Machine Health

In Your Brain Is a Time Machine, brain researcher and best-selling author Dean Buonomano draws on evolutionary biology, physics, and philosophy to present his influential theory of how we tell and perceive time. The human brain, he argues, is a complex system that not only tells time but creates it; it constructs our sense of chronological flow and enables "mental time travel" - simulations of future and past events.

For as long as we've studied the mind, we've believed that information flowing from our senses determines what our mind perceives. But as our understanding of neuroscience and psychology has advanced in the last few decades, a provocative and hugely powerful new view has flipped this assumption on its head. The brain is not a passive receiver, but an ever-active predictor. At the forefront of this cognitive revolution is widely acclaimed philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark, who has synthesized his ground-breaking work on the predictive brain.

Meet Dr. Eugene Lipov. His research and partnerships have led to an amazing discovery that all trauma has at its root a single piece of human hardware: the stellate ganglion. The symptoms of post-traumatic stress are the same for all of us, whether from childhood poverty or abandonment, the ravages of war, or the brutality of sexual assault. Dr. Lipov's pioneering procedure appears to treat injury to the stellate ganglion, relieving even the worst symptoms of PTSD—irritability, hypervigilance, insomnia, and more—in a fifteen-minute treatment.

Medicine has become inhuman, to disastrous effect. The doctor-patient relationship - the heart of medicine - is broken: doctors are too distracted and overwhelmed to truly connect with their patients, and medical errors and misdiagnoses abound. In Deep Medicine, leading physician Eric Topol reveals how artificial intelligence can help. AI has the potential to transform everything doctors do, from notetaking and medical scans to diagnosis and treatment, greatly cutting down the cost of medicine and reducing human mortality.

Outrage Machine reveals how to navigate a world that has been thoroughly disrupted by technology. It demystifies the underlying machinery that has come to control us and will help guide listeners toward reflection rather than reaction. Pulling together 15 years of research and inquiry, Rose-Stockwell gives listeners a language with which to comprehend what is happening to society, and offer new mental models for how to manage our time, our technology, and our attention, as well as big-picture recommendations for the way forward.

The Chaos Machine is the story of how the world was driven mad by social media. The election of populists like Trump and Bolsonaro; strife and genocide in countries like Myanmar, the rampant spread of COVID-19 conspiracy theories as deadly as the pandemic itself, all of these are products of a breakdown in our social and political lives, a breakdown driven by the apps, companies and algorithms that compete constantly for our attention.

The entirety of the human brain’s 4-billion-year story can be summarised as the culmination of five evolutionary breakthroughs, starting from the very first brains, all the way to the modern human brains. Each breakthrough emerged from new sets of brain modifications, and equipped animals with a new suite of intellectual faculties. These five breakthroughs are the organising map to this book, and they make up our itinerary for our adventure back in time. Each breakthrough also has fascinating corollaries to breakthroughs in AI.

First coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, a meme is any idea, behavior, or skill that can be transferred from one person to another by imitation. Susan Blackmore shows that once our distant ancestors acquired the crucial ability to imitate, a second kind of natural selection began, a survival of the fittest amongst competing ideas and behaviors. Ideas and behaviors that proved most adaptive-making tools, for example, or using language - survived and flourished, replicating themselves in as many minds as possible.

Just months ago, millions of people were stunned by ChatGPT's amazing abilities–and its bizarre hallucinations. But that was 2022. GPT-4 is now here, with smarter, more accurate, and deeper technical knowledge. GPT-4 and its competitors and followers are on the verge of transforming medicine. But with lives on the line, you need to understand these technologies–stat.

In today's technological society, with an unprecedented amount of information at our fingertips, learning plays a more central role than ever. In How We Learn, Stanislas Dehaene decodes its biological mechanisms, delving into the neuronal, synaptic and molecular processes taking place in the brain. He explains why youth is such a sensitive period, during which brain plasticity is maximal, but also assures us that our abilities continue into adulthood, and that we can enhance our learning and memory at any age.

In this brilliant, smart-thinking book about the power and influence of social media, Professor Sinan Aral shows how ‘hyper-socialisation’ has profoundly changed us. Why does fake news spread faster than the truth? Do products and ideas become popular because they are good or because they are rated highly online? How does influence actually work and what does it mean to be influential? Which strategies and tactics can help businesses survive and thrive in the New Social Age?

What does it actually mean to be rational? Not Hollywood-style "rational", where you forsake all human feeling to embrace Cold Hard Logic, but where you make good decisions, even when it's hard; where you reason well, even in the face of massive uncertainty; where you recognize and make full use of your fuzzy intuitions and emotions, rather than trying to discard them. In Rationality: From AI to Zombies, Eliezer Yudkowsky explains the science underlying human irrationality with a mix of fables, argumentative essays, and personal vignettes.

From Plato to Westworld, these questions have fascinated and befuddled philosophers, artists, and scientists for centuries. In The Forgetting Machine, neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga explains how the mechanics of memory illuminates these discussions, with implications for everything from understanding Alzheimer's disease to the technology of Artificial Intelligence.

The Insanity Machine is an introspective look at life with paranoid schizophrenia. This book takes a clinical and observational look at the challenges presented by the condition. Kenna discusses the definition of paranoid schizophrenia, treatments, living with the disorder, and many other topics surrounding schizophrenia.

Do you know what AI is doing to improve our health and well-being? Does this new technology concern you, or impress you? Do you want to know more about the future of AI in health care? Technology continues to advance at a pace that can seem bewildering. Nowhere else is it moving faster than in the health sector, where AI is now being used to improve millions of lives. In this audiobook, Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare: AI, Machine Learning, and Deep and Intelligent Medicine Simplified for Everyone, you can discover the great improvements that AI is making.

Do you feel like you have tried every new diet out there, without any real and long-lasting results? Sometimes the diet isn’t the problem, but a syndrome called insulin resistance is. When you have more glucose than your body needs, your body responds by producing more insulin to stabilize your blood sugar level. This will lead your body to store the excess glucose as fat, and is also the reason you probably feel like taking a nap after eating lunch with carbs in it.

In AI for Good: Applications in Sustainability, Humanitarian Action, and Health, a team of veteran Microsoft AI researchers delivers an insightful and fascinating discussion of how one of the world's most recognizable software companies is tackling intractable social problems with the power of artificial intelligence (AI). In the book, you'll see real in-the-field examples of researchers using AI with replicable methods and reusable AI code to inspire your own uses.

JJ Smith, author of the number one New York Times best seller 10-Day Green Smoothie Cleanse, provides an all-new and accessible detox system that rids the body of unwanted fat and bacteria for renewed energy and lasting weight loss.

Your heart is a miracle in motion, a marvel of construction unsurpassed by any human-made creation. It beats 100,000 times every day—if you were to live to 100, that would be more than 3 billion beats across your lifespan. Despite decades of effort in labs all over the world, we have not yet been able to replicate the heart’s perfect engineering. But, as Sian Harding shows us in The Exquisite Machine, new scientific developments are opening up the mysteries of the heart. And this explosion of new science has crucial, real-world consequences for health and well-being.

Shame is a powerful and sometimes useful tool. When we publicly shame corrupt politicians, abusive celebrities or predatory corporations, we reinforce values of fairness and justice. But as best-selling author Cathy O'Neil argues in this revelatory book, shaming has taken a new and dangerous turn. It is increasingly being weaponised - used as a way to shift responsibility for social problems from institutions to individuals. O'Neil explores the machinery behind all this shame, showing how governments, corporations and the healthcare system capitalise on it.