‘COMPLETELY TRANSFORMED MY WAY OF THINKING ABOUT DREAMS’ Jay Shetty
‘A JOURNEY THROUGH NEUROSCIENCE, NEUROCHEMISTRY, MAGIC, MYSTERY . . . A FANTASTIC READ’ Dr Rangan Chatterjee
‘TRANSFORMATIONAL’ Julia Samuel
‘ELEGANTLY LIFTS THE CURTAIN ON THE DREAMSCAPE TERRITORY’ David Eagleman
‘THIS BOOK WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE’ Lewis Howes
‘OUR POET LAUREATE OF NEUROSCIENCE’ Greg Whyte
‘AN INSTANT CLASSIC’ Bryan Fogel

Dreams are a source of mystery. They have changed the course of individual lives and the world, spurring business deals, inspiring art and scientific breakthroughs, triggering military invasions and mental breakdowns. Yet the source of dreams is not mysterious. They are the product of an extraordinary transformation that occurs in the brain each night when we sleep.

In this pioneering book, bestselling neurosurgeon Rahul Jandial delves into the dreaming brain and shares stories from his own practice to show the astonishing impact that dreams have on our waking life. He explains how dreaming of an exam might help you score up to 20% higher, why taking a long nap could make you better at problem-solving, and even that certain dream disorders can warn you of serious diseases like Parkinson’s years ahead of other symptoms. He offers clear and compelling advice, backed by new research, to become a lucid dreamer, understand your dreaming patterns and unleash their creative power.

Sharing the very latest discoveries in modern neuroscience, This Is Why You Dream provides answers to some fundamental questions: Why do we dream? How do we dream? What do dreams mean? And perhaps, most importantly, do we sleep in order to dream?

‘If I had to pick one, Zmigrod’s would be my book to watch out for in 2025’ Simon Ings, New Scientist

‘Filled with insightful findings, this book shows that ideological extremism and polarization are not just problems to fret about but puzzles that can be studied and understood’
Steven Pinker

The human brain faces a set of dilemmas every day: how to achieve coherence from fragmented sensory inputs and how to attain connection with other people in an increasingly atomized and isolating world. Ideologies offer a shortcut, providing easy answers, scripts to follow, and a sense of shared identity. Whether our ideologies are far-right, far-left, nationalist, religious, or even progressive, they simplify our understanding and give us organizing frameworks through which to act and interact with others. But ideologies come at a cost: demanding conformity and suppressing individuality through rigid rules, repetitive rituals, and intolerance. Once ideologies grip our minds, they fundamentally transform us, making us less sensitive and adaptable.

Drawing on her groundbreaking research, Dr Leor Zmigrod uncovers the hidden mechanisms driving our beliefs and behaviours. She uses the powerful tools of neuroscience to show that our political beliefs are not transient thoughts in our minds, divorced from our bodies – ideologies actually change our neural architecture, our cells. For instance, she demonstrates how a simple card sorting game can reveal your entire approach to life. Cognitive rigidity in such tasks – struggling to adapt to new rules – mirrors the rigidity with which you cling to social and political ideologies. While some individuals are more susceptible to dogmatic thinking than others, all of us can strive to be more flexible.

The Ideological Brain is essential reading in today’s polarized and polarizing world. To foster a more informed, resilient and freer society, we need to zoom into the processes happening inside each of us and learn to spot rigid thinking in ourselves and others. We need to learn to avoid black-and-white thinking and embrace ambiguity. We need to recognize our ability to resist irrational rules and authority. Regardless of your political stance, this book will challenge you to reassess your convictions – and what they are doing to your brain.

An expert, empathetic guide to the science, psychology and physiology of breaking, from the acclaimed author of How We Are

What happens when our minds and bodies are pushed beyond their limits? Vincent Deary is a health psychologist who has spent years helping his patients cope with whatever life has thrown at them. In How We Break, he has written a book for all of us who sometimes feel we have reached our breaking point.

Drawing on clinical case studies, cutting-edge scientific research, intimate personal stories and references from philosophy, literature and film, How We Break offers a consoling new vision of everyday human struggle. The big traumas in life, Deary points out, are relatively rare. More common is when too many things go wrong at once, or we are exposed to prolonged periods of difficulty or precarity. When the world shrinks to nothing but our daily coping, we become unhappy, worried, hopeless, exhausted. In other words, we break. Breaking, he shows us, happens when the same systems that enable us to navigate through life become dysregulated. But if we understand how the wear and tear of life affects us, then we have a better chance of navigating through times of burnout, stress, fatigue and despair.

By equipping us with a better understanding of what happens to us when we’re struggling to cope, and making a bold case for the power of rest and recuperation, How We Break helps chart a path through difficult times.

‘Utterly engrossing . . . Ambitious, accessible and important‘ James O’Brien

‘Consistently gripping – dazzling in its sweep and thrillingly brain-twisting in its arguments’ Tom Holland

A provocative new vision of how our world really works – and why chance determines everything.

In Fluke, myth-shattering social scientist Brian Klaas deep-dives into the phenomenon of randomness, unpicking our neat and tidy storybook version of events to reveal a reality far wilder and more fascinating than we have dared to consider. The bewildering truth is that but for a few incidental changes, our lives – and our societies – would be radically different.

