From "The Van Gogh Blues" ...
.,."virtually 100 percent of creative people will suffer from episodes of depression. Why virtually 100 percent? Because every creative person came out of the womb ready to interrogate life and determine for herself what life would mean, could mean, and should mean. Her gift or curse was that she was born ready to stubbornly doubt received wisdom and disbelieve that anyone but she was entitled to provide answers to her own meaning questions."
Creative people of all kinds look for understanding, empathy, and meaning in life. That is what they do, what they work with. This will often lead to depression-- but not because understanding, empathy, and meaning are not possible. They are simply not always on terms that are easy to accept. This depression of creative people does not have to be physiological, nor does it necessarily respond to pharmaceutical treatments.
Dr. Eric Maisel, an internationally known expert on the creative process and best-selling author, has developed a four-step plan for engaging this type of depression and moving past it. Using examples of famous creators like Vincent van Gogh and Fyodor Dostoyevsky and not-so-famous creators who have struggled with this kind of depression, he shows that despite the difficulty, creative people hold the ability to forge relationships, repair themselves, and create meaning in an utterly unique and powerful way. Dr. Maisel's approach legitimizes creative people's own instinctual beliefs that standard treatments are not the answer.

"Tony Buzan will do for the brain what Stephen Hawking did for the universe".
THE TIMES

With Tony Buzan's help, you need never be lost for words ever again! This book shows you how to harness the power of your verbal intelligence and become brilliant with words – reading, speaking, remembering and understanding them – improving your social life and your career into the bargin! This book includes Buzan's revolutionary techniques for improving recall and understanding shows you how to:
• Increase your vocabulary, your creativity and memory
• Use mind-maps to develop your word power
• Speed-read and improve your comprehension
• Become a successful conversationalist and speak

Over 40? Getting forgetful? Discover the secret of neurobics. Neurobics is a unique brain exercise program that can be done anytime, anywhere. Based on the latest neuroscience, these deceptively simple exercises stimulate brain nutrients to help new brain cells grow. The key to keeping your brain strong and healthy is to break routines and use all five senses in unexpected ways. Offbeat, fun, and easy, these 83 exercises will result in a mind fit to meet any challenge--whether remembering a name, learning a new app, or staying creative in your work.

We all have concerns about our memories about becoming forgetful, about how to preserve our memories especially as we age. Now, Dr. D. P. Devanand answers your questions about memory loss due to aging and offers a revolutionary, medically sound practical program to keep your mind in shape and stave off memory loss.
The Memory Program is a complete promemory plan for everyone over 40 learn how memory works in the brain and how aging affects your memory evaluate your memory using simple tests follow the right diet and exercise plan to help your memory
* Use special memory-training techniques to keep your mind sharp
* Tackle the major reversible causes of memory loss including stress and depression, alcohol, medications, and hormonal and nutritional problems
* Discover exciting new preventive strategies and treatments, including herbal and other alternative medications, antioxidants and nutritional supplements, and useful over-the-counter and prescription medicines.
Personalized by gender, age group, and whether you currently have a normal memory or suffer from mild memory loss, The Memory Program is a comprehensive, simple-to-follow plan to enhance your memory. Its the only memory book youll ever need.

If time is money, then memory is the bank and Harry Lorayne will show you how to make every minute count, dramatically increasing performance, productivity, and profits.
-- Enhance your powers of concentration and observation.
-- Double or even triple your daily work output, eliminate careless errors, quickly skim and retain business reports, news articles, and technical data.
-- Breeze through exams, improve your grades and classroom performance, reduce your homework time, and increase your free time.
-- Give speeches without notes and without anxiety, learn foreign languages more easily, excel at poker, bridge, and other games.
-- Heighten your mental agility, learning power, and conversational skills.
-- Discover the newfound authority, confidence, and pleasure that come from a quick, sharp, active mind.

