Winifred Gallagher has 3 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators, with an average listener rating of 3.2★ across 5 ratings. The most-rated is Rapt.
Rapt
Summary
In Rapt, acclaimed behavioral science writer Winifred Gallagher makes the argument that the quality of your life largely depends on what you choose to pay attention to and how you choose to do it. Gallagher grapples with provocative questions -- Can we train our focus? What's different about the way creative people pay attention? Why do we often zero in on the wrong factors when making big decisions? -- driving us to reconsider what we think we know about attention. As suggested by the expression "pay attention," this cognitive currency is a finite resource that we must learn to spend wisely. In Rapt, Gallagher introduces us to a diverse cast of characters -- artists and ranchers, birders and scientists -- who have learned to do just that and whose stories are profound lessons in the art of living the interested life. No matter what your quotient of wealth, looks, brains, or fame, increasing your satisfaction means focusing more on what really interests you and less on what doesn't. In asserting its groundbreaking thesis -- the wise investment of your attention is the single most important thing you can do to improve your well-being -- Rapt yields fresh insights into the nature of reality and what it means to be fully alive.
©2009 Winifred Gallagher (P)2009 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
New: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change
Summary
Follow a crawling baby around and you’ll see that right from the beginning, nothing excites us more than something new and different. Our unique human brains are biologically primed to engage with and even generate novelty, from our ancestors’ first bow and arrow to the latest tablet computer. This “neophilia” has enabled us to thrive in a world of cataclysmic change, but now, we confront an unprecedented deluge of new things, from products to information, which has quadrupled in the past 30 years and shows no sign of slowing. To prevent our great strength from becoming a weakness in today’s fast-paced world, we must reconnect with neophilia’s grand evolutionary purpose: to help us learn, create, and adapt to new things that have real value and dismiss the rest as distractions. In New: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change, Winifred Gallagher, acclaimed behavioral science writer and author of Rapt, takes us to the cutting-edge laboratories and ancient archeological sites where scientists explore our special affinity for novelty and change. Although no other species can rival our capacity to explore and experiment with the new, we individuals vary in how we balance the conflicting needs to avoid risk and approach rewards. Most of us are moderate “neophiles”, but some 15 percent of us are diehard “neophiliacs”, who have an innate passion for new experiences, and another 15 percent are cautious “neophobes”, who try to steer clear of them - a 1-5-1 ratio that benefits the group’s well-being. Wherever you sit on the continuum, New shows you how to use this special human gift to navigate more skillfully through our rapidly changing world by focusing on the new things that really matter.
©2012 Winifred Gallagher (P)2011 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
How the Post Office Created America
Summary
A masterful history of a long underappreciated institution, How the Post Office Created America examines the surprising role of the postal service in our nation's political, social, economic, and physical development. The founders established the Post Office before they had even signed the Declaration of Independence, and for a very long time it was the US government's largest and most important endeavor - indeed, it was the government for most citizens. This was no conventional mail network but the central nervous system of the new body politic, designed to bind 13 quarrelsome colonies into the United States by delivering news about public affairs to every citizen - a radical idea that appalled Europe's great powers. America's uniquely democratic post powerfully shaped its lively, argumentative culture of uncensored ideas and opinions and made it the world's information and communications superpower with astonishing speed. Winifred Gallagher presents the history of the Post Office as America's own story, told from a fresh perspective over more than two centuries. The mandate to deliver the mail - then "the media" - imposed the federal footprint on vast, often contested parts of the continent and transformed a wilderness into a social landscape of post roads and villages centered on post offices. The post was the catalyst of the nation's transportation grid, from the stagecoach lines to the airlines, and the lifeline of the great migration from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It enabled America to shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy and to develop the publishing industry, consumer culture, and the political party system. Still one of the country's two major civilian employers, the post was the first to hire women, African Americans, and other minorities for positions in public life. Starved by two world wars and the Great Depression, confronted with the country's increasingly anti-institutional mind-set, and struggling with its doubled mail volume, the post stumbled badly in the turbulent 1960s. Distracted by the ensuing modernization of its traditional services, however, it failed to transition from paper mail to email, which prescient observers saw as its logical next step. Now the Post Office is at a crossroads. Before deciding its future, Americans should understand what this grand yet overlooked institution has accomplished since 1775 and consider what it should and could contribute in the 21st century. Gallagher argues that now, more than ever before, the imperiled Post Office deserves this effort, because just as the founders anticipated, it created forward-looking, communication-oriented, idea-driven America.
©2016 Winifred Gallagher (P)2016 Gildan Media LLC