Music is one of humanity's oldest medicines. From the Far East to the Ottoman Empire, Europe to Africa and the pre-colonial Americas, many cultures have developed their own rich traditions for using sound and rhythm to ease suffering, promote healing, and calm the mind.

In his latest work, neuroscientist and New York Times best-selling author Daniel J. Levitin (This Is Your Brain on Music) explores the curative powers of music, showing us how and why it is one of the most potent therapies today. He brings together, for the first time, the results of numerous studies on music and the brain, demonstrating how music can contribute to the treatment of a host of ailments, from neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, to cognitive injury, depression, and pain.

Levitin is not your typical scientist--he is also an award-winning musician and composer, and through lively interviews with some of today's most celebrated musicians, from Sting to Kent Nagano and Mari Kodama, he shares their observations as to why music might be an effective therapy, in addition to plumbing scientific case studies, music theory, and music history. The result is a work of dazzling ideas, cutting-edge research, and jubilant celebration. I Heard There Was a Secret Chord highlights the critical role music has played in human biology, illuminating the neuroscience of music and its profound benefits for those both young and old.

What is the secret of talent? How do we unlock it? This groundbreaking work provides readers with tools they can use to maximize potential in themselves and others.

Whether you're coaching soccer or teaching a child to play the piano, writing a novel or trying to improve your golf swing, this revolutionary book shows you how to grow talent by tapping into a newly discovered brain mechanism.

Drawing on cutting-edge neurology and firsthand research gathered on journeys to nine of the world's talent hotbeds--from the baseball fields of the Caribbean to a classical-music academy in upstate New York--Coyle identifies the three key elements that will allow you to develop your gifts and optimize your performance in sports, art, music, math, or just about anything.

- Deep Practice Everyone knows that practice is a key to success. What everyone doesn't know is that specific kinds of practice can increase skill up to ten times faster than conventional practice.

- Ignition We all need a little motivation to get started. But what separates truly high achievers from the rest of the pack? A higher level of commitment--call it passion--born out of our deepest unconscious desires and triggered by certain primal cues. Understanding how these signals work can help you ignite passion and catalyze skill development.

- Master Coaching What are the secrets of the world's most effective teachers, trainers, and coaches? Discover the four virtues that enable these talent whisperers to fuel passion, inspire deep practice, and bring out the best in their students.

These three elements work together within your brain to form myelin, a microscopic neural substance that adds vast amounts of speed and accuracy to your movements and thoughts. Scientists have discovered that myelin might just be the holy grail: the foundation of all forms of greatness, from Michelangelo's to Michael Jordan's. The good news about myelin is that it isn't fixed at birth; to the contrary, it grows, and like anything that grows, it can be cultivated and nourished.

Combining revelatory analysis with illuminating examples of regular people who have achieved greatness, this book will not only change the way you think about talent, but equip you to reach your own highest potential.

The groundbreaking work on trauma that remains a classic for our generation (Bessel van der Kolk, MD, author of The Body Keeps the Score)

Trauma and Recovery is the foundational text on understanding trauma survivors. By placing individual experience in a political frame, psychiatrist Judith L. Herman argues that psychological trauma is inseparable from its social and political context. Drawing on her own research on incest, as well as a vast literature on combat veterans and victims of political terror, she shows surprising parallels between private horrors like child abuse and public horrors like war.

This edition includes a new epilogue by the author assessing what has--and hasn't--changed in understanding and treating trauma over the last three decades.

Hailed by the New York Times as one of the most important psychiatry works to be published since Freud, Trauma and Recovery is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how we heal.

--Mark Hyman, MD, New York Times bestselling author of Young Forever

Discover the surprising link between your metabolism and mental health in this cutting-edge guide with practical advice for treatment and care.

Drawing on decades of research, Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Chris Palmer outlines a revolutionary new understanding that for the first time unites our existing knowledge about mental illness within a single framework: Mental disorders are metabolic disorders of the brain.

Brain Energy explains this new understanding of mental illness in detail, from symptoms and risk factors to what is happening in brain cells. Palmer also sheds light on the new treatment pathways this theory opens up--which apply to all mental disorders, including anxiety, depression, ADHD, alcoholism, eating disorders, bipolar disorder, autism, and even schizophrenia.