Whatever your lifestyle or walk of life, begin your countdown to success today, and put a world of knowledge and know-how at your fingertips

Whatever kind of creative person you are, this thought experiment game will get you out of your comfort zone. How? It stimulates creativity through limitation. Boundaries push you to think beyond the usual solutions and send you in different directions. That's exactly how you end up with unexpected and extraordinary ideas. How to play You take 3 "Do" cards that define a unique imaginary project. You need to come up with a solution for this project. But you also get 3 "Don't" cards, which give you a set of rules. For Example Do: Create clothing that is also a landmark | For two persons | To become more productive Don't: Don't use straight shapes | Don't make the size static | Don't use non-recyclable material The "Do" and "Don't" cards make you think differently than you normally would. In the beginning, the rules might feel like a big obstacle. But once you start playing, you will see that limitations also give you possibilities. Rules make you think about loopholes. Play the game by yourself to get inspired, use it as a conversation starter or play it in teams to find out who comes up with the most surprising solution. The outcome could even be the beginning of a real project!

Women are notorious for taking care of everyone else first, exhausting themselves. Time for Me is for any woman who feels stretched too thin, burnt out, or ready to find a better work-life balance. Author Helene Lerner helps women figure out if they're doing too much, and then provides four Power Keys to living a more joyful and balanced life. For women who are out in the trenches every day, this book offers simple pleasures to nourish your spirit and ingenious solutions to find time for yourself.

The latest book in the successful IQ Workout Series gives you the opportunity to test your mind to the full. We only use a tiny percentage of our potential brainpower, while the rest is locked away in the subconscious mind. Just as an athlete can improve performance by rigorous training, you too can become mentally fitter by using the workouts contained in this book. A set of brand new tests will push your mind to the limit, covering creativity, problem solving, memory, agility of mind and IQ tests. Also included is a hints section, as well as all the answers. You can either pit yourself against the clock, or try out the puzzles at your own pace.

Use this and other books in The IQ Workout Series as a fun and informative way of testing, assessing, and expanding your brainpower! These books are suitable for anyone from 18 to 80 who wants to put themselves to the test. Ken Russell and Philip Carter have written over 100 books on all aspects of testing, puzzles and crosswords.

Whether it's preparing for the big event like an exam and important presentation at work, or simply remember this week's shopping list, Brilliant Memory Training will help you stop worrying about your memory - and start using it to the full.

Challenge your brain with word puzzles. The Sun presents this cracking collection of 250 fun, quick crosswords so you can while away your leisure time at home. Wherever you are, Britain’s bestselling daily ensures you will always have a quick and enjoyable brain challenge to hand. These 250 quick crosswords are all new and based on the quick clues from the pages of The Sun. Tackle them on the train, tube or bus journey or pack them in your bags on your next holiday or weekend away. Fun, fast and furious you will while away the time and give your grey matter an enjoyable workout at the same time.

Foer's unlikely journey from chronically forgetful science journalist to U.S. Memory Champion frames a revelatory exploration of the vast, hidden impact of memory on every aspect of our lives.
On average, people squander forty days annually compensating for things they've forgotten. Joshua Foer used to be one of those people. But after a year of memory training, he found himself in the finals of the U.S. Memory Championship. Even more important, Foer found a vital truth we too often forget: In every way that matters, we are the sum of our memories.
"Moonwalking with Einstein" draws on cutting-edge research, a surprising cultural history of memory, and venerable tricks of the mentalist's trade to transform our understanding of human remembering. Under the tutelage of top "mental athletes," he learns ancient techniques once employed by Cicero to memorize his speeches and by Medieval scholars to memorize entire books. Using methods that have been largely forgotten, Foer discovers that we can all dramatically improve our memories.
Immersing himself obsessively in a quirky subculture of competitive memorizers, Foer learns to apply techniques that call on imagination as much as determination-showing that memorization can be anything but rote. From the PAO system, which converts numbers into lurid images, to the memory palace, in which memories are stored in the rooms of imaginary structures, Foer's experience shows that the World Memory Championships are less a test of memory than of perseverance and creativity.
Foer takes his inquiry well beyond the arena of mental athletes-across the country and deep into his own mind. In San Diego, he meets an affable old man with one of the most severe case of amnesia on record, where he learns that memory is at once more elusive and more reliable than we might think. In Salt Lake City, he swaps secrets with a savant who claims to have memorized more than nine thousand books. At a high school in the South Bronx, he finds a history teacher using twenty- five-hundred-year-old memory techniques to give his students an edge in the state Regents exam.
At a time when electronic devices have all but rendered our individual memories obsolete, Foer's bid to resurrect the forgotten art of remembering becomes an urgent quest. "Moonwalking with Einstein" brings Joshua Foer to the apex of the U.S. Memory Championship and readers to a profound appreciation of a gift we all possess but that too often slips our minds.

