Your Best Brain: The Science of Brain Improvement

Food: A Cultural Culinary History

• ORIGINAL (18 hrs and 22 mins)
• By The Great Courses
• Narrated By Professor Ken Albala

Eating is an indispensable human activity. As a result, whether we realize it or not, the drive to obtain food has been a major catalyst across all of history, from prehistoric times to the present. Epicure Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin said it best: "Gastronomy governs the whole life of man."

Your Deceptive Mind: A Scientific Guide to Critical Thinking Skills

• ORIGINAL (12 hrs and 39 mins)
• By The Great Courses
• Narrated By Professor Steven Novella

No skill is more important in today's world than being able to think about, understand, and act on information in an effective and responsible way. What's more, at no point in human history have we had access to so much information, with such relative ease, as we do in the 21st century. But because misinformation out there has increased as well, critical thinking is more important than ever. These 24 rewarding lectures equip you with the knowledge and techniques you need to become a savvier, sharper critical thinker in your professional and personal life.

The Story of Human Language

• ORIGINAL (18 hrs and 15 mins)
• By The Great Courses, John McWhorter
• Narrated By Professor John McWhorter

Language defines us as a species, placing humans head and shoulders above even the most proficient animal communicators. But it also beguiles us with its endless mysteries, allowing us to ponder why different languages emerged, why there isn't simply a single language, how languages change over time and whether that's good or bad, and how languages die out and become extinct.

Understanding the Mysteries of Human Behavior

• ORIGINAL (12 hrs and 11 mins)
• By The Great Courses
• Narrated By Professor Mark Leary

Every day of your life is spent surrounded by mysteries that involve what appear to be rather ordinary human behaviors. What makes you happy? Where did your personality come from? Why do you have trouble controlling certain behaviors? Why do you behave differently as an adult than you did as an adolescent?Since the start of recorded history, and probably even before, people have been interested in answering questions about why we behave the way we do.

No Excuses: Existentialism and the Meaning of Life

• ORIGINAL (12 hrs and 7 mins)
• By The Great Courses
• Narrated By Professor Robert C. Solomon

What is life? What is my place in it? What choices do these questions obligate me to make? More than a half-century after it burst upon the intellectual scene - with roots that extend to the mid-19th century - Existentialism's quest to answer these most fundamental questions of individual responsibility, morality, and personal freedom, life has continued to exert a profound attraction.

Thinking Like an Economist: A Guide to Rational Decision Making

• ORIGINAL (6 hrs and 10 mins)
• By The Great Courses
• Narrated By Professor Randall Bartlett

Economic forces are everywhere around you. But that doesn't mean you need to passively accept whatever outcome those forces might press upon you. Instead, with these 12 fast-moving and crystal clear lectures, you can learn how to use a small handful of basic nuts-and-bolts principles to turn those same forces to your own advantage.

The Science of Energy: Resources and Power Explained

• ORIGINAL (13 hrs and 20 mins)
• By The Great Courses
• Narrated By Professor Michael E. Wysession

To better put into perspective the various issues surrounding energy in the 21st century, you need to understand the essential science behind how energy works. And you need a reliable source whose focus is on giving you the facts you need to form your own educated opinions.

Being Human: Life Lessons from the Frontiers of Science

• ORIGINAL (5 hrs and 57 mins)
• By The Great Courses, Robert Sapolsky
• Narrated By Professor Robert Sapolsky

Understanding our humanity - the essence of who we are - is one of the deepest mysteries and biggest challenges in modern science. Why do we have bad moods? Why are we capable of having such strange dreams? How can metaphors in our language hold such sway on our actions? As we learn more about the mechanisms of human behavior through evolutionary biology, neuroscience, anthropology, and other related fields, we're discovering just how intriguing the human species is.

A Day's Read

• ORIGINAL (18 hrs and 24 mins)
• By The Great Courses
• Narrated By Professor Arnold Weinstein, Professor Emily Allen, Professor Grant L. Voth

Join three literary scholars and award-winning professors as they introduce you to dozens of short masterpieces that you can finish - and engage with - in a day or less. Perfect for people with busy lives who still want to discover-or rediscover-just how transformative an act of reading can be, these 36 lectures range from short stories of fewer than 10 pages to novellas and novels of around 200 pages. Despite their short length, these works are powerful examinations of the same subjects and themes that longer "great books" discuss.

