Life of Brain

This book is about everything that goes on in your conscious experience: sensations, perceptions, feelings, thoughts, imagination, plans, expectations. It’s also about your conscious experience of self, the sense that there is a YOU behind everything, a YOU that is having all these experiences, a YOU that seems to control all those activities of the mind.

Some of the questions it explores:

- What is conscious experience?

- How did it evolve?

- Why did it evolve?

- How does it develop in the young child?

- What can we do with it?

- Why might it cause us problems?

- Why is it still a mystery?

This book is NOT about the neurological landscape and its functions studied by the neuroscientist armed with the latest fMRI technology (which incidentally measures brain activity indirectly through the flow of blood in response to different tasks). You don’t have to know brain anatomy, you don’t have to tell your hippocampus from your hypothalamus.

This book will be of interest to YOU if you have ever wondered about the nature of conscious experience and the workings of your own consciousness. It may well tell you more about YOU than any other book you have ever read.

Students of psychology, philosophy and evolution will find it of particular relevance to their areas of inquiry.

Parenting is (Not) Child's Play

Most parents would say that they love their children, passionately. They might also admit that at times they experience frustration, anger and even disappointment because of disobedience and a lack of cooperation from their children.

Parenting is (Not) Child’s Play deals with the ‘Special Play Time’ method, a revolutionary and proven tool that empowers both parents and children. During a 40-minute weekly play session, parents learn, not only clear and practical skills in setting boundaries, they also gain a deeper understanding of the emotions and worries of their children. They discover how to encourage positive behaviour, too and thus increase the self-esteem of their children.

Within a short time, parents notice positive changes in the home. While enjoying mutual fun and play, they regain their parental authority and notice an increase in the emotional and social abilities of their children.

Orit Josefi Wiseman is a non-directive play therapist with an M.A. from the University of York in the United Kingdom. She has a clinic in Israel and has rich and extensive experience with parents and children using this method. She has also established trainings for families and professionals in the field of education in order for them to improve their communication with and empower the psychological robustness of children.

During her work, Orit has met many parents who have learnt parental skills but could not implement them in real time. Her book is written for all those parents. Having a deep faith in the efficacy of the method, Orit wishes to share her knowledge and make it accessible to every household with children.

Practice Makes Improvement

Teaching is an amazing career and if done properly can change lives forever.

Everyone remembers that one teacher who inspired them and made them believe in themselves and their particular talents.

This book examines all the theories and popular approaches to teaching. It breaks down all the theory into actual approaches to be used at the classroom level.

Teacher-pupil interaction is the crucial element to a child developing in all aspects of their life.

All children are born with wings and a good teacher helps them to fly!

So You Want to Be a Paranormal Investigator?

You have seen every episode of Most Haunted, TAPS’ Ghost Hunters, Haunted Collector.

Now it is your turn. This book will guide the new investigator to begin investigating safely and give the experienced investigator another area of paranormal investigation used by the investigators of the past. Maybe you just have the interest in the paranormal; I am sure this book will not disappoint.

Teaching Research Writing to EFL Students

Aimed at EFL students, Ayed T. Alharbi's Teaching Research Writing to EFL Students can be considered an invaluable tool for students keen to prosper within the academic environment.From deciding which topic to choose, to research, collecting and collating data, to writing the final paper, every aspect of the process is covered in readily comprehensible, bite-sized chapters, perfect for students who are still building their confidence with writing in a second language.

The End of Schooling

How much the prosperity of both individuals and nations would burgeon if only more funding could be provided for education is a popular contemporary view. Class sizes made smaller, curricula more expertly designed, teachers more wide-ranging in their interests and competence. This mechanistic outlook is challenged. Education, like pure art, seeks to fathom the world's depths without ever totally reaching its bedrock. Participants need to be ready for surprise. To be left feeling mystified, wondering, overwhelmed. In a Nature never still, each generation has to face environments in novel ways. Education's incomparable brief, then, is to deal with the real demands made on humanity. Definite answers are unavailable. Invitations are to share interminable journeying. To find delight in evanescent experiences. Not to seek arrival at supposedly perfect destinations.

The Future Knowledge Compendium

Thriving in the 21^st Century

Humans have a unique capability to both understand their situation in the world and to envision and act to realise their aspirations in the emerging world. And most of us would welcome knowing how we can become ever more skilful at both understanding, and shaping the future of, our emerging world, so that we can thrive in it. The 21^st century is very different from the 20^th century. Globalisation, the greatest economic prosperity uplifting machine humanity has ever invented, and mass education, are combining to sweep humanity into an emerging interdependent global village. It is creating a global educated middle class that will number 5 billion in 2030.

