Showing results by publisher "The Great Courses" in Health & Wellness

What explains the brain-body connection? How is it that something intangible like stress can really kill? How about the fact that we can and often do worry ourselves sick? And how can we take advantage of the mind’s connection to the body to reduce pain, boost physical performance, and even treat disease? Answer these questions and more in The Power of Mind over Body, a 12-lecture course that will change the way you think about physical health and the brain.

We all want to live long, healthy, and happy lives. But the path to achieve this-fitness and nutrition-is fraught with popular yet dangerously misleading myths about personal wellness. How do you separate the fact from the fiction? How can you recognize when you're doing your body more harm than good? Scientific knowledge has greatly expanded our understanding of how the human body works, laying many previously held ideas about fitness and nutrition to rest.

Conventional wisdom suggests there is a sharp distinction between emotion and reason. Emotions are seen as inferior, disruptive, primitive, and even bestial forces. These 24 remarkable lectures suggest otherwise-that emotions have intelligence and provide personal strategies that are vitally important to our everyday lives of perceiving, evaluating, appraising, understanding, and acting in the world.

The landscape of cancer treatment and prevention is a vastly different place than it was even a decade ago. Thanks to a relatively new focus on molecular medicine, researchers are gaining a deeper understanding of the mechanisms involved in the disease, poising them on the brink of huge breakthroughs. What Science Knows About Cancer reports from the front lines of the war on cancer with a clear and scientifically precise - yet thoroughly accessible - guide to how the disease develops, thrives, and can potentially be conquered.

What foods did the human body evolve to eat, and why? How does the food we eat affect our genes and our minds? What foods are (and aren't) optimal for our everyday health? How can we use cutting-edge science to end world hunger? In these 36 lectures, get eye-opening answers to these and other perplexing questions about the evolution of the human diet and its relationship to our bodies.

The brain is an astounding organ, and today neuroscientists have more insights than ever about how it works - as well as strategies for helping us live better every day. These 24 practical lectures give you a wealth of useful strategies for improving your well-being. By presenting evidence-based "hacks" for your brain, Professor Vishton empowers you to take charge of your life and perform better all around.

In The Black Death: New Lessons from Recent Research, celebrated medievalist Dorsey Armstrong shares the fascinating new story of this old pandemic—revealed by dedicated researchers working with 21st-century technologies and a knowledge of language and history that now provide input from all geographic areas of the medieval world. In seven engaging lectures, Professor Armstrong corrects explanations of the pandemic that are now known to be inaccurate and offers a more robust description of plague biology than has ever been known.

In Your Best Brain, Professor John J. Medina - an award-winning scientist, New York Times best-selling author, and leading advocate for brain research - delivers 24 exciting lectures that probe the origins of consciousness, memory, emotion, attention, intelligence, and beyond. He focuses on five key areas of study in neuroscience: the brain’s physical structure and function, and how it enabled us to become the planet’s apex predator.

Professor Allison Friederichs will walk you through six lessons that can help you better know your own mind, and thus understand and transform your own methods of communication. You will learn how your brain acquires, processes, and retains information. You can then take that knowledge and apply it whenever you need to convey something to others, with the best possible results. While you may not have any control over how other people communicate, developing your own methods of connection and conversation can have a positive impact on both your personal and professional life.

In the 24 fascinating lectures of Existentialism and the Authentic Life, Professor Skye C. Cleary will lead you through the writings of many existentialists to help you understand how they addressed the biggest of all questions. Writing about love, death, sex, war, plagues, intrigue, murder, deception, and more, these thinkers guide you toward living an authentic and meaningful life in a world that often seems absurd.

A must-have course for corporate leaders, design professionals, marketers, and anyone else who communicates visually, How Colors Affect You tells you everything you need to know about the science of color and its impact on all aspects of human experience. These lectures will give you a beautiful new perspective on color - one rooted in credible scientific knowledge and not popular myth.

To understand the roots of personality is to understand motivations and influences that shape behavior, which in turn reflect how you deal with the opportunities and challenges of everyday life. That's the focus of these exciting 24 lectures, in which you examine the differences in people's personalities, where these differences come from, and how they shape our lives. Drawing on information gleaned from psychology, neuroscience, and genetics, Professor Leary opens the door to understanding how personality works and why.

According to the latest scientific research, anyone can be creative. You just have to know how to think creatively, which involves taking a more imaginative approach to the challenges we all face. Learn how to wield the same research-based tools that today's creative people use and tap into your inner creative thinker with Professor Puccio's engaging 24-lecture series that takes you step-by-step through the creative-thinking process.

With its up to 500 trillion synaptic connections, your brain is easily the most powerful machine in the world. Even more incredibly: This amazing machine is constantly changing through a process known as brain plasticity. And you can take advantage of this process to improve and enhance your brain’s jaw-dropping powers - at any age.

Professor Thad Polk, of the University of Michigan, invites you to join him for Shocking Psychological Studies and the Lessons They Teach, a six-lecture course exploring a range of shocking psychological experiments from the past that have nonetheless contributed significant insight into the human condition. Dr. Polk elucidates the contemporary ethical principles now in place to protect both subjects and science, but admits that with every new technological and scientific advancement, there also comes a new set of ethical conundrums for researchers to grapple with.

The form of research-based meditation known as Integrative Restoration (or iRest®) has helped special operations troops improve their resiliency, executives manage stress, cancer patients cope with pain, and trauma survivors experience safety and healing. Now, bring the practice right into your life and home in these 24 classes.

Learning is a lifelong adventure.It starts in your mother's womb, accelerates to high speed in infancy and childhood, and continues through every age. Whether you're actively engaged in mastering a new skill, intuitively discovering an unfamiliar place, or even sleeping-which is fundamental to helping you consolidate and hold on to what you've learned-you are truly born to learn around the clock.But few of us know how we learn, which is the key to learning and studying more effectively.

Heidi Sormaz has a PhD in psychology from Yale University with an emphasis on cognitive psychology, and she’s been a meditation and yoga practitioner and teacher for two decades. She is also a reformed over-thinker, so, she knows exactly what you’re going through—or what you’re (over)thinking, so to speak. Over the 12 engaging lessons of Overcome Your Overthinking, Heidi not only provides the science behind cognitive behavioral therapy but she’ll also arm you with a toolbox of exercises and techniques that are most effective at breaking the spell of overthinking.

In How You Decide: The Science of Human Decision Making, Professor Ryan Hamilton, associate professor of marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School, uses research revealed via the scientific method to understand and explain human decision making. While his easygoing manner and anecdotes about surprising and bizarre choices will keep you enthralled, Professor Hamilton also shares what decision science has revealed through empirically tested theories.

From technology to business, two (or more) heads often prove to be better than one - but only if those heads are cognitively diverse. Diverse perspectives are a powerful tool for maximizing productivity and enhancing collective performance. Now, in The Hidden Factor: Why Thinking Differently Is Your Greatest Asset, you can learn the strategies that make you a more diverse thinker and position you to break down institutional silos and build robust, effective teams.