Some people have something to say in any conversation and can spot the hidden angles of completely unrelated problems; but how do they do it? So many books, apps, courses, and schools compete for our attention that the problem isn't a lack of opportunity to sharpen our minds, it's having to choose between so many options. And yet, more than two thousand years ago, the greatest thinker of Ancient Greece, Aristotle, had already discovered the blueprint of the human mind. Despite the fact that the latest cognitive science shows his blueprint to be exactly what sharpens our reasoning, subtlety of thought, and ability to think in different ways and for ourselves, we have meanwhile replaced it with a simplistic and seductive view of intelligence, education and the mind. Condensing that blueprint to six 'secrets', Craig Adams uncovers the underlying patterns of every discussion and debate we've ever had, and shows us how to be both harder to manipulate and more skilful in any conversation or debate - no matter the topic.

Feeling distracted? Scattered? Time is slipping away from you? You're not alone. But it doesn't have to be that way. Using revolutionary time management techniques you will find out how to super charge your mind power and focus on what matters most - your goals and your achievements.

Focus shows you how to direct energy without distraction to the key tasks that lead you to success. Based on the latest research, these techniques make it easy for you to overcome information overload, stress and procrastination and concentrate on what's really important.

Using these recent discoveries in time management, like how to achieve a state of flow that can lead to maximum achievement in minimum time, Focus will show you how you can move swiftly towards your most important goals.

The result: you reach your goals quickly and with less effort.

Challenge yourself with word puzzles Calling all word search wizards! Here are 300 entertaining new puzzles that will have you hunting for hours. Inside you’ll find a wonderful world of thematic word searches to explore, with some real brain teasers along the way. Wherever you are these are the puzzles for you! So sit back, relax, and prepare for a non-stop word search extravaganza. Solutions appear in the back.

Many people claim they would rather be diagnosed with cancer than dementia or Alzheimer's. What they may not realize is that decreased or impaired brain function is not a foregone conclusion as we get older. Our own lifestyle choices and habits can have a significant impact--for good or ill--on our brains. And that means there's hope. Drawing from the latest medical research, Dr. Richard Furman helps readers understand brain health and shows them how to make three powerful lifestyle changes that can help decrease the probability of developing dementia or Alzheimer's. He explains how eating the right foods, exercising, and sustaining an ideal weight can dramatically reduce the likelihood of developing brain disorders in the first place, and even how those habits can slow the progression of dementia in someone who has already received a diagnosis.

Attention is central to everything we do and think; yet it is usually invisible, transparent, lost behind our fixation with content. We pay attention to this and that moment or we let our attention wander, but we rarely give attention to the process of attending and distraction. It is typically viewed instrumentally, in terms of what it can achieve, and so its process and practice are overlooked, yet it is central to neuroplasticity - the brain's ability to create new neural pathways in order to adapt - and underlies both the mindfulness revolution and the concern about the influence of new social and digital media. Gay Watson explores attention in action through many disciplines and ways of life, from neuroscience to surfing. The book contains interviews with, among others, John Luther Adams, Stephen Batchelor, Susan Blackmore, Guy Claxton, Edmund de Waal, Rick Hanson, Jane Hirshfield, Iain McGilchrist, Wayne McGregor, Garry Fabian Miller, Alice and Peter Oswald, Ruth Ozeki and James Turrell.A valuable and timely account of something central to our lives yet all too often neglected, this book will appeal to all those who find their attention wandering owing to the distractions and clamour of modern life, and want to know why.

