Biopsychology & Your Mind - The Mental Mechanics of Your Thoughts, Feelings, Emotions and Their Disorders

Biopsychology & Your Mind explains the way your mind works - and why it sometimes doesn't. The key is your mental mechanics: molecular, neural, and biological mechanisms.

This book explores the unexpected properties of thoughts, feelings, emotions, and actions, examining phenomena such as blindsight, associative learning, intact memory in amnesia, and dreaming during sleep. Using evolutionary biopsychology as a framework, it addresses fundamental questions: What constitutes an emotion? How do thoughts and emotions interact? The text reveals how evolution has shaped our mental mechanics to seek adaptive balances, often switching between extremes depending on current circumstances. Mental disorders are presented as otherwise adaptive reactions that are occurring either in unusually extreme situations or within systems that are unusually reactive. The book demonstrates how evolutionary pressures have created mental systems that rapidly change between states, seeking optimal responses rather than fixed solutions.

This book is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand mental machinery and psychological disorders. Detailed notes, references, and technical sections also make it an ideal companion for all students of biopsychology.

List of contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS, PREFACE, PATHS THROUGH THIS BOOK. 1: The Multi-Hued Mind. 2: The Mind Machine, 3: The Mental Processing Unit. 4: Building the Machine. 5: What is an Emotion? 6: How Do We Learn? 7: How Do We Remember? 8: Why Do We Sleep? 9: The Big Picture
10: Mental Disorder and Stress. 11: Epilogue. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

About the author

Neil McNaughton is an Emeritus Professor and Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in the Department of Psychology (Te Tari Whakam¿tau Hinekaro) at the University of Otago (¿t¿kou Whakaihu Waka) in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Product details

• Authors: McNaughton Neil
• Publisher: Taylor and Francis
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 10.03.2026
• EAN: 9781032735986
• ISBN: 978-1-032-73598-6
• No. of pages: 246
• Illustrations: schwarz-weiss Illustrationen, Raster,schwarz-weiss, Zeichnungen, schwarz-weiss, Tabellen, schwarz-weiss
• Subjects: Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Medicine > Clinical medicine; Non-fiction book > Psychology, esoterics, spirituality, anthroposophy > Applied psychology; PSYCHOLOGY / Emotions, PSYCHOLOGY / Cognitive Psychology & Cognition, Physiological & neuro-psychology, biopsychology, Psychology: emotions, Cognition & cognitive psychology, Neurosciences, Cognition and cognitive psychology, Physiological psychology, neuropsychology, biopsychology