Arcadia Public Library

"One of the most valuable skills in our economy is becoming increasingly rare. If you master this skill, you'll achieve extraordinary results. Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It's a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship....

One of the most gifted thinkers of our time, Noam Chomsky has revolutionized our understanding of language, its use and its acquisition. Now, Language and mind brings Chomsky into your classroom, where he takes your students on a guided tour through his epoch-making ideas. The theories of Noam Chomsky propose that the human brain is endowed with an innate "language faculty" and that part of this biological endowment is a set of principles common to...

"A renowned neurologist explains why our routine forgetting-of names, dates, even house keys-is not a brain failure but actually, when combined with memory, one of the mind's most beneficial functions. Who wouldn't want a better memory? Dr. Scott Small has dedicated his career to understanding why memory forsakes us. As director of the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at Columbia University, he focuses largely on patients who experience pathological...

Have you ever . . .

Invested time in something that, in hindsight, just wasn't worth it?

Paid too much in an eBay auction?

Continued to do something you knew was bad for you?

Sold stocks too late, or too early?

Taken credit for success, but blamed failure on external circumstances?

Backed the wrong horse?

These are examples of what the author calls cognitive biases, simple errors all of us make

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While her friends are spending their summers having pool parties and sleepovers, twelve-year-old Carolina Carol is spending hers in the middle of the New Mexico desert, helping her parents move the grandfather she's never met into a home for people with dementia. At first, Carol avoids prickly Grandpa Serge. But as the summer wears on and the heat bears down, Carol finds herself drawn to him, fascinated by the crazy stories he tells her about a healing...

Includes stories of people who are able to navigate the world and communicate with others despite losing what many of us consider indispensable senses and faculties: the power of speech, the capacity to recognize faces, the sense of three-dimensional space, the ability to read, and the sense of sight. This book is a testament to the complexity of vision and the brain and to the power of creativity and adaptation, and it provides a whole new perspective...

A professor of psychology examines the divergent ways in which eastern and western cultures view the world, offering suggestions about how today's interdependent global cultures may be bridged.

Bargh takes us on an entertaining and enlightening tour of the forces that affect everyday behavior while transforming our understanding of ourselves. He takes readers into his labs at New York University and Yale and reveals what science now knows about the pervasive influence of the unconscious mind. From who we vote for, what we buy, to how we perform on tests and in job interviews, hidden mental processes secretly govern every aspect of our behavior....