Treatment options, lifestyle strategies, and emotional support for two million Americans.

Epilepsy, once mistakenly associated with demonic possession, has for centuries been a poorly understood illness. Today, though it affects nearly one out of every one hundred Americans, little comprehensive information can be found on bookshelves regarding this common and complex neurological disease. Until now!

Using his expertise in pharmacology and neuroscience, Dr. Carl Bazil demystifies epilepsy and other seizure disorders and offers medical, practical, and emotional support to patients and their families. He explains how and why seizures occur, and thoroughly discusses treatment options, the pros and cons of surgery, experimental and alternative treatments, strategies for daily living, and much more.

Substantiated with case examples, this useful book provides a much-needed window into epilepsy so that patients can achieve the full life they deserve.

This book explains in layperson's terms a new approach to studying consciousness based on a partnership between neuroscientists and complexity scientists. The author, a physicist turned neuroscientist, outlines essential features of this partnership. The new science goes well beyond traditional cognitive science and simple neural networks, which are often the focus in artificial intelligence research. It involves many fields including neuroscience, artificial intelligence, physics, cognitive science, and psychiatry. What causes autism, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer's disease? How does our unconscious influence our actions? As the author shows, these important questions can be viewed in a new light when neuroscientists and complexity scientists work together. This cross-disciplinary approach also offers fresh insights into the major unsolved challenge of our age: the origin of self-awareness. Do minds emerge from brains? Or is something more involved? Using human social networks as a metaphor, the author explains how brain behavior can be compared with the collective behavior of large-scale global systems. Emergent global systems that interact and form relationships with lower levels of organization and the surrounding environment provide useful models for complex brain functions.By blending lucid explanations with illuminating analogies, this book offers the general reader a window into the latest exciting developments in brain research.

A quest is never what you expect it to be.

Elizabeth Madeline Martin spends her days in a retirement home in Cape Town, watching the pigeons and squirrels on the branch of a tree outside her window. Bedridden, her memory fading, she can recall her early childhood spent in a small wood-and-iron house in Blackridge on the outskirts of Pietermaritzburg. Though she remembers the place in detail – dogs, a mango tree, a stream – she has no idea of where exactly it is. ‘My memory is full of blotches,’ she tells her daughter Julia, ‘like ink left about and knocked over.’

Julia resolves to find the Blackridge house: with her mother lonely and confused, would this, perhaps, bring some measure of closure? A journey begins that traverses family history, forgotten documents, old photographs, and the maps that stake out a country’s troubled past – maps whose boundaries nature remains determined to resist. Kind strangers, willing to assist in the search, lead to unexpected discoveries of ancestors and wars and lullabies. Folded into this quest are the tender conversations between a daughter and a mother who does not have long to live.

Taken as one, The Blackridge House is a meditation on belonging, of the stories we tell of home and family, of the precarious footprint of life.

In the late seventeenth century, a team of scientists managed to free, for the first time, the soft tissues of the brain and nerves from the hard casing of the skull. In doing so, they not only engendered modern neuroscience, and with it the promise of knowing the mind through empirical study of the brain; they also unleashed a host of questions, problems, paradoxes, and--strangest of all--literary forms that are still with us today. Nervous Fictions is the first account of early neuroscience and of the peculiar literary forms it produced. Challenging the divide between science and literature, philosophy and fiction, Jess Keiser draws attention to a distinctive, but so far unacknowledged, mode of writing evident in a host of late seventeenth and eighteenth-century texts: the nervous fiction. Apparent not just in scientific work, but also in poetry (Barker, Blackmore, Thomson), narrative (Sterne, Smollett, ""it-narratives""), philosophy (Hobbes, Cavendish, Locke), satire (Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot), and medicine (Mandeville, Boswell), nervous fictions dissect the brain through metaphor, personification, and other figurative language. Nervous fictions stage a central Enlightenment problematic: the clash between mind and body, between our introspective sense of self as beings endowed with thinking, sensing, believing, willing minds and the scientific study of our brains as simply complex physical systems.

A Caregiver's Guide to Lewy Body Dementia is the first book to present a thorough picture of what Lewy body dementia really is. Combining current strategies for managing symptoms and behaviors with personal examples that connect to readers' own experiences, this is the ideal book for caregivers, family members, and friends of individuals seeking to understand the disease and provide support to their loved ones. Written in easy-to-read language, the chapters incorporate handy facts and tips throughout, definitions of key terms, and practical wisdom to help caregivers navigate the day-to-day. Links to online resources, support groups, and associations are collected at the end of the book for further reference.As a complete guide to Lewy body dementia, this revised and updated second edition includes coverage of recent research developments and topic areas of growing interest, including: Updated information on the latest drug and treatment options Brand new chapter on the psychology of dementia, explaining the ways dementia changes the brain and how caregivers can continue to relate to their loved ones Discussions of the various causes for dementia-related behaviors and responsive dementia care techniques for caregivers to follow Expanded section on alternative therapies in a new chapter dedicated to managing stress

Effects of Peri-Adolescent Licit and Illicit Drug Use on the Developing CNS: Part II, Volume 161, in the International Review on Neurobiology serial highlights new advances, with this volume presenting chapters on topics including Introduction to Effects of Peri-Adolescent Licit and Illicit Drug Use on the Developing CNS, Peri-adolescent Exposure to (Meth)amphetamine in Animal Models, The Impact of Adolescent Nicotine Exposure on Alcohol Use During Adulthood: The Role of Neuropeptides, Cannabis Exposure During Adolescence: A uniquely Sensitive Period for Neurobiological Effects, The Stoned Age: Sex Differences in the Effects of Adolescent Cannabinoid Exposure on Prefrontal Cortex Structure and Function in Animal Models, and more.