Daniel Nettle

Why are some people worriers, and others wanderers? Why do some people seem good at empathising, and others at controlling? We have something deep and consistent within us that determines the choices we make and the situations we bring about. But why should members of the same species differ so markedly in their natures? What is the best personality to have; a bold one or a shy one, an aggressive one or a meek one? And are you stuck with your personality, or can you change it?Daniel Nettle takes the reader on a tour through the science of human personality, introducing the five 'dimensions' on which every personality is based, and using an unusual combination of individual life stories and scientific research. Showing how our personalities stem from our biological makeup, Nettle looks at the latest findings from genetics and brain science, considers the evolutionary origins and consequences of personality variation, and even includes a questionnaire for you toassess your own personality against the five dimensions.There is no optimal personality to have. Rather, every disposition brings both advantages and disadvantages. Life is partly the business of finding a niche where your personal characteristics work for you. Full of human as well as scientific insight, this book will enable you to understand the perils and potentials of your personality to the full.

What makes you the way you are

Personality:What makes you the way you are

What exactly is happiness? Can we measure it? Using the results of psychological studies, this title explores the origins and purpose of our pursuit of happiness. It views that while it may be unrealistic to expect lasting happiness, our evolved tendency to seek happiness drives us to achieve much that is worthwhile in itself.

The Science Behind Your Smile

Happiness

Suzanne Romaine

Nettle and Romaine paint a breathtaking landscape that shows why so many of the world's languages are disappearing-and more importantly, why it matters. - BOOK JACKET.

The Extinction of the World's Languages

Vanishing Voices

"Evolution and Genetics for Psychology explains how to think in evolutionary terms, and shows how to apply this thinking to any subject. With the principles in place, it goes on to show how they are applied to issues of human behaviour, from sex to social relationships, to learning." --Book Jacket.

Evolution and Genetics for Psychology

Personality + Happiness

Nettle Bundle

Happiness / the Science Behind Your Smile and Personality: What Makes You the Way You Are

The Daniel Nettle Psychology Set

Colin Renfrew

This volume will be of interest to historical linguists concerned to examine the claims made for macrofamilies in general and the Nostratic family in particular, as well as to prehistoric archaeologists and molecular geneticists seeking deeper insights into issues underlying the consideration of the prehistory of languages.

Examining a Linguistic Macrofamily

Nostratic

الجنون هو السر المركزي في النفس البشرية. لقد تطورت عقولنا لتعطينا فهمًا صادقًا للواقع ، للسماح لنا بالاندماج في مجتمعاتنا ، ولمساعدتنا في تكييف سلوكنا مع بيئتنا. ومع ذلك ، في حالة المرض العقلي الخطير ، فإن العقل يقوم بالضبط عكس هذه الأشياء. يبني المتألم قصوراً من الوهم الخيالي ، ويفشل في التكيف ، ويصبح غريباً بين شعبه. ومع ذلك ، فإن المرض العقلي ليس ظاهرة هامشية: فهو موجود في جميع المجتمعات وكل العصور التاريخية ، والجينات التي تكمن وراءه شائعة جدا. وعلاوة على ذلك ، يتم العثور على الصفات التي تحدد الرجل المجنون في شكل موهن في التفكير والشعور العادي. إذاً ، فإن استمرار الجنون هو لغز رهيب من وجهة نظر تطورية وجهة نظر إنسانية. في حلم ليلة منتصف الصيف ، اقترح شكسبير وجود صلة بين الجنون والإبداع الفني: "المجنون ، الحبيب ، والشاعر" ، كتب: "هل من خيال مدمج". وقد أظهرت الدراسات الحديثة أن هناك بالفعل اتصال. ترتفع معدلات الأمراض العقلية بشكل كبير في عائلات الشعراء والكتاب والفنانين ، مما يوحي بأن نفس الجينات ، ونفس المزاج ، والقدرات الإبداعية نفسها تعمل في الجنون والقدرة الإبداعية. وبالتالي فإن سبب استمرار الجنون هو أن السمات التي تكمن وراءه لها فوائد نفسية بالإضافة إلى التكاليف النفسية. في الخيال القوي ، يستكشف دانيال نيتل طبيعة المرض العقلي ، والآليات البيولوجية التي تكمن وراءه ، وصلته بالعبقرية الخلاقة. يذهب إلى النظر في مكان كل من الجنون والخيال الإبداعي في تطور نوعنا. العبيكان 2003

Strong Imagination: Madness, Creativity and Human Nature

الخيال القوي: الجنون الإبداع والطبيعة البشرية

Few people know that nearly one hundred native languages once spoken in what is now California are near extinction, or that most of Australia's 250 aboriginal languages have vanished. In fact, at least half of the world's languages may die out in the next century. Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine assert that this trend is far more than simply disturbing. Making explicit the link between language survival and environmental issues, they argue that the extinction of languages is part of the larger picture of near-total collapse of the worldwide ecosystem. Indeed, the authors contend that the struggle to preserve precious environmental resources-such as the rainforest-cannot be separated from the struggle to maintain diverse cultures, and that the causes of language death, like that of ecological destruction, lie at the intersection of ecology and politics. In addition to defending the world's endangered languages, the authors also pay homage to the last speakers of dying tongues, such as Red Thundercloud, a Native American in South Carolina; Ned Mandrell, with whom the Manx language passed away in 1974; and Arthur Bennett, an Australian who was the last person to know more than a few words of Mbabaram. In our languages lies the accumulated knowledge of humanity. Indeed, each language is a unique window on experience. Vanishing Voices is a call to preserve this resource, before it is too late.

