Their meeting captured headlines; the waiting list for tickets was nearly 2000 names long. If you were unable to attend, this book will take you there. Including both the papers given at the conference, and the animated discussion and debate that followed, The Dalai Lama at MIT reveals scientists and monks reaching across a cultural divide, to share insights, studies, and enduring questions.

Is there any substance to monks’ claims that meditation can provide astonishing memories for words and images? Is there any neuroscientific evidence that meditation will help you pay attention, think better, control and even eliminate negative emotions? Are Buddhists right to make compassion a fundamental human emotion, and Western scientists wrong to have neglected it?

The Dalai Lama at MIT shows scientists finding startling support for some Buddhist claims, Buddhists eager to participate in neuroscientific experiments, as well as misunderstandings and laughter. Those in white coats and those in orange robes agree that joining forces could bring new light to the study of human minds.

Winner of the Association of American Publishers PROSE Award for Excellence in Biological and Life Sciences

A world-renowned researcher of animal behavior reveals the extraordinary orienteering skills of desert ants, offering a thrilling account of the sophisticated ways insects function in their natural environments.

Cataglyphis desert ants are agile ultrarunners who can tolerate near-lethal temperatures when they forage in the hot midday sun. But it is their remarkable navigational abilities that make these ants so fascinating to study. Whether in the Sahara or its ecological equivalents in the Namib Desert and Australian Outback, the Cataglyphis navigators can set out foraging across vast expanses of desert terrain in search of prey, and then find the shortest way home. For almost half a century, Rüdiger Wehner and his collaborators have devised elegant experiments to unmask how they do it.

Through a lively and lucid narrative, Desert Navigator offers a firsthand look at the extraordinary navigational skills of these charismatic desert dwellers and the experiments that revealed how they strategize and solve complex problems. Wehner and his team discovered that these insect navigators use visual cues in the sky that humans are unable to see, the Earth’s magnetic field, wind direction, a step counter, and panoramic “snapshots” of landmarks, among other resources. The ants combine all of this information to steer an optimal course. At any given time during their long journey, they know exactly where to go. It is no wonder these nimble and versatile creatures have become models in the study of animal navigation.

Desert Navigator brings to light the marvelous capacity and complexity found in these remarkable insects and shows us how mini brains can solve mega tasks.

Dyslexia and Development presents the latest findings of neurobiological research, which suggest a link between seemingly minor brain abnormalities and epilepsy, learning disorders, and autism. The authors focus on the plasticity of the developing nervous system and the possible role of subtle early brain injury in the emergence of these disorders, particularly dyslexia.

The distinguished contributors to this volume examine epidemiological and clinical issues that may make the developing brain more vulnerable to environmental and genetic influences, which can in turn lead to abnormal brain plasticity and behavior. Although major forms of brain malformation have been clearly associated with functional deficits, mild forms have historically been ignored or trivialized; this book supports the hypothesis that several types of such malformation reflect brain injury during critical stages of development, and also the premise that more and more disturbances of thought and behavior stem from abnormalities of brain organization.

Neurologists and neurobiologists, psychologists, psycholinguists, psychiatrists, and special educators will find here a guide to more enlightened understanding and more effective treatment of dyslexia. In fact, the book emphasizes the positive aspect of the neurobiological deviation that dyslexic brains seem to show, along with the observation that people with such brains are often quite creative and extraordinary, rather than handicapped. In turn, the revised consideration of dyslexia should lead to more serious attention to other disturbances of childhood behavior as problems in developmental neurology, as well as to a deeper analysis of possible neurological bases for individual differences in normal behavior and personality.