'Wide ranging, backed by science and research, informative and easy to understand, this is a great book for the sleep-deprived' Lisa Artis, The Sleep Council When was the last time you had a proper night's sleep? In today's fast-paced, non-stop world, research by the UK's Sleep Council has found that almost a third of us don't get enough sleep most nights. Insomnia can wreak havoc on everyday life - leaving us feeling exhausted, irritable and unwell. Lack of sleep has also been linked to a whole host of long-term chronic conditions including Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, obesity and depression. But don't despair - help is at hand! This book is packed with easy to read and simple to follow tips, as well as some weird and wonderful tricks, all gathered from expert scientific research, that will help you fall asleep and stay asleep. You may be surprised to learn that everything from having a purpose in life to warming your feet, from what you eat through the day to how you breathe, from how much time you spend outdoors to reframing your thoughts and mindset can all help you get a better night's rest. A good night's sleep can help change your life for the better, and this book will help you to achieve it.

Interdisciplinary perspectives on the capacity to perceive, appreciate, and make music. Research shows that all humans have a predisposition for music, just as they do for language. All of us can perceive and enjoy music, even if we can't carry a tune and consider ourselves "unmusical." This volume offers interdisciplinary perspectives on the capacity to perceive, appreciate, and make music. Scholars from biology, musicology, neurology, genetics, computer science, anthropology, psychology, and other fields consider what music is for and why every human culture has it; whether musicality is a uniquely human capacity; and what biological and cognitive mechanisms underlie it. Contributors outline a research program in musicality, and discuss issues in studying the evolution of music; consider principles, constraints, and theories of origins; review musicality from cross-cultural, cross-species, and cross-domain perspectives; discuss the computational modeling of animal song and creativity; and offer a historical context for the study of musicality. The volume aims to identify the basic neurocognitive mechanisms that constitute musicality (and effective ways to study these in human and nonhuman animals) and to develop a method for analyzing musical phenotypes that point to the biological basis of musicality. Contributors Jorge L. Armony, Judith Becker, Simon E. Fisher, W. Tecumseh Fitch, Bruno Gingras, Jessica Grahn, Yuko Hattori, Marisa Hoeschele, Henkjan Honing, David Huron, Dieuwke Hupkes, Yukiko Kikuchi, Julia Kursell, Marie-Elaine Lagrois, Hugo Merchant, Bjoern Merker, Iain Morley, Aniruddh D. Patel, Isabelle Peretz, Martin Rohrmeier, Constance Scharff, Carel ten Cate, Laurel J. Trainor, Sandra E. Trehub, Peter Tyack, Dominique Vuvan, Geraint Wiggins, Willem Zuidema

What occurs within coma? What does the coma patient experience? How does the patient perceive the world outside of coma, if at all? The simple answer to these questions is that we don't know. Yet the sheer volume of literary and media texts would have us believe that we do. Examining representations of coma and brain injury across a variety of texts, this book investigates common tropes and linguistic devices used to portray the medical condition of coma, giving rise to universal mythologies and misconceptions in the public domain. Matthew Colbeck looks at how these texts represent, or fail to represent, long-term brain injury, drawing on narratives of coma survivors that have been produced and curated through writing groups he has run over the last 10 years. Discussing a diverse range of cultural works, including novels by Irvine Welsh, Stephen King, Tom McCarthy and Douglas Coupland, as well as film and media texts such as The Sopranos, Kill Bill, Coma and The Walking Dead, Colbeck provides an explanation for our fascination with coma. With a proliferation of misleading stories of survival in the media and in literature, this book explores the potential impact these have upon our own understanding of coma and its victims.

Awaiting description

Self Help? Self Hypnosis! explodes the myths surrounding self-hypnosis, providing you with an explanation about how hypnosis works and how to use it for your own personal therapy. Many books spend all their time showing you how to get into trance and then leave you with little help on what to do when you get there! This book guides you through how to use different language, ideas and stories to help change patterns and behaviours in your mind, it goes far beyond the usual simple affirmations for change. It is broken down into different sections to focus on areas of treatment, to make it easy to use and there are some sample sessions to help you understand how to create your own therapy. Zetta Thomelin has an honours degree in English/History, she has worked in the media and in the Third Sector, as CEO of CWAC. Zetta now works as a Hypnotherapist, she runs a private practice in Deal and London, she runs practitioner level training and CPD courses through her own training school ratified by GHSC. Zetta is the Chair of The British Association of Therapeutic Hypnotists (BAThH), she is the Editor of BAThH's "Journal", she is a Director of the UK Confederation of Hypnotherapy Organisations (UKCHO) and their Press Officer.

How can we deal with the rapidly increasing pace and complexity of life, fear of terrorism and the threatening state of world affairs, climate breakdown, the confusions of personal relationships-without succumbing to stress, depression and illness? Halliday provides a way to assimilate the shocks of life experiences, so that we might live a more balanced life. The way to achieve this is through reconnecting with the centre of our own being, our consciousness. Halliday sets out not only the nature of this consciousness, but also its relation to the world of phenomena, to the nature of being, and in particular, to mankind. He begins by examining the meaning of terms such as sentience, consciousness and awareness. They are to some degree interchangeable and refer to, `That in and by which we know what we know, and that we know.' If we ask ourselves what this statement means, we can only say that, `We know what we mean. Consciousness is its own evidence', and thus we cannot indicate what we mean by one of these consciousness-related words, `without appealing to that in us, which corresponds with their significance, that is, to that in us which knows that it knows'. Halliday sees a complex structure such as the brain, as `a vehicle for the expression of the complex processes of an [already existing] sentience'. He posits that the ultimate source and origin of our being resides in an absolute field of sentience, and states that the true nature of the self is `consciousness itself'. But, as beings with physical bodies, we are tyrannised by the limitations of our sense organs; by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, by emotional charges in the records of our experiences, so that we often behave in a reactive manner-as if we were no more than animals with no free choice. But, if we remember the nature of our true self, and our source in consciousness, we can free ourselves from this enslavement and become human, that is, capable of free choice and action.