This groundbreaking guide pairs cutting-edge science with practical advice and strategies to help people reclaim their mental health. Inside, Palmer reveals:

Discover your body's neural pathways to calmness, safety, and connection.

An intense conversation, a spat with a partner, or even an obnoxious tweet--these situations aren't life-or-death, yet we often react as if they are. That's because our bodies treat most perceived threats the same way. Yet one approach has proven to be incredibly effective in training our nervous system to stop overreacting and start responding to the world with greater safety and ease: Polyvagal Theory.

In Anchored, expert teacher Deb Dana shares a down-to-earth presentation of Polyvagal Theory, then brings the science to life with practical, everyday ways to transform your relationship with your body. Using field-tested techniques, Dana helps you master the skills to become more aware of your nervous system moment to moment--and change the way you respond to the great and small challenges of life.

Here, you'll explore:

- Polyvagal Theory--get to know the biology and function of your vagus nerve, the highway of the nervous system
- Befriending Your Nervous System--attune to what's going on in your body by developing your neuroception
- Using Your Vagal Brake--discover key techniques to consciously regulate the intensity of your emotions
- Connection and Protection--learn to recognize and influence your internal cues for safety and danger
- Your Social Engagement System--find ways to create nourishing relationships with others and the world around you
- Practices and guidance to gently shape your nervous system for greater resilience, intuition, safety, and wonder

Through guided imagery, meditation, self-inquiry, and more, Anchored offers a practical user's manual for moving from a place of fear and panic into a grounded space of balance and confidence. Once we know how our nervous system works, we can work with it, teaches Deb Dana. We can learn to access an embodied, biological resource that is always present, available, and there to guide us toward well-being.

Daria Burke's childhood growing up under the shadow of an absent father and a mother debilitated by drug addiction was marked by neglect and poverty. Despite these fractured beginnings, she forges a triumphant path out of Detroit and into fashion's C-Suite. After ten years of therapy, she believes her healing journey is complete.

When she discovers a photograph of the car accident that she believes altered the course of her early life, Burke is forced to confront the parts of her childhood she had avoided. This discovery sparks a four-year immersion into neuroplasticity, epigenetics, the impact of adverse childhood experiences on early brain development and ultimately, why some of us remain stuck in past trauma while others experience Post Traumatic Growth. She dives headfirst into an exploration of her trauma, grappling with the enduring grip of the past on the present and the mind's influence over the body.

More than a story of personal triumph, Of My Own Making is a soulful and scientific exploration of the power to shape one's destiny. In facing the stark reality of her past, Burke reminds us that every moment demands a choice, and that we owe it to ourselves to reparent our inner child and reclaim the lives we deserve.

Burke's lyrical account of a life lived with courage and intention offers an empathetic and hard-won perspective on the nature versus nurture debate and the power of acceptance. Part memoir, part methodology, it is a fearless rallying cry inspiring us to excavate and examine the stories that define our lives. Ultimately, the narratives that we craft with our own hands are the only ones that matter.

Hope and light are on the horizon to help clients overcome the challenges of healing and releasing the pain of relational trauma.

The highly acclaimed Transcending Trauma explores a unique, compassionate, and evidence-based approach to resolving complex and dissociative trauma. In this transformative book Frank Anderson, MD, masterfully details an IFS path to therapy that allows clients to access their inherent capacity for healing - called Self-energy - while also helping them welcome, as opposed to manage, the extreme emotions frequently associated with trauma.

Included are clinical case examples, summary charts, current neuroscience research, and personal stories that will enable your clients to reclaim self-connection, experience self-love, and regain the ability to connect with and love others. Designed with clinicians in mind, this book offers a comprehensive map to complex trauma treatment that will enable readers to:

• Learn how to stay calm and steady in the presence of extreme symptoms
• Discover a different approach to resolving attachment trauma
• Gain confidence when addressing shame, neglect, and dissociation
• Understand the neurobiology of PTSD and dissociation
• Integrate neuroscience-informed therapeutic interventions
• Effectively address medication and common comorbidities
• Incorporate IFS with other models of treatment

Wolf restores our awe of the human brain--its adaptability, its creativity, and its ability to connect with other minds through a procession of silly squiggles. -- San Francisco Chronicle

How do people learn to read and write--and how has the development of these skills transformed the brain and the world itself ? Neuropsychologist and child development expert Maryann Wolf answers these questions in this ambitious and provocative book that chronicles the remarkable journey of written language not only throughout our evolution but also over the course of a single child's life, showing why a growing percentage have difficulty mastering these abilities.

