Obsessive-Compulsive disorder and other mental problems, the history of philosophy as it touches upon the will and consciousness, dualism and materialism, Buddhist mindfulness, animal experiments, neurology, psychology, quantum physics, mysticism and more. Gives people suffering from OCD a different perspective on ‘why-they-do-what-they-do’.
The title for this post may sound like a platitude; but this book really deserves it. If you feel that you have read the entire stress related book you can, then this book may come as a surprise. The book is targeted towards the intelligent lay person.
Mr. Sapolsky has done a wonderful job of distilling ideas of stress, stress related diseases, effects of stress on memory, depression and more in this charmingly written book.
The book is not about how to manage stress. A single chapter has been comfortably tucked away at the end of the book in that matter. Foremost, the book is about how the stress response affects your body. How the various stress related diseases raise their ugly heads in a person.
Most of the books in the market (in thousands) deal with how to reduce or cope with stress. But if you want to know in excruciating detail how exactly stress effects your body, the mechanism behind cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, memory impairment, sexual dysfunction, depression etc. then reading this gem of a book will be an enlightening experience.
The notes at the end of the book are in themselves interesting to read.
A scientific exploration of the various ways people attempt to make themselves happy has won the annual Royal Society Prize for Science Books. Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness had been tipped as the favourite to win the prestigious £10,000 award.
It beat five other titles including Henry Nicholl’s Lonesome George, an account of the last known individual of a subspecies of Galapagos tortoise. More…
What would have happened if, at the end of “Casablanca,” Ingrid Bergman had stayed with Humphrey Bogart in Morocco, rather than boarding the plane to Lisbon with her Nazi-fighting husband? Would she have regretted it? Or did she end up lamenting the decision she did make? According to Daniel Gilbert, odds are that either decision would have made her equally happy in the long run. More…
The beginning of the 20th Century was a high point in the history of physics. Einstein and his colleagues left us the Theories of Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics. Both of these have had profound effects on our modern technology. They’ve also left us with a problem. We don’t understand how the two concepts relate to one another. If we try to use the equations from relativity to look at very small scales, we get answers that don’t make any sense. The same thing is true in the other direction; quantum mechanics only explains the actions of very small objects. Throughout the last hundred years, physicists have looked for ways to unify the two theories. The leading candidate, for the last 25 years, has been string theory. But according to Dr. Lee Smolin, from the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, this has led to a stagnation in the field of physics, as more and more resources are pushed at a theory that has yet to proven true. In his new book, The Trouble With Physics, Dr. Smolin explores why he thinks this is leading to a crisis in science.
In the fall of 2006, mind-body and consciousness expert and author Deepak Chopra, M.D. debated the existence of God with atheist author Richard Dawkins on British television. In this six-part series, Chopra takes on Dawkins in even more detail, specifically addressing each major God-related claim by Dawkins, whose books include “The God Delusion,” “The Selfish Gene,” and “Unweaving the Rainbow.” More…
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