The Brain That Changes Itself von Doidge, Norman

FOYLES NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR
A SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER
THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING - HIGHLY COMMENDED
LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE SUNDAY TIMES, TELEGRAPH, PROSPECT, THE NEW YORKER AND BBC HISTORY
WATERSTONES NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE MONTH


'The best book on the history of life on Earth I have ever read' Tom Holland

'Epically cinematic... A book of almost unimaginable riches' Sunday Times

This is the past as we've never seen it before. Otherlands is an epic, exhilarating journey into deep time, showing us the Earth as it used to exist, and the worlds that were here before ours.

Award-winning young palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday immerses us in a series of ancient landscapes, from the mammoth steppe in Ice Age Alaska to the lush rainforests of Eocene Antarctica, with its colonies of giant penguins, to Ediacaran Australia, where the moon is far brighter than ours today. We visit the birthplace of humanity; we hear the crashing of the highest waterfall the Earth has ever known; and we watch as life emerges again after the asteroid hits, and the age of the mammal dawns.

Otherlands is a staggering imaginative feat: an emotional narrative that underscores the tenacity of life - yet also the fragility of seemingly permanent ecosystems, including our own. To read it is to see the last 500 million years not as an endless expanse of unfathomable time, but as a series of worlds, simultaneously fabulous and familiar.

In den 1950er- und 1960er-Jahren erforschten Wissenschaftler die Wirkweise psychedelischer Substanzen. Psychiater betrachteten sie gar als Wundermittel zur Behandlung psychischer Erkrankungen. Bald lösten Stoffe wie LSD und Psilocybin jedoch moralische Panik aus. Psychedelika wurden verboten, die Forschung eingestellt. Seit zehn Jahren wird allerdings wieder geforscht. Michael Pollan greift die aktuellen Erkenntnisse auf und zeigt, wie Erkrankungen wie Depressionen, Angstneurosen und Sucht alternativ behandelt werden könnten. Durch Selbstversuche erkundet er zudem die spirituelle Dimension veränderter Bewusstseinszustände. Damit liefert Pollan ein umfassendes Bild der Psychedelika-Forschung.