With fascinating down-to-earth examples and lively personal anecdotes, Wolf asserts that the brain that examined the tiny clay tablets of the Sumerians is a very different brain from the one that is immersed in today's technology-driven literacy, in which visual images on the screen are paving the way for a reduced need for written language--with potentially profound consequences for our future.

The act of reading is so easily taken for granted that we forget what an astounding feat it is. How can a few black marks on white paper evoke an entire universe of meanings? It's even more amazing when we consider that we read using a primate brain that evolved to serve an entirely different purpose. In this riveting investigation, Stanislas Dehaene, author of How We Learn, explores every aspect of this human invention, from its origins to its neural underpinnings. A world authority on the subject, Dehaene reveals the hidden logic of spelling, describes pioneering research on hiw we process languages, and takes us into a new appreciation of the brain and its wondrous capacity to adapt.

One of the most beautifully composed and moving works of our time. --The Washington Post

Awakenings--which inspired the major motion picture starring Robert DeNiro and Robin Williams--is the remarkable story of a group of patients who contracted sleeping-sickness during the great epidemic just after World War I. Frozen for decades in a trance-like state, these men and women were given up as hopeless until 1969, when Dr. Oliver Sacks gave them the then-new drug L-DOPA, which had an astonishing, explosive, awakening effect. Dr. Sacks recounts the moving case histories of his patients, their lives, and the extraordinary transformations which went with their reintroduction to a changed world.

Alexander Lowen challenges conventional thinking and contends that neurotic behavior stems from a fear of life, and represents the individual's unconscious effort to overcome that fear. But one cannot do so. One can only suppress or deny it, at the cost of spontaneity and being at ease. Lowen explains that being a person requires that one stop their frantic doing, and take time out to breathe and to feel. If one has the courage to accept and feel the pain and hurt, despair and sadness, and inner emptiness or anxiety in one's life, one can heal trauma and gain pleasure, fulfillment, and joy....the object of Bioenergetic Analysis.

While in grad school in the early 1990s, Chris Niebauer began to notice striking parallels between the latest discoveries in psychology, neuroscience, and the teachings of Buddhism, Taoism, and other schools of Eastern thought. When he presented his findings to a professor, his ideas were quickly dismissed as pure coincidence, nothing more.

Fast-forward 20 years later and Niebauer is a PhD and a tenured professor, and the Buddhist-neuroscience connection he found as a student is practically its own genre in the bookstore. But according to Niebauer, we are just beginning to understand the link between Eastern philosophy and the latest findings in psychology and neuroscience and what these assimilated ideas mean for the human experience.

In this groundbreaking book, Niebauer writes that the latest research in neuropsychology is now confirming a fundamental tenet of Buddhism, what is called Anatta, or the doctrine of no self. Niebauer writes that our sense of self, or what we commonly refer to as the ego, is an illusion created entirely by the left side of the brain. Niebauer is quick to point out that this doesn't mean that the self doesn't exist but rather that it does so in the same way that a mirage in the middle of the desert exists, as a thought rather than a thing. His conclusions have significant ramifications for much of modern psychological modalities, which he says are spending much of their time trying to fix something that isn't there.

What makes this book unique is that Niebauer offers a series of exercises to allow the reader to experience this truth for him- or herself, as well as additional tools and practices to use after reading the book, all of which are designed to change the way we experience the world--a way that is based on being rather than thinking.

Men are like the ocean... deeper than they look and easy to misread. The Woman's Guide to How Men Think bridges the gulf between the sexes by explaining how men see the world, and how they view the women in their lives.

Written by a clinical psychologist and backed by research, this book reveals what women want to know about the men they love. You'll discover...

• The most important thing to men, and how it affects romance


• Why men change after they commit to a woman- The most damaging mistake women can make with men


• How to help a man open up


• Strategies for handling the most common misunderstandings

You'll also learn why men often feel frustrated and criticized by their partners, how to deal with male silence without putting men on the defensive, and how some of the most frustrating male traits may actually be thoughtful--but misunderstood--attempts at problem-solving.

