Constant connectivity is rewiring our brains - this is your survival guide for the digital era Many of us would no more go out without our cell phone than we would leave the house without clothes. We live our lives on social media, and PDAs, tablets, computers and other devices are completely integrated into our global culture. From connectedness to accessibility and instant access to information, a wealth of benefits accompanies this digital revolution. But what about the cost? Weaving together history, popular literature, media and industry hype, sociology and psychology, and observations from over 18 years of clinical practice and research, Dr. Mari Swingle explores the pervasive influence of i-technology. Engaging and entertaining yet scientifically rigorous, i-Minds demonstrates: How constant connectivity is rapidly changing our brains What dangers are posed to children and adults alike in this brave, new world The positive steps we can take to embrace new technology while protecting our well-being and steering our future in a more human direction. This extraordinary book is a virtually indispensable look at a revolution where the only constant is change—food for thought about which aspects of technology we should embrace, what we should unequivocally reject, and the many facets of the digital era that we should now be debating.

Drawing on philosophy, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence, Simple Minds explores the construction of the mind from the matter of the brain.

Popular science writer Philip Ball explores a range of sciences to map our answers to a huge, philosophically rich question: How do we even begin to think about minds that are not human? Sciences from zoology to astrobiology, computer science to neuroscience, are seeking to understand minds in their own distinct disciplinary realms. Taking a uniquely broad view of minds and where to find them—including in plants, aliens, and God—Philip Ball pulls the pieces together to explore what sorts of minds we might expect to find in the universe. In so doing, he offers for the first time a unified way of thinking about what minds are and what they can do, by locating them in what he calls the “space of possible minds.” By identifying and mapping out properties of mind without prioritizing the human, Ball sheds new light on a host of fascinating questions: What moral rights should we afford animals, and can we understand their thoughts? Should we worry that AI is going to take over society? If there are intelligent aliens out there, how could we communicate with them? Should we? Understanding the space of possible minds also reveals ways of making advances in understanding some of the most challenging questions in contemporary science: What is thought? What is consciousness? And what (if anything) is free will? Informed by conversations with leading researchers, Ball’s brilliant survey of current views about the nature and existence of minds is more mind-expanding than we could imagine. In this fascinating panorama of other minds, we come to better know our own.

Stan Franklin is the perfect tour guide through the contemporary interdisciplinary matrix of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, artificial neural networks, artificial life, and robotics that is producing a new paradigm of mind. Along the way, Franklin makes the case for a perspective that rejects a rigid distinction between mind and non-mind in favor of a continuum from less to more mind.

Explains a variety of learning disabilities to elementary school children.

Reflecting on the confusion, shame and grief brought on by her mother's schizophrenia, Amy Simpson provides a bracing look at the social and physical realities of mental illness. Reminding us that people with mental illness are our neighbors and our brothers and sisters in Christ, she explores new possibilities for the church to minister to this stigmatized group.

AS SEEN ON THIS MORNING 'a fascinating and moving account of life working with people who too often society wants to forget' Dr Amanda Brown, author of THE PRISON DOCTOR 'excellent and enlightening' Jonathan Levi and Emma French, authors of INSIDE BROADMOOR 'thought provoking' Gwen Adshead, author of THE DEVIL YOU KNOW Shocking, eye-opening and grimly fascinating, these are the true stories, patients and cases that have characterised a career spent treating mentally disordered offenders. As a forensic psychiatrist, it's Dr Das's job to treat and rehabilitate what the tabloids might call the 'criminally insane', many of whom assault, rob, rape, and even kill. His work takes him to high-security prisons and securely locked hospital wards across the country, as well as inside courtrooms, giving evidence as an expert witness. From the young woman who smothered her two-year-old nephew in a flash of psychosis, to the teenager who set his house on fire with his mother locked inside, Dr Das must delve into the minds of these violent offenders to elicit their symptoms of mental illness, understand their actions and prevent future atrocities. In this honest, revealing and at times humorous memoir, Dr Das shares stories from his fifteen years as a psychiatric doctor working with this dangerous clientele, detailing some of his most extreme, heart-breaking and bizarre cases - and how he's learned to live with his mistakes when the worse happens. Compelling, enlightening and candid, if you enjoyed Unnatural Causes, Dark Side of the Mind or The Prison Doctor, you'll love IN TWO MINDS.

An exploration of why and how the human competence for predication came to be. The predicative mind singles out and represents an item in order to attribute to it a property, a relation, an action, an evaluation; it thinks, and says, of a house that it is big, of a car that it is to the left of the house, of a cat that it is about to jump, of a hypothesis that it is plausible. The capacity to predicate appears to be neither innate nor learned, yet it is universal among humans. Puzzling in evolutionary, developmental, and philosophical terms, the mental competence for predication still awaits a coherent and plausible explanation. In this exploration of the predicative roots of human thinking, Radu Bogdan takes up the challenge. Bogdan argues that predication is not only an outcome of development but also a by-product of uniquely human features of development, many of them social in nature and unrelated to representation, cognition, and thinking. Humans develop predicative minds for disparate reasons, which bear initially on physiological coregulation, affective and manipulative communication, and the socially shared acquisition of words. Once developed, the competence for predication in turn redesigns human thinking and communication. Predication is at the heart of conscious, deliberate, explicit, and language-based human thinking, and it is the fuel of higher mental activities. Understanding the uniqueness and representational power of the human mind, Bogdan contends, requires an explanation of why and how predication came to be.

Follows the adventures of two royal teenagers who possess extraordinary mental powers.