Animal Cognition

De Waal reviews the rise and fall of the mechanistic view of animals and opens our minds to the idea that animal minds are far more intricate and complex than we have assumed. De Waal's landmark work will convince you to rethink everything you thought you knew about animal - and human - intelligence.

No matter your goals, Atomic Habits offers a proven framework for improving - every day. James Clear, one of the world's leading experts on habit formation, reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviors that lead to remarkable results. If you're having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn't you. The problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don't want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change.

Most of us are aware of the hive mind—the power of bees as an amazing collective. But do we know how uniquely intelligent bees are as individuals? In The Mind of a Bee, Lars Chittka draws from decades of research, including his own pioneering work, to argue that bees have remarkable cognitive abilities. He shows that they are profoundly smart, have distinct personalities, can recognize flowers and human faces, exhibit basic emotions, count, use simple tools, solve problems, and learn by observing others. They may even possess consciousness.

Noted science writer Virginia Morell explores the frontiers of research on animal cognition and emotion, offering a surprising and moving exploration into the hearts and minds of wild and domesticated animals.

In The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity—and will Determine the Fate of the Human Race, George Washington University professor and psychiatrist Daniel Z. Lieberman, MD, and Georgetown University lecturer Michael E. Long present a potentially life-changing proposal: Much of human life has an unconsidered component that explains an array of behaviors previously thought to be unrelated, including why winners cheat, why geniuses often suffer with mental illness, why nearly all diets fail, and more.

I drop walnuts on roads to crack them open. Wheels are tools when you are too small; timing is a muscle; memory smells like your hand. If I could speak, I would not recite facts. I would hand you a broken shell and watch whether you understood why. This book is that hand—close, blunt, and exact. It follows the small acts that add up to a mind: the walnut, the wait, the face remembered across seasons, the dusk meeting where a thousand silent signals sort friend from threat. Read me if you want a map of cognition that never learned words. You will find tool-use stripped of wonder and recast...

How did human minds become so different from those of other animals? What accounts for our capacity to understand the way the physical world works, to think ourselves into the minds of others, to gossip, read, tell stories about the past, and imagine the future? These questions are not new: they have been debated by philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, evolutionists, and neurobiologists over the course of centuries. One explanation widely accepted today is that humans have special cognitive instincts.

"If a lion could talk, we could not understand him." That warning holds double for me. I live in twilight and vibration, not your sentences: body pressed into grass, ears narrowing to a mouse's heartbeat, whiskers reading the gap before my paws. I am not a metaphor. I am a predator with a grammar of light, air, and scent—practical, urgent, and all of it felt. If a cat could teach you anything, it wouldn't teach kindness. It would teach attention. This book moves through the instruments of that attention—twilight sight, ears of silk, whiskers as touch-lidar, layered scent-maps, purrs and...

"If a lion could talk, we could not understand him." So listen instead to what does speak: the ant under your shoe, writing life in scent. I lay a trail that reads like a sentence, press my antennae to a sister for grammar, taste sugar and grit as punctuation. I do not speak; I broadcast maps, alarms, and care with chemicals and touch. In plain, unsentimental scenes I narrate how a single path becomes a mind — how food, brood, and danger are solved by bodies obeying small rules until they look like decisions. This is natural history pried open at the seam where science meets sensation. ...

Get ready for the exploration of a lifetime. Inventory of the Universe whisks you from the original elementary particles in the confines of 14 billion years of outer space through Earth's protective atmosphere, zips down to our lush livable home-base globe, plunges into the absorbing aqueous kingdom of water, darts onto hospitable terra firma with its exotic flora, oftentimes bizarre fauna and you and me, probably the most extraordinary and enigmatic beings on earth with our handy multi-functional bodies, intelligent, thinking (sometimes) brains and imaginative (sometimes a little too much)...