Full AspenCat Catalog

Helen Fisher, one of the world's leading experts on romantic love, unlocks the hidden code of desire and attachment. Each of us, it turns out, primarily expresses one of four broad personality types--Explorer, Builder, Director, or Negotiator--and each of these types is governed by different chemical systems in the brain. Driven by this biology, we are attracted to partners who both mirror and complement our own personality type. Drawing on her unique...

Draws on the knowledge of coaches and other running experts to show how and why to make the move safely to running in less shoe and explains why most runners should consider minimalism.

Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy is a far-reaching study of how music captivates us so completely and why we form such powerful connections to it. Leading us to an understanding of the pleasures of sound, Robert Jourdain draws on a variety of fields including science, psychology, and philosophy. He uses music from around the world to show how melodies work, how rhythm differs from beat, and why some sounds are beautiful and others ugly. Music, the Brain,...

A brilliantly starry night is one of nature's most thrilling wonders. Yet in our world of nights as bright as day, most of us no longer experience true darkness. Eight out of ten Americans born today won't ever live where they can see the Milky Way. And exposure to artificial light at night has been cited as a factor in health concerns ranging from poor sleep to cancer. Paul Bogard travels the globe to find the night, blending personal narrative,...

An eye-opening exploration of the psychology of eating in todays unprecedented North American pantry of abundance, access, and excess.In Why You Eat What You Eat, acclaimed neuroscientist Rachel Herz examines the sensory, psychological, neuroscientific, and physiological factors that influence our eating habits. Herz un- covers the fascinating and surprising facts that influence food consumption-such as why bringing reusable bags to the grocery store...

Psychologists and philosophers have long grappled with the mysteries of dreaming, and now--thanks largely to recent innovations in brain imaging--neuroscientists are starting to join the conversation. In this book, the author traces the history of this emerging field. She then takes us into modern sleep labs across the country, asking the questions that intrigue us all: Why do we remember only a fraction of our dreams? Why are dreams usually accompanied...

Music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion. It can persuade us to buy something, or remind us of our first date. It can lift us out of depression when nothing else can. It can get us dancing to its beat. But the power of music goes much, much further. Indeed, music occupies more areas of our brain than language does--humans are a musical species. Oliver Sacks's compassionate, compelling tales of people struggling to adapt to different neurological...

Explores the mind-body connection, presenting startling research to prove that exercise is truly our best defense against everything from depression to ADD to addiction to aggression to menopause to Alzheimer's.

Recently, top pros have been performing well past a previously considered prime: World-class athletes such as Kelly Slater, the greatest surfer of all time, is winning competitions in his fifties; Tom Brady can beat players half his age. But what about the rest of us? Steven Kotler has been studying human performance for thirty years, and taught hundreds of thousands of people at all skill levels, age groups, and walks of life, how to achieve peak...