Tubemonkey will do his usual, fine job of posting today's daily deals. I'd like to make a plug for one of the audiobooks (actually, it probably is better to consider it a
set of audiobooks), however, if you will indulge me.
Today's deal is The Great Courses'
The Addictive Brain.
I'd like to make a point concerning the quality of the course. These The Great Courses courses are exceptional. I've bought, literally, probably around a hundred since I first started buying them years ago. There is only one that I was disappointed with, and that might be because of my expectations more than a quality issue. All of the courses are rated by listeners, and the one featured today has outstanding ratings.
My second point concerns price. When Audible has a sale on a The Great Courses title, the price on it will be the best that you will ever see for that course. A relatively distant second will be that course if it is found in the "employees pricing" sales that The Great Courses themselves have occasionally.
Today's course is only
$2.95. That's for nearly 6 1/2 hours of audio. I have a rule of thumb that if I can get a The Great Courses course for $1 or less per hour of listening, it's a good deal. Of course, this one is far less than $1 per hour--that's not a good deal, it's an
outstanding deal.
A third point concerns the date that the course was released and/or published. Information about, for example, Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo doesn't change very much from year to year. But there are fields of study that immediately come to my mind as being those in which new developments occur at a very rapid pace--those fields are physics and neurology. This course is, of course, one that deals with neurology. This course was released/published March 2015--only about 3 years ago--if I remember correctly. The information in it is bound to be nearly cutting-edge. I haven't listened to all of the The Great Courses courses that I have--I try to put audios of subjects in which information changes fast, like this one, at the beginning of my queue of audiobooks to listen to.
Then, there's the practical side. All of us have friends and/or family who are addicted to something. One out of ten people in the United States, for example, are addicted to alcohol, alone. I'm sure that this course will give us information that is actionable--that we can use to help understand us why that friend or relative has the addiction, and how we can be of the most help to them, if not in conquering it, at least in understanding better, ourselves, why they have it. Or, why
we have that addiction that we may have, and what we can do about it.
The titles of the lectures (from
The Great Courses' webpage for the course):
1. Addiction 101.
2. The Psychology and Neuroscience of Reward.
3. How Addiction Hijacks the Brain
4. Genetics: Born to Be an Addict?
5. Your Brain on Drugs.
6. We Crave Coffee and Cigarettes.
7. Alcohol: Social Lubricant or Drug Abuse?
8. The Science of Marijuana.
9. Stimulants: from Cocaine to Ritalin.
10. The Science of Poppies, Pleasure, and Pain.
11. The Gambler's Brain.
12. Junk Food, Porn, Video Games: Addictions?
Thanks for listening to my pitch.