If you have been searching for an insider's guide to the ever-elusive male mind, then look no further. This upbeat and positive guide will help you navigate these mysterious waters.

• A woman paralyzed on the left side of her body who believes she is lifting a tray of drinks with both hands offers a unique opportunity to test Freud's theory of denial.
• A man who insists he is talking with God challenges us to ask: Could we be wired for religious experience?
• A woman who hallucinates cartoon characters illustrates how, in a sense, we are all hallucinating, all the time.

In this moving and dazzlingly creative book, Dr. Jonathan Shay examines the psychological devastation of war by comparing the soldiers of Homer's Iliad with Vietnam veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. A classic of war literature that has as much relevance as ever in the wake of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Achilles in Vietnam is a transcendent literary adventure (The New York Times) and clearly one of the most original and most important scholarly works to have emerged from the Vietnam War (Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried).

As a Veterans Affairs psychiatrist, Shay encountered devastating stories of unhealed PTSD and uncovered the painful paradox--that fighting for one's country can render one unfit to be a citizen. With a sensitive and compassionate examination of the battles many Vietnam veterans continue to fight, Shay offers readers a greater understanding of PTSD and how to alleviate the potential suffering of soldiers. Although the Iliad was written twenty-seven centuries ago, Shay shows how it has much to teach about combat trauma, as do the more recent, compelling voices and experiences of Vietnam vets.

A groundbreaking and provocative monograph, Achilles in Vietnam takes readers on a literary journey that demonstrates how we can learn how war damages the mind and spirit, and work to change those things in our culture that so that we don't continue repeating the same mistakes.

A landmark exploration of the relationship between emotion and reason

Since Descartes famously proclaimed, I think, therefore I am, science has often overlooked emotions as the source of a person's true being. Even modern neuroscience has tended, until recently, to concentrate on the cognitive aspects of brain function, disregarding emotions. This attitude began to change with the publication of Descartes' Error in 1995. Antonio Damasio--one of the world's leading neurologists (The New York Times)--challenged traditional ideas about the connection between emotions and rationality. In this wondrously engaging book, Damasio takes the reader on a journey of scientific discovery through a series of case studies, demonstrating what many of us have long suspected: emotions are not a luxury, they are essential to rational thinking and to normal social behavior.

A groundbreaking work of science that confirms, for the first time, the independent existence of the mind-and demonstrates the possibilities for human control over the workings of the brain.

Conventional science has long held the position that 'the mind' is merely an illusion, a side effect of electrochemical activity in the physical brain. Now in paperback, Dr Jeffrey Schwartz and Sharon Begley's groundbreaking work, The Mind and the Brain, argues exactly the opposite: that the mind has a life of its own.Dr Schwartz, a leading researcher in brain dysfunctions, and Wall Street Journal science columnist Sharon Begley demonstrate that the human mind is an independent entity that can shape and control the functioning of the physical brain. Their work has its basis in our emerging understanding of adult neuroplasticity-the brain's ability to be rewired not just in childhood, but throughout life, a trait only recently established by neuroscientists.

Through decades of work treating patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), Schwartz made an extraordinary finding: while following the therapy he developed, his patients were effecting significant and lasting changes in their own neural pathways. It was a scientific first: by actively focusing their attention away from negative behaviors and toward more positive ones, Schwartz's patients were using their minds to reshape their brains-and discovering a thrilling new dimension to the concept of neuroplasticity.

The Mind and the Brain follows Schwartz as he investigates this newly discovered power, which he calls self-directed neuroplasticity or, more simply, mental force. It describes his work with noted physicist Henry Stapp and connects the concept of 'mental force' with the ancient practice of mindfulness in Buddhist tradition. And it points to potential new applications that could transform the treatment of almost every variety of neurological dysfunction, from dyslexia to stroke-and could lead to new strategies to help us harness our mental powers. Yet as wondrous as these implications are, perhaps even more important is the philosophical dimension of Schwartz's work. For the existence of mental force offers convincing scientific evidence of human free will, and thus of man's inherent capacity for moral choice.