Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.
Daniel Goleman is an American psychologist, author, and science journalist. For twelve years, he wrote for The New York Times, reporting on the brain and behavioral sciences. His 1995 book Emotional Intelligence was on The New York Times Best Seller list for a year and a half, a bestseller in many countries, and is in print worldwide in 40 languages. Apart from his books on emotional intelligence, Goleman has written books on topics including self-deception, creativity, transparency, meditation, social and emotional learning, ecoliteracy and the ecological crisis, and the Dalai Lama's vision for the future.
In psychology, cognitivism is a theoretical framework for understanding the mind that gained credence in the 1950s. The movement was a response to behaviorism, which cognitivists said neglected to explain cognition. Cognitive psychology derived its name from the Latin cognoscere, referring to knowing and information, thus cognitive psychology is an information-processing psychology derived in part from earlier traditions of the investigation of thought and problem solving.
Information overload is the difficulty in understanding an issue and effectively making decisions when one has too much information (TMI) about that issue, and is generally associated with the excessive quantity of daily information. The term "information overload" was first used as early as 1962 by scholars in management and information studies, including in Bertram Gross' 1964 book, The Managing of Organizations, and was further popularized by Alvin Toffler in his bestselling 1970 book Future Shock. Speier et al. (1999) said that if input exceeds the processing capacity, information overload occurs, which is likely to reduce the quality of the decisions.
In the philosophy of mind, the hard problem of consciousness is to explain why and how humans and other organisms have qualia, phenomenal consciousness, or subjective experience. It is contrasted with the "easy problems" of explaining why and how physical systems give a (healthy) human being the ability to discriminate, to integrate information, and to perform behavioral functions such as watching, listening, speaking, and so forth. The easy problems are amenable to functional explanation—that is, explanations that are mechanistic or behavioral—since each physical system can be explained purely by reference to the "structure and dynamics" that underpin the phenomenon.
Daniel Joseph Levitin, FRSC is an American-Canadian polymath, cognitive psychologist, neuroscientist, writer, musician, and record producer. He is the author of four New York Times best-selling books, including This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, which has sold more than 1½ million copies.
Attention management refers to models and tools for supporting the management of attention at the individual or at the collective level, and at the short-term or at a longer term.
David Eagleman is an American neuroscientist, author, and science communicator. He teaches neuroscience at Stanford University and is CEO and co-founder of Neosensory, a company that develops devices for sensory substitution. He also directs the non-profit Center for Science and Law, which seeks to align the legal system with modern neuroscience and is Chief Science Officer and co-founder of BrainCheck, a digital cognitive health platform used in medical practices and health systems. He is known for his work on brain plasticity, time perception, synesthesia, and neurolaw.
Daniel H. Pink is an American author. He has written seven New York Times bestsellers. He was host and a co-executive producer of the National Geographic Channel social science TV series Crowd Control. From 1995 to 1997, he was the chief speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore.
This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession is a popular science book written by the McGill University neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin, and first published by Dutton Penguin in the U.S. and Canada in 2006, and updated and released in paperback by Plume/Penguin in 2007. It has been translated into 18 languages and spent more than a year on The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, and other bestseller lists, and sold more than one million copies.
An amygdala hijack is an emotional response that is immediate, overwhelming, and out of measure with the actual stimulus because it has triggered a much more significant emotional threat. The term, coined by Daniel Goleman in his 1996 book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, is used by affective neuroscientists and is considered a formal academic term. The brain is made up of two halves. Every half's amygdala is made up of a small, round structures located closer to the forehead than the hippocampus, near the temporal lobes. The amygdalae are involved in detecting and learning which parts of our surroundings are important and have emotional significance. They are critical for the production of emotion. They are known to be very important for negative emotions, especially fear. Amygdala activation often happens when people see a potential threat. The amygdala uses a person's past, related memories to help them make decisions about what is currently happening.
Clinical neuroscience is a branch of neuroscience that focuses on the scientific study of fundamental mechanisms that underlie diseases and disorders of the brain and central nervous system. It seeks to develop new ways of conceptualizing and diagnosing such disorders and ultimately of developing novel treatments.
Thinking, Fast and Slow is a 2011 popular science book by psychologist Daniel Kahneman. The book's main thesis is a differentiation between two modes of thought: "System 1" is fast, instinctive and emotional; "System 2" is slower, more deliberative, and more logical.
Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn is a book by CUNY Graduate Center professor Cathy Davidson published by Viking Press on August 19, 2011.
Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are (2012) is a book by Sebastian Seung. It introduces basic concepts in neuroscience and then elaborates on the field of connectomics, that is, how to scan, decode, compare, and understand patterns in brain connectivity. The book concludes with musings on cryonics and mind uploading. It was selected by The Wall Street Journal as Top Ten Nonfiction of 2012.
The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature is a popular science book written by the McGill University neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin, and first published by Dutton Penguin in the U.S. and Canada in 2008, and updated and released in paperback by Plume in 2009, and translated into six languages. Levitin’s second New York Times bestseller, following the publication of This Is Your Brain on Music, received praise from a wide variety of readers including Sir George Martin, Sting, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Adam Gopnik. The Los Angeles Times called it "masterful". The New York Times wrote: "A lively, ambitious new book whose combined elements can induce feelings of enlightenment and euphoria. Will leave you awestruck." The Times wrote "Levitin is such an enthusiastic anthropologist, such an exuberant song and dance man, such a natural-born associative thinker, that you gotta love the guy." It was named one of the best books of 2008 by the Boston Herald and by Seed Magazine.
Jamie Smart is a British speaker and writer.
Chris Bailey is a Canadian writer and productivity consultant, and the author of The Productivity Project (2016), Hyperfocus (2018) and How to Calm Your Mind (2022).
A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age is a bestselling book written by Daniel J. Levitin and originally published in 2016 by Dutton. It was published in 2017 in paperback with a revised introduction under the new title Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-truth Era; a new edition was published in 2019 under the title A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking With Statistics and the Scientific Method.
How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence is a 2018 book by Michael Pollan. It became a No. 1 New York Times best-seller.
