Books by Jay Schulkin

For this book, Jay Schulkin mined six decades of Richter's archived research data, personal documents, and interviews to flesh out an engaging portrait of a "laboratory artisanin the context of his work.

This book explores the cultures of philosophy and the law as they interact with neuroscience and biology, through the perspective of American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes' Jr., and the pragmatist tradition of John Dewey.

Sports are as varied as the people who play them. We run, jump, and swim. We kick, hit, and shoot balls. We ride sleds in the snow and surf in the sea. From the Olympians of ancient Greece to today's professional athletes, from adult pickup soccer games to children's gymnastics classes, people at all levels of ability at all times and in all places have engaged in sport. What drives this phenomenon?In Sport, the neuroscientist Jay Schulkin argues that biology and culture do more than coexist when we play sports-they blend together seamlessly, propelling each other toward greater physical and intellectual achievement. To support this claim, Schulkin discusses history, literature, and art-and engages philosophical inquiry and recent behavioral research. He connects sport's basic neural requirements, including spatial and temporal awareness, inference, memory, agency, direction, competitive spirit, and endurance, to the demands of other human activities. He affirms sport's natural role as a creative evolutionary catalyst, turning the external play of sports inward and bringing insight to the diversion that defines our species. Sport, we learn, is a fundamental part of human life.

We have known for over a thousand years that the brain underlies behavioral expression, but effective scientific study of the brain is only very recent. Two things converge in this book: a great respect for neuroscience and its many variations, and a sense of investigation and inquiry demythologized. Think of it as foraging for coherence.

As scientific literature abounds with studies of decision-making and effort, this book emphasizes the importance of demythologizing our understanding of cognitive systems in order to link motivation, behavioral inhibition, self-regulation, and will. It is for researchers and students in neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and clinical psychology.

As a working neuroscientist, Jay Schulkin's ambitious exploration offers reflections on the pragmatic tradition from a fresh perspective, to present not only a scientist's take on the pragmatic tradition, but also a pragmatist's take on the evolution of human problem solving.