In this emerging world, a world where our future prosperity will be increasingly based on metaphysical wealth, on what we know, 20^th century nation-first, competitive, win/lose, mindsets and agendas can no longer work. These now yesteryear mindsets will instead undermine our best endeavours, including making our future ever more climate and pandemic safe.

Humanity is now beginning to learn that it now has no option but to adopt planet-first, collaborative, win/win values and mindsets, if it wishes to shape our emerging global village so that it can become liveable for all: ever more prosperous, harmonious, inclusive, sustainable, healthy, and secure. Meeting these challenges successfully will require that humanity innovates for itself a new future knowledge curriculum so that it can economically thrive in a sustainable and humane manner.

Peter Ellyard has asked the question: what would be the contents of such a curriculum? In The Future Knowledge Compendium: A Curriculum for Thriving in the 21^st Century, he has sought to answer this question.

IELTS Topic Vocabulary: Essential Vocabulary for the Speaking and Writing Exams

This book is invaluable for all the students preparing for the IELTS exam. It contains essential topic-specific vocabulary for the exam, divided into 20 topics, as well as two separate sections on useful vocabulary for the writing exam, including collocations. There is also a section on idiomatic language that can be used in speaking exam. Exercises throughout the book reinforce the vocabulary so that it becomes active, enabling you to use it in the exam and boost your IELTS band score.

Knowledge, Power, Wealth and Wisdom

Knowledge involves true belief and the realization of one’s own ignorance is the precondition for its attainment.Power is similar to distilled liquor; it will intoxicate and dim the judgment of even the most scrupulous men.Wealth is frequently associated with spiritual poverty and the distribution of wealth in any society exposes its lack of justice.Wisdom is combined with the trinity of values, which are, the absolute truth, the spirit of beauty and complete goodness.The man who is neither good nor wise remains self-satisfied. He has no desire to acquire that to which he feels no need.Aristotle insisted that life is the activity of the mind. Plato insisted that life is a preparation for death.

Mundane Insurance

Manufacturing industries are a common knowledge as are the likes of the motor car, television, foodstuffs and electrical goods that exist around us every day and are forcefully advertised. Banking too but it is only true to a lesser degree regarding insurance because if canvasing the average person in the street about insurance they would think only about their life insurance, health insurance, motor cover, house and contents, pet plan insurance and so on. Put like that, it is all very wearisome and therefore hardly a subject worth writing about, or is it? That was certainly the author’s impression of insurance even up to the point of moving into the financial sector from manufacturing industry.

Pursuing the subject a step further, hazarding a guess, if those very same people were quizzed regarding the types of people they imagined are employed in insurance they would probably describe their insurance broker or simply a voice at an insurance call centre. This account therefore will, in all probability, dispel the notion that all insurance dealings are routine and in the main, predictable as did an international group of young insurance delegates at a Middle East seminar, many of whom were totally unaware that the insurance industry’s activities were so diverse.

The Promised End

The Promised End explores how the endings of Shakespeare’s tragedies work – how, in effect, they resist conventional closure. It looks back from the endings of five plays – Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear – to explore how their structures of action, imagery and the interaction of different genres – comedy, tragedy and romance – bring them to conclusions that are both inevitable and yet strangely incongruous, beyond explanation and moral understanding, almost too terrible to bear.

Foundations of Writing for University Study

This textbook explains the fundamentals of effective academic writing for university studies across multiple genres and formats. It is intended for students who are either in the early stages of their university studies, or are preparing to enter a university degree. 

One of the ways this textbook differs from other textbooks on academic writing is its focus on the organisation of the English sentence through Theme and Rheme. The Theme is what the sentence is about, while the Rheme is what is being said about the Theme. In the English clause, the Theme is at the beginning and the Rheme follows. 

At the same time as the English clause is divided into Theme and Rheme, the clause can be understood as a unit of information where New information is provided to Given information. One of the central aims of the textbook is to increase awareness of the flow of Given and New information from sentence to sentence, and for students to have greater ability in its organisation. Moreover, New information is formally organised through prosody, or rhythm and intonation patterns. This approach takes account of English rhythms, intonation and stress patterns that accompany sentences and how this relates to writing sentences.

Through the Theme/Rheme and Given/New approach, combined with an understanding of Genre, this book aims to both increase awareness of these aspects of the English sentence and explore how this aspect of English facilitates clearer and more effective writing.