Are you truly in danger or has your brain simply "tricked" you into thinking you are? In The Worry Trick, psychologist and anxiety expert David Carbonell shows how anxiety hijacks the brain and offers effective techniques to help you break the cycle of worry, once and for all. Anxiety is a powerful force. It makes us question ourselves and our decisions, causes us to worry about the future, and fills our days with dread and emotional turbulence. Based in acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), this book is designed to help you break the cycle of worry. Worry convinces us there's danger, and then tricks us into getting into fight, flight, or freeze mode—even when there is no danger. The techniques in this book, rather than encouraging you to avoid or try to resist anxiety, shows you how to see the trick that underlies your anxious thoughts, and how avoidance can backfire and make anxiety worse. If you’re ready to start observing your anxious feelings with distance and clarity—rather than getting tricked once again—this book will show you how.
How magicians exploit the natural functioning of our brains to astonish and amaze us How do magicians make us see the impossible? The Illusionist Brain takes you on an unforgettable journey through the inner workings of the human mind, revealing how magicians achieve their spectacular and seemingly impossible effects by interfering with your cognitive processes. Along the way, this lively and informative book provides a guided tour of modern neuroscience, using magic as a lens for understanding the unconscious and automatic functioning of our brains. We construct reality from the information stored in our memories and received through our senses, and our brains are remarkably adept at tricking us into believing that our experience is continuous. In fact, our minds create our perception of reality by elaborating meanings and continuities from incomplete information, and while this strategy carries clear benefits for survival, it comes with blind spots that magicians know how to exploit. Jordi Camí and Luis Martínez explore the many different ways illusionists manipulate our attention—making us look but not see—and take advantage of our individual predispositions and fragile memories. The Illusionist Brain draws on the latest findings in neuroscience to explain how magic deceives us, surprises us, and amazes us, and demonstrates how illusionists skillfully “hack” our brains to alter how we perceive things and influence what we imagine.
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year From an obesity and neuroscience researcher with a knack for engaging, humorous storytelling, The Hungry Brain uses cutting-edge science to answer the questions: why do we overeat, and what can we do about it? No one wants to overeat. And certainly no one wants to overeat for years, become overweight, and end up with a high risk of diabetes or heart disease--yet two thirds of Americans do precisely that. Even though we know better, we often eat too much. Why does our behavior betray our own intentions to be lean and healthy? The problem, argues obesity and neuroscience researcher Stephan J. Guyenet, is not necessarily a lack of willpower or an incorrect understanding of what to eat. Rather, our appetites and food choices are led astray by ancient, instinctive brain circuits that play by the rules of a survival game that no longer exists. And these circuits don’t care about how you look in a bathing suit next summer. To make the case, The Hungry Brain takes readers on an eye-opening journey through cutting-edge neuroscience that has never before been available to a general audience. The Hungry Brain delivers profound insights into why the brain undermines our weight goals and transforms these insights into practical guidelines for eating well and staying slim. Along the way, it explores how the human brain works, revealing how this mysterious organ makes us who we are.
A politically incorrect journey into the workings of the brain that reveals the reason the mental health profession, religion and new age philosophies can do more harm than good. This book is written for you. It is about you. It is about every human being on this planet. This book is about your brain and the tricks it plays on you. Not cool party tricks of the Chris Angel Mind Freak variety, but rather the fundamental dirty tricks of the brain which represent the Big Bang Level. Their impact on humanity is comparable to the splitting of the atom - both wondrous and horrendous. These tricks underlie and impact all we know - everything that has been written about, claimed, or posted as truth. I am not a new age radical, or some political rat-bag out to undermine or push a political agenda. With thirty years of psychology practice under my belt, I want to expose the flaws in our current system and show how humanity has been duped by the brain. A word of warning - in this book I touch on many 'raw' or 'sacred' issues. Past and present, political, cultural, religious, ideological or social issues are challenged. You will wonder why I appear to take on the world and strip it bare. Why don't I just stick to exploring and explaining the brain? It is impossible to discuss the brain, and the tricks it plays, outside of the world it has allowed us to create. Stripping the world of its layers of man-created belief systems is essential. By getting back to basics we can expose the brain's dirty tricks and reveal a core characteristic we can tap for our benefit. This book will challenge much of what you hold dear. For some it will offend or shock. We will put many cherished beliefs under the microscope to illustrate some of the major tricks of the brain. These tricks are the root cause of man's history of violence towards his fellow man, and have resulted in us taking our fragile planet to the brink. They have kept us ignorant, caught up in the myth of mental illness, divided and dangerous. I feel very passionately that it is time for us to grow up and reject any doctrine that is a product of a brain stuck in neutral gear. Beliefs are a product of the brain. This book demonstrates how evolution has primed us to be seduced by the 'what' (belief) while remaining oblivious to the 'how' of the brain. The poor old brain itself is not only the source of all beliefs in the first place, but also engages us in all the related cognitive processes, including subscription to and appreciation of the products we create. It is hardwired to take action - often mindlessly - to act on our beliefs. Despite its role as the originator of beliefs, this aspect receives scant recognition. The ideas in this book threaten the established order of things. My intention is to help wake you from the nasty cognitive-intellectual coma which blankets humanity. Along the way we will use the demolition hammer on some old structures, including the mental health profession and religion. On the positive side, destruction often gives rise to new growth. I hope this book encourages you to examine in a new light everything you have read, been told or have been led to believe. Martin Camilleri, 20 November, 2013
Five troubled teenagers fall into prostitution as they search for freedom, safety, community, family, and love in this #1 New York Times bestselling novel from Ellen Hopkins. When all choice is taken from you, life becomes a game of survival. Five teenagers from different parts of the country. Three girls. Two guys. Four straight. One gay. Some rich. Some poor. Some from great families. Some with no one at all. All living their lives as best they can, but all searching…for freedom, safety, community, family, love. What they don’t expect, though, is all that can happen when those powerful little words “I love you” are said for all the wrong reasons. Five moving stories remain separate at first, then interweave to tell a larger, powerful story—a story about making choices, taking leaps of faith, falling down, and growing up. A story about kids figuring out what sex and love are all about, at all costs, while asking themselves, “Can I ever feel okay about myself?” A brilliant achievement from New York Times bestselling author Ellen Hopkins—who has been called “the bestselling living poet in the country” by Mediabistro.com—Tricks is a book that turns you on and repels you at the same time. Just like so much of life.