Lecturer in Biological Psychology Daniel Nettle, Ph.D.

There are some 6,500 different languages in the world, belonging to around 250 distinct families and conforming to numerous grammatical types. This book explains why. Given that the biological mechanisms underlying language are the same in all normal human beings, would we not be a moresuccessful species if we spoke one language? Daniel Nettle considers how this extraordinary and rich diversity arose, how it relates to the nature of language, cognition, and culture, and how it is linked with the main patterns of human geography and history. Human languages and language families are not distributed evenly: there are relatively few in Eurasia compared to the profusion found in Australasia, the Pacific, and the Americas. There is also a marked correlation between biodiversity and linguistic diversity. The author explains the processesby which this distribution evolved and changes still. To do so he returns to the earliest origins of language, reconstructing the processes of linguistic variation and diffusion that occurred when humans first filled the continents and, thousands of years later, turned to agriculture. He ends byexamining the causes of linguistic mortality, and why the number of the world's languages may halve before 2100. Linguistic Diversity draws on work in anthropology, linguistics, geography, archaeology, and evolutionary science to provide a comprehensive account of the patterns of linguistic diversity. It is written in a clear, lively and accessible style, and will appeal broadly across the natural and humansciences, as well as to the informed general reader.

Linguistic Diversity

Los seres humanos, sea cual sea su cultura, el lugar o la época que les haya tocado vivir, han buscado la felicidad, se han planteado cuál es su naturaleza y, la mayoría de ellos han deseado alcanzarla. Pero, ¿qué es realmente la felicidad? ¿podemos medirla? ¿por qué algunas personas son felices y otras no? ¿cuál es ese fuerte instinto que nos lleva a perseguirla? Si la felicidad es algo tan importante ¿por qué la evolución humana no ha desarrollado en nosotros los mecanismos adecuados para ser más felices? Daniel Nettle usa, en este libro, los resultados de los últimos estudios psicológicos para tratar de explicar qué es la felicidad, qué hace a la gente feliz o desdichada y para examinar nuestro impulso, antiguo como el mismo ser humano, para conseguirla. En ello tiene que ver nuestro sistema cerebral o pueden tenerlo las drogas que alteran nuestra percepción de la realidad, sin olvidar que, especialmente en una sociedad como la actual, la felicidad se nos vende casi como una mercancía más. Nettle nos enseña en este libro cómo nuestra propia tendencia evolutiva para buscar la felicidad nos ayuda a conseguirla, al menos en parte, y en ello tiene mucho que ver nuestra propia actitud hacia la vida.

La ciencia tras la sonrisa

Felicidad

I love this book. I love the essays and I love the overall form. Reading these essays feels like entering into the best kind of intellectual conversation—it makes me want to write essays in reply. It makes me want to get everyone else reading it. I almost never feel this enthusiastic about a book. —Rebecca Saxe, Professor of Cognitive Science at MIT What does it mean to be a scientist working today; specifically, a scientist whose subject matter is human life? Scientists often overstate their claim to certainty, sorting the world into categorical distinctions that obstruct rather than clarify its complexities. In this book Daniel Nettle urges the reader to unpick such distinctions—biological versus social sciences, mind versus body, and nature versus nurture—and look instead for the for puzzles and anomalies, the points of connection and overlap. These essays, converted from often humorous, sometimes autobiographical blog posts, form an extended meditation on the possibilities and frustrations of the life scientific. Pragmatically arguing from the intersection between social and biological sciences, Nettle reappraises the virtues of policy initiatives such as Universal Basic Income and income redistribution, highlighting the traps researchers and politicians are liable to encounter. This provocative, intelligent and self-critical volume is a testament to the possibilities of interdisciplinary study—whose virtues Nettle stridently defends—drawing from and having implications for a wide cross-section of academic inquiry. This will appeal to anybody curious about the implications of social and biological sciences for increasingly topical political concerns. It comes particularly recommended to Sciences and Social Sciences students and to scholars seeking to extend the scope of their field in collaboration with other disciplines.

Essays on Science, Society and the Academic Life

Hanging on to the Edges

Nettle’s book presents the results of five years of comparative ethnographic fieldwork in two different neighbourhoods of the same British city, Newcastle upon Tyne. The neighbourhoods are only a few kilometres apart, yet whilst one is relatively affluent, the other is amongst the most economically deprived in the UK. Tyneside Neighbourhoods uses multiple research methods to explore social relationships and social behaviour, attempting to understand whether the experience of deprivation fosters social solidarity, or undermines it. The book is distinctive in its development of novel quantitative methods for ethnography: systematic social observation, economic games, household surveys, crime statistics, and field experiments. Nettle analyses these findings in the context of the cultural, psychological and economic consequences of economic deprivation, and of the ethical difficulties of representing a deprived community. In so doing the book sheds light on one of the main issues of our time: the roles of culture and of socioeconomic factors in determining patterns of human social behaviour. Tyneside Neighbourhoods is a must read for scholars, students, individual readers, charities and government departments seeking insight into the social consequences of deprivation and inequality in the West.

Daniel Nettle

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