Penguin Books Australia

'If you want to understand how we remember, and how we can all learn to remember better, then read this book'  Jonah Lehrer 

Can anyone get a perfect memory? Joshua Foer used to be like most of us, forgetting phone numbers and mislaying keys. Then he learnt the art of memory training, and a year later found himself in the finals of the US Memory Championship. He also discovered a truth we...

'A brilliant, lucid insight into the profound implications of modern biological thinking . . . With this book Matt Ridley establishes himself as one of the finest of contemporary science writers' – Bryan Appleyard

In what the General Practitioner called 'this intelligent searching work', the author of 'Stigma' and 'Asylums' presents an analysis of the structures of social encounters from the perspective of the dramatic performance. He shows us exactly how people use such 'fixed props' as houses, clothes, and job situations; how they combine in teams resembling secret societies; and how they adopt discrepant...

Psychoanalysis as a form of therapy works by attending to the patient's side effects, that is, 'what falls out of his pockets once he starts speaking'. Undergoing psychoanalytic treatment is in many ways like reading a powerful work of literature – a leap into the dark. It's impossible to know beforehand the effect it will have. All we can do, as the essays in this book suggest, is see where...

People used to download music for free, then Steve Jobs convinced them to pay. How? By charging 99 cents.  Prada and other luxury stores stock a few obscenely expensive items - just to make the rest of their inventory seem like a bargain.  Why do text messages cost money, while e-mails are free? Why do jars of peanut butter keep getting smaller in order to keep the price the 'same'? The answer...

From a pioneer in the field of mental health comes a groundbreaking book on the healing power of 'mindsight', the capacity for insight and empathy that allows you to make positive changes in your brain — and in your life.
 

All the big ideas, simply explained - an innovative and accessible guide to the study of human nature

The Psychology Book clearly explains more than 100 groundbreaking ideas in this fascinating field of science. How does the brain remember faces? What makes us choose one decision over another? Where does language come from?

' Quiet is a startling, important and readable page-turner that will make quiet people see themselves in a whole new light.'
Naomi Wolf , author of The Beauty Myth

'Once in a blue moon, a book comes along that gives us startling new insights. Quiet is that book: part page-turner, part cutting-edge science, it will change the way you see yourself, other people, and the world.'
Adam Grant, the Wharton...

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy has already helped millions of people overcome their issues and move their life forward – now it can really help you too. In this busy, demanding and often stressful modern world, it's a struggle to find time to even think about what your dreams and goals might be, let alone work towards actually realising them.

'Wise, witty and playful essays, taking in the nature of fundamentalism, excess, authenticity and much else. Radiates the rarest type of questioning intelligence' 
John Gray, Prospect

Are we too obsessed with excess?

What can childhood teach us about bad behaviour?

And should we be happy, or is there something better we might be?

In On Balance , acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips explores a...

All of us lead two parallel lives: the life we actually live and the one that we wish for and fantasise about. And this life unlived (the one that never actually happens, the one we might be living but for some reason are not) can occupy an extraordinary part of our mental life. We share our lives, in a sense, with the people we have failed to be - and this can become itself the story of our lives:...

This volume brings together Freud's main contributions to the psychology of love. His illuminating discussions of the ways in which sexuality is always psychosexuality - that there is no sexuality without fantasy, conscious or unconscious - have changed the ways we think about erotic life. In these papers Freud develops his now famous theories about the sexuality of childhood and the transgressive...

Building on the crucial insight that jokes use many of the same mechanisms he had already discovered in dreams, Freud developed one of the richest and most comprehensive theories of humour that has ever been produced.

The Psychopathology of Everyday Life ranks among his most entertaining and accessible works. Starting with the story of how he once forgot the name of an Italian painter – and how a young acquaintance mangled a quotation from Virgil through fears that his girlfriend...

As early as 1908, he produced a powerful paper on the repressive hypocrisy of 'civilized sexual morality', and its role in 'modern nervous illness'. Deepening this analysis in Civilization and Its Discontents, he argues that civilized values – and the impossible...