Maybe, once or twice in your life, you have experienced a surge of destiny so strong it made you believe in miracles. Such bolts from the blue seem to hit when weariness or ill fortune have plowed through the ground of reason, breaking it up so magic can take root. What follows is so perfect that to call it accidental defies belief. Diana Archer is an absolutely -- mathematically! -- average woman, living an unremarkable life, when destiny reaches her. Without quite knowing how or why, she finds herself leaving everything familiar and moving into a world where miracles are commonplace, where her supposed flaws become her salvation, and where each persons story is everyones. In this exuberant allegory, bestselling memoir and self-help author Martha Beck takes readers into the wild parts of the world and the human psyche. The story of Diana, Herself helps every reader chart a course for awakening to greater joy, adventure, and purpose.

This book asks how 21st century technologies such as the Internet, mobile phones and social media are transforming human memory and its relationship to gender. Each epoch brings with it new media technologies that have transformed human memory. Anna Reading examines the ways in which globalised digital cultures are changing the gender of memory and memories of gender through a lively set of original case studies in the 'globital age'. The study analyses imaginaries of gender, memory and technology in utopian literature; it provides an examination of how foetal scanning alters the gendered memories of the human being. Reading draws on original research on women's use of mobile phones to capture and share personal and family memories as well as analysing changes to journalism and gendered memories, focusing on the mobile witnessing of terrorism and state terror. The book concludes with a critical reflection on Anna Reading's work as a playwright mobilising feminist memories as part of a digital theatre project 'Phenomenal Women with Fuel Theatre' which created live and digital memories of inspirational women. The book explains in depth Reading's original concept of digitised and globalised memory - 'globital memory' - and suggests how the scholar may use mobile methodologies to understand how memories travel and change in the globital age.

In May 2012, bestselling author Neil Gaiman stood at a podium at Philadelphia's University of the Arts to deliver the commencement address. For the next nineteen minutes he shared his thoughts about creativity, bravery, and strength: he encouraged the students before him to break rules and think outside the box. Most of all, he encouraged the fledgling painters, musicians, writers, and dreamers to make good art.

This book, designed by renowned graphic artist Chip Kidd, contains the full text of Gaiman's inspiring speech. Whether bestowed upon a young artist beginning his or her creative journey, or given as a token of gratitude to an admired mentor, or acquired as a gift to oneself, this volume is a fitting offering for anyone who strives to make good art.

Drawing on the theoretical roots of the Stoics, Buddhism, popular psychology and CBT, Ben has created a unique programme that anyone can follow. Join Ben on his journey from anxious mess to back in control. This book is packed with fun and practical challenges that readers can try themselves, all in the name of self-improvement! Thanks to having undertaken these challenges himself, Ben now has an unusual selection of hobbies, a host of interesting new skills, some fantastic dinner party stories and plenty of wonderful experiences... and most importantly he now feels calmer, healthier, happier and more at peace. Split into three types of activity - mental, physical and skilful - the challenges range from climbing a mountain to sleeping on a beach in a bivvy bag in a storm to having a conversation in Japanese. Follow Ben in learning how to pick a lock, how to solve a Rubik's Cube in under a minute and how to memorize the order of a deck of cards after seeing it only once (the ultimate party trick). Along the way, he's eaten some repulsive insects, whilst also creating a new morning routine that freed up the time to write this book. Try out Ben's challenges ... or create some of your own, with the help of the challenge tracker!