Offering an entirely new perspective, Fluke explores how our world really works, driven by strange interactions and random events. How much difference does our decision to hit the snooze button make? Did one couple’s vacation really change the course of the twentieth century? What are the smallest accidents that have tilted the course of history itself?

The mind-bending lessons of this phenomenon challenge our beliefs about the very workings of the world. From the evolution of human biology and natural disasters to the impact of global events on supply chain disruptions, every detail matters because of the web of connectivity that envelops us. So what if, by exploding our illusion of control, we can make better decisions and live happy, fulfilling lives?

This book shows a whole other side of how brains work – from the patient who is afraid to take a shower because she fears her body will slip down the drain to a man who is convinced, against all evidence, that he is a cat, and a woman who compulsively snacks on cigarette ashes.

Entertaining though they are, these cases are more than just oddities. In attempting to understand them, neuroscientists have uncovered important details about how the brain works. BIZARRE will examine these details while explaining what neuroscience’s most unusual patients have taught us about normal brain function -ideal both for readers seeking a better appreciation of the inner workings of the brain and those who simply want some extraordinary topics for dinner-party conversation.

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 has advanced in the last few decades, a 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 to explore its fascinating mechanics and implications. Among the most stunning of these is the realization that experience itself, because it is guided by prior expectation, is a kind of controlled hallucination. We don’t passively take in the world around us; instead our mind is constantly making and refining predictions about what we expect to see. This even applies to our bodies, as the way we experience pain and other states is shaped by our expectations, and this has broader implications for the understanding and treatment of conditions from PTSD to schizophrenia to medically unexplained symptoms. From the most mundane experiences to the most sublime, it is our predictions that sculpt our experience.

A landmark study of cognitive science, The Experience Machine lays out the extraordinary explanatory power of the predictive brain for our lives, mental health and society.

‘THIS BOOK WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE’ Lewis Howes
‘TRANSFORMATIONAL’ Julia Samuel
‘OUR POET LAUREATE OF NEUROSCIENCE’ Greg Whyte
‘AN INSTANT CLASSIC’ Bryan Fogel

Dreams are a source of mystery. They have changed the course of individual lives and the world, spurring business deals, inspiring art and scientific breakthroughs, triggering military invasions and mental breakdowns. Yet the source of dreams is not mysterious. They are the product of an extraordinary transformation that occurs in the brain each night when we sleep.

In this pioneering book, bestselling neurosurgeon Rahul Jandial delves into the dreaming brain and shares stories from his own practice to show the astonishing impact that dreams have on our waking life. He explains how dreaming of an exam might help you score up to 20% higher, why taking a long nap could make you better at problem-solving, and even that certain dream disorders can warn you of serious diseases like Parkinson’s years ahead of other symptoms. He offers clear and compelling advice, backed by new research, to become a lucid dreamer, understand your dreaming patterns and unleash their creative power.

Sharing the very latest discoveries in modern neuroscience, This Is Why You Dream provides answers to some fundamental questions: Why do we dream? How do we dream? What do dreams mean? And perhaps, most importantly, do we sleep in order to dream?

**A COSMOPOLITAN BEST NEW NON-FICTION BOOK TO ADD TO YOUR TBR IN 2023**
**A “NEXT BIG IDEA CLUB” MUST-READ**

Rediscover your ability to pay attention with this groundbreaking new approach from ‘the definitive expert on distraction and multitasking’ (Cal Newport).

We spend an average of just 47 seconds on any screen before shifting our attention. It takes 25 minutes to bring our attention back to a task after an interruption. And we interrupt ourselves more than we’re interrupted by others.

In Attention Span, psychologist Gloria Mark reveals these and more surprising results from her decades of research into how technology affects our attention. She shows how much of what we think we know is wrong, including insights such as:
Why multitasking hurts rather than helps productivity
How social media and modern entertainment amplify our short attention spans
What drains our mental resources and how to refuel them
The four types of attention that we experience every day and how to recognise them

While the concept of ‘flow’ has previously been considered the ideal state of focus, Dr Mark offers a new framework to help explain how our brains function in the digital world: kinetic attention. This book reveals how we can take control, not only to find more success in our careers, but also to find creativity, joy and wellness in our everyday lives.

What if you could harness the extraordinary power of your unconscious mind to achieve your goals?

Shockingly, we spend nearly half our day repeating things we’ve done in the past without thinking about them. How we respond to the people around us; the way we conduct ourselves in meetings; what we buy; when and how we exercise, eat and drink – a truly remarkable number of things we do every day, we do by habit.

And yet, whenever we want to change something about ourselves, we rely on willpower alone. We hope that our determination and intention will be enough to effect positive change. And that is why almost all of us fail.

Professor Wendy Wood is the world’s foremost expert on habits. Drawing on three decades of original research, she explains the fascinating science of how we form habits and provides the key to unlocking our habitual mind in order to make the changes we seek.

Combining a potent mix of neuroscience, case studies and experiments conducted in her lab, Good Habits, Bad Habits is a comprehensive, accessible and highly practical book that will change the way you think about almost every aspect of your life.

‘Wendy Wood is the world’s foremost expert in the field, and this book is essential’ – Angela Duckworth, bestselling author of Grit