New and forthcoming publications

A flat p&p charge of £1.00 will be added to the cost of each monograph purchased online.

• Brain Development During Adolescence and Beyond
• Collective Behaviour and the Physics of Society
• Counter-Intuition
• Music, Pleasure and the Brain
• Fields of the Mind

Monograph Series No. 51

Brain Development During Adolescence and Beyond

Dr. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore

ISSN 0306 1906, ISBN 978-0-904674-43-9
Published 2007 A5, 20 pages

Price £5.00

Until relatively recently, it was widely believed that the brain ceases to develop after childhood. However, recent research has demonstrated that the human brain continues to develop during adolescence and beyond. Dr. Blakemore describes the developmental processes that occur in certain parts of the brain during adolescence, and the implications of this development for teenagers. She also describes recent studies showing that the human brain may retain its 'plasticity' throughout adult life.

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore is a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellow at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. She is currently engaged in research investigating development of the brain during adolescence, and social cognition in autism. She frequently gives public lectures, was scientific consultant on a BBC series on the Human Mind in 2003, worked with the Select Committee for Education in 2000, and has co-authored a book called The Learning Brain (Blackwell, Oxford, UK; April 2005). She was recently awarded the British Psychological Society Spearman Medal 2006 for published psychological research of outstanding merit.

Monograph Series No. 52

Collective Behaviour and the Physics of Society

Philip Ball

ISSN 0306 1906, ISBN 978-0-904674-44-6
Published 2007 A5, 32 pages

Price £5.00

In this monograph, Philip Ball suggests that certain kinds of social behaviour are collective phenomena that do not follow in any trivial or easily anticipated way from individual behaviour. They may best be analysed by importing some of the tools and techniques that have been developed in the physical sciences for describing systems composed of many interacting entities. Understanding such forms of collective behaviour may in the future be vital to the creation and maintenance of a stable, just and equitable society.

Philip Ball is a freelance science writer and a consultant editor for Nature. He can often be heard on radio and television, and is the author of several scientific books for the lay reader, including H2O: A Biography of Water, Bright Earth (shortlisted for a National Book Critics Circle Award), and Critical Mass (winner of the 2005 Aventis Prize). Philip graduated in chemistry from the University of Oxford, and holds a PhD in physics from the University of Bristol.

Monograph Series No. 53

Counter-Intuition

Dr. Kevin Byron

ISSN 0306 1906, ISBN 978-0-904674-45-3
Published 2008 A5, 26 pages

Price £5.00

Dr. Kevin Byron received his doctorate in applied physics from the University of Hull and after graduation spent some 25 years in research in the telecommunication industry. In 2001 he was awarded a research fellowship with The National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) in the UK for studies on creativity in education. Kevin is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and a Visiting Senior Fellow to the Physical Sciences branch of the Higher Education Academy at the University of Hull.

Monograph Series No. 54

Music, Pleasure and the Brain

Dr. Harry Witchel

ISSN 0306 1906, ISBN 978-0-904674-46-0
Published 2008 A5, 19 pages

Price £5.00

Dr. Harry Witchel received his PhD in Physiology from the University of California at Berkeley. He continued his wide-ranging research at the Medical School in Bristol (UK). This included work on the effects of emotionally arousing stimuli (e.g.music) on autonomic activity. In 2003 he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Florence, Italy, and in 2004 he received the national honour of being chosen for The Charles Darwin Award Lecture by the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He is a popular lecturer at science festivals throughout the UK, and has participated in many public programmes for The Royal Society, The Royal Institution, BBC Television, Midweek with Libby Purves on Radio 4, Café Scientifique, the Dana Centre for the Brain, and the University of Bristol. He is at present with the Brighton and Sussex Medical School, University of Sussex.

Monograph Series No. 55

Fields of the Mind

Dr. Rupert Sheldrake

ISSN 0306 1906 ISBN 978-0-904674-47-7
Published 2009 A5, 20 pages

Price £5.00

Dr Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and author of more than 75 technical papers and several books, the most recent being The Sense of Being Stared at, and Other Aspects of the Extended Mind. He studied natural sciences at Cambridge University and philosophy at Harvard, where he was a Frank Knox Fellow. He took a PhD in biochemistry at Cambridge and was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, where he was Director of Studies in biochemistry and cell biology. As a Research Fellow of the Royal Society, he carried out research at Cambridge in developmental biology. He is currently a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California, and Director of the Perrott-Warrick Research Project funded by Trinity College, Cambridge. He lives in London.

Autumn 2009 Lecture Series
more info >>