to keep up. But somehow some people become quite accomplished at managing information flow. In The Organized Mind, Daniel J. Levitin, PhD, uses the latest brain science to demonstrate how those people excel—and how readers can use their methods to regain a sense of mastery over the way they organize their homes, workplaces, and time. With lively, entertaining chapters on everything from the kitchen junk drawer to health care to executive office workflow, Levitin reveals how new research into the cognitive neuroscience of attention and memory can be applied to the challenges of our daily lives. This Is Your Brain on Music showed how to better play and appreciate music through an understanding of how the brain works. The Organized Mind shows how to navigate the churning flood of information in the twenty-first century with the same neuroscientific perspective. Product DetailsISBN-13: 9780147516312 Media Type: Paperback Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group Publication Date: 09-01-2015 Pages: 544 Product Dimensions: 5.31(w) x 7.96(h) x 1.13(d) Age Range: 18 YearsAbout the Author Daniel J. Levitin, PhD, is a neuroscientist, cognitive psychologist, and bestselling author. He is Founding Dean of Arts & Humanities at the Minerva Schools at KGI in San Francisco, and Professor Emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at McGill University. He is the author of This Is Your Brain on Music, The World in Six Songs, The Organized Mind, A Field Guide to Lies, and Successful Aging. He divides his time between Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area.Read an Excerpt Read an Excerpt One of the best students I ever had the privilege of meeting was born in communist Romania, under the repressive and brutal rule of Nicolae . Although his regime collapsed when she was eleven, she remembered well the long lines for food, the shortages, and the economic destitution that lasted far beyond his overthrow. Ioana was bright and curious, and although still young, she had the colors of a true scholar: When she encountered a new scientific idea or problem, she would look at it from every angle, reading everything she could get her hands on. I met her during her first semester at university, newly arrived in North America, when she took my introductory course on the psychology of thinking and reasoning. Although the class had seven hundred students, she distinguished herself early on by thoughtfully answering questions posed in class, peppering me with questions during office hours, and constantly proposing new experiments. I ran into her one day at the college bookstore, frozen in the aisle with all the pens and pencils. She was leaning limply against the shelf, clearly distraught. “Is everything all right?” I asked. “It can be really terrible living in America,” Ioana said. “Compared to Soviet Romania?!” “Everything is so complicated. I looked for a student apartment. Rent or lease? Furnished or unfurnished? Top floor or ground floor? Carpet or hardwood floor . . .” “Did you make a decision?” “Yes, finally. But it’s impossible to know which is best. Now . . .” her voice trailed off. “Is there a problem with the apartment?” “No, the apartment is fine. But today is my fourth time in the bookstore. Look! An entire row full of pens. In Romania, we had three kinds of pens. And many times there was a shortage—no pens at all. In America, there are more than fifty different kinds. Which one do I need for my biology class? Which one for poetry? Do I want felt tip, ink, gel, cartridge, erasable? Ballpoint, razor point, roller ball? One hour I am here reading labels.” Every day, we are confronted with dozens of decisions, most of which we would characterize as insignificant or unimportant—whether to put on our left sock first or our right, whether to take the bus or the subway to work, what to eat, where to shop. We get a taste of Ioana’s disorientation when we travel, not only to other countries but even to other states. The stores are different, the products are different. Most of us have adopted a strategy to get along called satisficing, a term coined by the Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon, one of the founders of the fields of organization theory and information processing. Simon wanted a word to describe not getting the very best option but one that was good enough. For things that don’t matter critically, we make a choice that satisfies us and is deemed sufficient. You don’t really know if your dry cleaner is the best—you only know that they’re good enough. And that’s what helps you get by. You don’t have time to sample all the dry cleaners within a twenty-four-block radius of your home. Does Dean & DeLuca really have the best gourmet takeout? It doesn’t matter—it’s good enough. Satisficing is one of the foundations of productive human behavior; it prevails when we don’t waste time on decisions that don’t matter, or more accurately, when we don’t waste time trying to find improvements that are not going to make a significant difference in our happiness or satisfaction. All of us engage in satisficing every time we clean our homes. If we got down on the floor with a toothbrush every day to clean the grout, if we scrubbed the windows and walls every single day, the house would be spotless. But few of us go to this much trouble even on a weekly basis (and when we do, we’re likely to be labeled obsessive-compulsive). For most of us, we clean our houses until they are clean enough, reaching a kind of equilibrium between effort and benefit. It is this cost-benefits analysis that is at the heart of satisficing (Simon was also a respected economist). Recent research in social psychology has shown that happy people are not people who have more; rather, they are people who are happy with what they already have. Happy people engage in satisficing all of the time, even if they don’t know it. Warren Buffett can be seen as embracing satisficing to an extreme—one of the richest men in the world, he lives in Omaha, a block from the highway, in the same modest home he has lived in for fifty years. He once told a radio interviewer that for breakfasts during his weeklong visit to New York City, he’d bought himself a gallon of milk and a box of Oreo cookies. But Buffett does not satisfice with his investment strategies; satisficing is a tool for not wasting time on things that are not your highest priority. For your high-priority endeavors, the old-fashioned pursuit of excellence remains the right strategy. Do you want your surgeon or your airplane mechanic or the director of a $100 million feature film to do just good enough or do the best they possibly can? Sometimes you want