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How we can use what we've learned about the brain to improve our mental healthThere are many routes to mental well-being. In this groundbreaking book, neuroscientist Camilla Nord offers a fascinating tour of the scientific developments that are revolutionising the way we think about mental health, showing why and how events—and treatments—can affect people in such different ways.In The Balanced Brain, Nord explains how our brain constructs our sense of mental health—actively striving to maintain balance in response to our changing circumstances. While a mentally healthy brain deals well with life's turbulence, poor mental health results when the brain struggles with disruption. But just what is the brain trying to balance? Nord describes the foundations of mental health in the brain—from the neurobiology of pleasure, pain and desire to the role of mood-mediating chemicals like dopamine, serotonin and opioids. She then pivots to interventions, revealing how antidepressants, placebos and even recreational drugs work; how psychotherapy changes brain chemistry; and how the brain and body interact to make us feel physically (as well as mentally) healthy. Along the way, Nord explains how the seemingly small things we use to lift our moods—a piece of chocolate, a walk, a chat with a friend—work on the same pathways in our brains as the latest treatments for mental health disorders.Understanding the cause of poor mental health is one of the crucial questions of our time. But the answer is unique to each of us, and it requires finding what helps our brains rebalance and thrive. With so many factors at play, there are more possibilities for recovery and resilience than we might think.

This book reframes the Lacanian object a voice as a horrific register of alterity. The object gaze has received, as it does in Jacques Lacan's work, more commentary than voice. Yet recently voice has garnered interest from multiple disciplines. The book intervenes in the Slovenian school's commentary of the ‘object voice'in terms of two questions: audition and corporeality. This intervention synthesizes psychoanalysis with recent theorizing of the horror of philosophy. In this intervention the object a voice is argued to resonate in lacunae – epistemological voids that evoke horror in the subject. Biological and evolutionary perspectives on voice, genre horror film and literature, music videos, close readings of Freudian and Lacanian case studies and textual analysis of ancient philosophy texts all contribute to an elucidation of the horrors of the object a voice: Vox-Exo.

Most of us the world over do not know much about the nuclear experience, let alone the 70,000 Korean victims of the atomic bomb or their arts of life and survival. Quietude: A Musical Anthropology of'Korea's Hiroshima'gives new insight into the overlooked and abused people who have lived and died on the margins of East Asian modernity. This book is an ethnography of Korean first- and second-generation victims of the atomic bombing of Japan focused on the everyday arts that make life possible and worthwhile. Author Joshua D. Pilzer recounts the stories and songs of atomic bomb survivors and their children in Hapcheon, Korea, offering a corrective to the enduring, multifaceted neglect and marginalization they have faced. Struck by the quiet of'Korea's Hiroshima,'Pilzer sheds light on its many sources: notions of Japanese soft-spokenness, vocal disability, the quiet contemplation of texts, the changes to the human heart as one grows older, the experience of war, social marginalization, traumatic experience, and various social movement discourses. He considers victims'uses of voice, speech, song, and movement in the struggle for national and global recognition, in the ongoing work of negotiating the traumatic past, and in the effort to consolidate and maintain selves and relationships in the present.

Drawing together contributions by scholars from a variety of fields, including theater, film and television, sociology, and visual culture, this volume explores the range and diversity of comedic performance and comic forms in the modern age. It covers a range of forms and examples from 1920 to the present day, including plays, film, television comedy, live comedy, and comedy on social media. It argues that the period covered was marked by an explosion of comic forms and a flowering of comic creativity across a range of media. From the communal watching of silent films at the start of the period, to the use of Twitter and other online platforms to share and comment on comedy, technology has brought about significant changes in its form, consumption, and social effects. As comic forms have shifted and developed, so too have attitudes to what comedy can and cannot do. This study considers its role in entertainment and in provoking consideration of a range of social and political topics. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: form, theory, praxis, identities, the body, politics and power, laughter, and ethics. These eight different approaches to comedy add up to an extensive, synoptic coverage of the subject.

Drawing together contributions by scholars from a variety of fields, including theater, film and television, sociology, and visual culture, this volume explores the range and diversity of comedic performance and comic forms in the modern age. It covers a range of forms and examples from 1920 to the present day, including plays, film, television comedy, live comedy, and comedy on social media. It argues that the period covered was marked by an explosion of comic forms and a flowering of comic creativity across a range of media. From the communal watching of silent films at the start of the period, to the use of Twitter and other online platforms to share and comment on comedy, technology has brought about significant changes in its form, consumption, and social effects. As comic forms have shifted and developed, so too have attitudes to what comedy can and cannot do. This study considers its role in entertainment and in provoking consideration of a range of social and political topics. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: form, theory, praxis, identities, the body, politics and power, laughter, and ethics. These eight different approaches to comedy add up to an extensive, synoptic coverage of the subject.

The book provides an investigation grounded in creative writing and practice-as-research methodology and explores the issues of authorship and collaborative labour in contemporary performance. This investigation is set in the context of a world more and more characterized by fragmentation, displacement and virtual communication and relationships. It addresses and playfully engages with the following questions: what is a collaborative body? Can a sole performer carry out a collaborative practice? Can we stand in for others? What forms of “coming-together” might take place when distance remains between those who perform and those who spectate? The book contains the full-length version of the score from A Duet Without You, an original performance piece created between 2013 and 2015 by Chloé Déchery in collaboration with a range of artistic collaborators working inter- and cross-disciplinary, including Karen Christopher, Pedro Iñes, Simone Kenyon, Marty Langthorne, Tom Parkinson, Michael Pinchbeck and Deborah Pearson. Alongside the playtext, the book entails a collection of essays written by independent writers, artists and academics and dedicated to the politics of collaboration, ranging from performative responses and co-authored articles to in-depth theoretical essays. Primary readership will be those teaching, researching or studying in theatre and performance studies, visual arts, fine arts, art history, creative writing, poetry, philosophy or French literature. Will also be of interest to art school students and those with an interest in theatre.

Dieses Narr Studienbuch ist die erste Zusammenfassung eines hochaktuellen und immer wieder diskutierten Themas in der Fremdsprachendidaktik und -forschung. Es hebt die Bedeutung von Musik im Fremdsprachenunterricht umfassend und illustrativ sowie praxisnah hervor und gibt einen konzisen Überblick über die vielfältigen Einsatzmöglichkeiten von Musik und musikalischen Elementen im Kontext des Lernens und Lehrens von Fremdsprachen. Damit stellt es nach ähnlichen Konzeptbänden zum Einsatz von Filmen und zu unterschiedlichen Formen der literacy eine wichtiges Novum sowie eine Ergänzung dar. Neben einem kompakten Überblick zu theoretischen Dimensionen, Modellen und Konzepten zur Thematik beantworten die Genrekapitel praxisorientierte Fragen zum didaktisch-methodischen Einsatz von beispielsweise Liedern, Musikvideoclips oder Instrumentalmusik und zeigen multiperspektivisch verschiedene literatur-, kultur- und mediendidaktische sowie interkulturelle und kompetenzorientierte Zugänge zu Musik im FU auf. Jedes Kapitel zeigt modellartig praxisrelevante Beispiele auf. Alle Ausführungen wie auch die unterrichtspraktischen Beispiele beinhalten einen Querschnitt verschiedener moderner Fremdsprachen (Englisch, Französisch, Spanisch, Italienisch, Portugiesisch, Russisch sowie Deutsch als Fremdsprache), so dass sich Fremdsprachenstudierende, Fremdsprachen- wie MusiklehrerInnen in Ausbildung und Beruf sowie Musik- und Spracheninteressierte angesprochen fühlen.