It’s time to outsmart your worry and anxiety. Drawing on the same cutting-edge psychology presented in author David Carbonell’s The Worry Trick, this irreverent, on-the-go guide offers ten powerful "counter-intuitive" strategies to help you put worry in its place—anytime, anywhere. Anxiety is a powerful force. It makes us question our decisions and ourselves, worry about the future, and it fills our days with dread and emotional turbulence. But what if we understood that anxiety is merely a trick of the mind, trying to convince us we’re in danger? Anxiety is like a magician behind the curtain, playing subtle tricks on us to convince us that we're in danger when we’re not. When we understand this, we can observe our anxious feelings with some distance. Based on the author’s popular book, The Worry Trick, this helpful and humorous guide identifies the “trick” of chronic anxiety, and provides the ten most powerful techniques based in acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to help you respond differently to panic, anxiety, worry, and phobias. Once you learn to respond differently to the worry trick, you’ll be able to break the cycle of chronic anxiety for good. Instead of trying to “manage” your anxiety or push anxious thoughts away—techniques that you’ve probably already discovered don’t work—the ten powerful strategies outlined in this guide will empower you to actually change how you respond to worry and anxiety, so you can get your life back!
Showmanship for Magicians is a 1943 work by semi-professional magician and author Dariel Fitzkee. It is the first in the Fitzkee Trilogy, a classic collection that is still read widely by magicians, conjuroprs and illusionists alike. There is little information available on the life of Dariel Fitzkee outside of his written work. Born in Annawan, Illinois, in 1898 as Dariel Comp Fitzkee, he later changed his surname to Fitzroy during World War II. But he continued to write under the name Fitzkee throughout his life. Fitzkee's early books were shorter works focused on specific magic tricks. Books like Cut and Restored Rope and Manipulation (1929) and Linking Ring Manipulation (1930) described multiple variations of these classic tricks. Fitzkee was also a regular contributor to Genii Magazine, which is still published today. He wrote two recurring magic columns in the 1930s called "Thoughts are Things" and "Glimpses of Strange Shadows." Fitzkee also contributed a book and magazine review column called "Paper and Ink" that ran for over 12 years. For all of his analysis and study on the subject, it seems that success as a professional magician eluded him. Fitzkee is said to have had an unsuccessful touring act from 1939 to 1940, after which he stopped performing. But his most enduring written works were yet to come in the form of the Fitzkee Trilogy, starting with Showmanship for Magicians. Many magicians throughout the second half of the 20th century have considered it to be a cornerstone work in the field, including the actor Steve Martin who was fanatical about magic as a young man. He described the book as "...more important to me than The Catcher in the Rye." Fitzkee was frustrated with the quality of magic at the time of his writing. He felt that the mediocrity that dominated the stages did damage to the reputation of the entire field of magic. One of his biggest issues with magic in the 1940s was that its performers were still treating the trappings of the late 1800s as the "standard" for magic. Performers often dressed in out-of-date tuxedos, wearing top hats or turbans. They adorned the stage with old-fashioned round "Magician's tables" that had been popularized some 70 years before. Fitzkee felt that magic should be "...geared and attuned to the times" to keep it fresh and interesting for the audience. Fitzkee analyzes the components of other successful forms of entertainment, like film, sporting events, theater, opera, and more. He breaks these down into a list of 39 "Audience Appeals" - music, color, comedy, conflict, etc - that can then be incorporated into a magic performance. The second book in the Fitzkee Trilogy is The Trick Brain published in 1944. This work condenses all magic tricks into 19 basic effects, such as getting a solid item to penetrate another without damaging either. It also examines how to combine effects into new and updated tricks. The final book of the trilogy, Magic by Misdirection (1945), concerns the psychology of deception, or "the attack the magician makes upon the spectator's mind." The books were written in this order on purpose. Fitzkee felt that entertainment was the primary purpose of a magician. Whatever else an audience may expect, the first thing they expect is to be entertained. Then he gets into the mechanics of magic in The Trick Brain, helping the entertainer to hone his or her skill and create original tricks. And finally, in Magic by Misdirection, Fitzkee examines the mental aspects of magic, from both the magician and the spectator's point of view.