The Great Ideas of Philosophy, 2nd Edition

• ORIGINAL (30 hrs and 10 mins)
• By The Great Courses
• Narrated By Professor Daniel N. Robinson

Grasp the important ideas that have served as the backbone of philosophy across the ages with this extraordinary 60-lecture series. This is your opportunity to explore the enormous range of philosophical perspectives and ponder the most important and enduring of human questions-without spending your life poring over dense philosophical texts.

Einstein's Relativity and the Quantum Revolution: Modern Physics for Non-Scientists, 2nd Edition

• ORIGINAL (12 hrs and 20 mins)
• By The Great Courses
• Narrated By Professor Richard Wolfson

"It doesn't take an Einstein to understand modern physics," says Professor Wolfson at the outset of these 24 lectures on what may be the most important subjects in the universe: relativity and quantum physics. Both have reputations for complexity. But the basic ideas behind them are, in fact, simple and comprehensible by anyone. These dynamic and illuminating lectures begin with a brief overview of theories of physical reality starting with Aristotle and culminating in Newtonian or "classical" physics.

Elements of Jazz: From Cakewalks to Fusion

• ORIGINAL (5 hrs and 59 mins)
• By The Great Courses
• Narrated By Professor Bill Messenger

Jazz is a uniquely American art form, one of America's great contributions to not only musical culture, but world culture, with each generation of musicians applying new levels of creativity that take the music in unexpected directions that defy definition, category, and stagnation. Now you can learn the basics and history of this intoxicating genre in an eight-lecture series that is as free-flowing and original as the art form itself.

The Foundations of Western Civilization

• ORIGINAL (24 hrs and 54 mins)
• By The Great Courses
• Narrated By Professor Thomas F. X. Noble

What is Western Civilization? According to Professor Noble, it is "much more than human and political geography," encompassing myriad forms of political and institutional structures - from monarchies to participatory republics - and its own traditions of political discourse. It involves choices about who gets to participate in any given society and the ways in which societies have resolved the tension between individual self-interest and the common good.

Writing Creative Nonfiction

• ORIGINAL (12 hrs and 16 mins)
• By The Great Courses, Tilar J J. Mazzeo
• Narrated By Professor Tilar J J. Mazzeo

Bringing together the imaginative strategies of fiction storytelling and new ways of narrating true, real-life events, creative nonfiction is the fastest-growing part of the creative writing world. It's a cutting-edge genre that's reshaping how we write (and read) everything from biographies and memoirs to blogs and public speaking scripts to personal essays and magazine articles.

The American Civil War

• ORIGINAL (24 hrs and 36 mins)
• By The Great Courses, Gary W. Gallagher
• Narrated By Professor Gary W. Gallagher

Between 1861 and 1865, the clash of the greatest armies the Western hemisphere had ever seen turned small towns, little-known streams, and obscure meadows in the American countryside into names we will always remember. In those great battles, those streams ran red with blood-and the United States was truly born.

The Theory of Evolution: A History of Controversy

• ORIGINAL (6 hrs and 10 mins)
• By The Great Courses, Edward J. Larson
• Narrated By Professor Edward J. Larson

Charles Darwin's theory of organic evolution-the idea that life on earth is the product of purely natural causes, not the hand of God-set off shock waves that continue to reverberate through Western society, and especially the United States. What makes evolution such a profoundly provocative concept, so convincing to most scientists, yet so socially and politically divisive? These 12 eye-opening lectures are an examination of the varied elements that so often make this science the object of strong sentiments and heated debate.

The Passions: Philosophy and the Intelligence of Emotions

• ORIGINAL (12 hrs and 41 mins)
• By The Great Courses
• Narrated By Professor Robert C. Solomon

Conventional wisdom suggests there is a sharp distinction between emotion and reason. Emotions are seen as inferior, disruptive, primitive, and even bestial forces. These 24 remarkable lectures suggest otherwise-that emotions have intelligence and provide personal strategies that are vitally important to our everyday lives of perceiving, evaluating, appraising, understanding, and acting in the world.

The Dead Sea Scrolls

• ORIGINAL (12 hrs and 21 mins)
• By The Great Courses
• Narrated By Professor Gary A. Rendsburg

Whether complete or only fragmentary, the 930 extant Dead Sea Scrolls irrevocably altered how we look at and understand the foundations of faith and religious practice. Now you can get a comprehensive introduction to this unique series of archaeological documents, and to scholars' evolving understanding of their authorship and significance, with these 24 lectures. Learn what the scrolls are, what they contain, and how the insights they offered into religious and ancient history came into focus.