more than Oreos and milk. Part of my Romanian student’s despondency could be chalked up to culture shock—to the loss of the familiar, and immersion in the unfamiliar. But she’s not alone. The past generation has seen an explosion of choices facing consumers. In 1976, the average supermarket stocked 9,000 unique products; today that number has ballooned to 40,000 of them, yet the average person gets 80%–85% of their needs in only 150 different supermarket items. That means that we need to ignore 39,850 items in the store. And that’s just supermarkets—it’s been estimated that there are over one million products in the United States today (based on SKUs, or stock-keeping units, those little bar codes on things we buy). All this ignoring and deciding comes with a cost. Neuroscientists have discovered that unproductivity and loss of drive can result from decision overload. Although most of us have no trouble ranking the importance of decisions if asked to do so, our brains don’t automatically do this. Ioana knew that keeping up with her coursework was more important than what pen to buy, but the mere situation of facing so many trivial decisions in daily life created neural fatigue, leaving no energy for the important decisions. Recent research shows that people who were asked to make a series of meaningless decisions of just this type—for example, whether to write with a ballpoint pen or a felt-tip pen—showed poorer impulse control and lack of judgment about subsequent decisions. It’s as though our brains are configured to make a certain number of decisions per day and once we reach that limit, we can’t make any more, regardless of how important they are. One of the most useful findings in recent neuroscience could be summed up as: The decision-making network in our brain doesn’t prioritize. Today, we are confronted with an unprecedented amount of information, and each of us generates more information than ever before in human history. As former Boeing scientist and New York Times writer Dennis Overbye notes, this information stream contains “more and more information about our lives—where we shop and what we buy, indeed, where we are right now—the economy, the genomes of countless organisms we can’t even name yet, galaxies full of stars we haven’t counted, traffic jams in Singapore and the weather on Mars.” That information “tumbles faster and faster through bigger and bigger computers down to everybody’s fingertips, which are holding devices with more processing power than the Apollo mission control.” Information scientists have quantified all this: In 2011, Americans took in five times as much information every day as they did in 1986—the equivalent of 175 newspapers. During our leisure time, not counting work, each of us processes 34 gigabytes or 100,000 words every day. The world’s 21,274 televi
Amazon.com: You Are Here: Discovering the Magic of the Present Moment: 8601420076822: Hanh, Thich Nhat, McLeod, Melvin, Kohn, Sherab Ch÷dzin: Books
Clay Skipper assembles a care package that'll help you maintain perspective, live a little more mindfully, and get you (even more) ready to leave isolation behind.
How to Sell Anything to Anybody [Girard, Joe, Brown, Stanley H.] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. How to Sell Anything to Anybody
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and The Boston Globe An authoritative, illuminating, and deeply humane history of addiction—a phenomenon that remains baffling and deeply misunderstood despite having touched countless lives—by an addiction psychiatrist striving to understand his own family and himself “Carl Erik Fisher’s The Urge is the best-written and most incisive book I’ve read on the history of addiction. In the midst of an overdose crisis that grows worse by the hour and has vexed America for centuries, Fisher has given us the best prescription of all: understanding. He seamlessly blends a gripping historical narrative with memoir that doesn’t self-aggrandize; the result is a full-throated argument against blaming people with substance use disorder. The Urge is a propulsive tour de force that is as healing as it is enjoyable to read.” —Beth Macy, author of Dopesick Even after a decades-long opioid overdose crisis, intense controversy still rages over the fundamental nature of addiction and the best way to treat it. With uncommon empathy and erudition, Carl Erik Fisher draws on his own experience as a clinician, researcher, and alcoholic in recovery as he traces the history of a phenomenon that, centuries on, we hardly appear closer to understanding—let alone addressing effectively. As a psychiatrist-in-training fresh from medical school, Fisher was soon face-to-face with his own addiction crisis, one that nearly cost him everything. Desperate to make sense of the condition that had plagued his family for generations, he turned to the history of addiction, learning that the current quagmire is only the latest iteration of a centuries-old story: humans have struggled to define, treat, and control addictive behavior for most of recorded history, including well before the advent of modern science and medicine. A rich, sweeping account that probes not only medicine and science but also literature, religion, philosophy, and public policy, The Urge illuminates the extent to which the story of addiction has persistently reflected broader questions of what it means to be human and care for one another. Fisher introduces us to the people who have endeavored to address this complex condition through the ages: physicians and politicians, activists and artists, researchers and writers, and of course the legions of people who have struggled with their own addictions. He also examines the treatments and strategies that have produced hope and relief for many people with addiction, himself included. Only by reckoning with our history of addiction, he argues—our successes and our failures—can we light the way forward for those whose lives remain threatened by its hold. The Urge is at once an eye-opening history of ideas, a riveting personal story of addiction and recovery, and a clinician’s urgent call for a more expansive, nuanced, and compassionate view of one of society’s most intractable challenges. | Author: Carl Erik Fisher | Publisher: Penguin Books | Publication Date: Jan 17, 2023 | Number of Pages: 400 pages | Language: English | Binding: Paperback | ISBN-10: 0525561463 | ISBN-13: 9780525561460
Explore classic and new dark historical fiction books to unveil the twisty mysteries of the past and sometimes the supernatural.
A list of our favorite recommended reads to help you level up your look, level up your mind, and level up your life.
