How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain - Softcover

Barrett, Lisa Feldman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1509837523 ISBN 13: 9781509837526

Publisher: Pan, 2018

Synopsis

'How Emotions Are Made did what all great books do. It took a subject I thought I understood and turned my understanding upside down' - Malcolm Gladwell

When you feel anxious, angry, happy, or surprised, what's really going on inside of you?

Many scientists believe that emotions come from a specific part of the brain, triggered by the world around us. The thrill of seeing an old friend, the fear of losing someone we love - each of these sensations seems to arise automatically and uncontrollably from within us, finding expression on our faces and in our behaviour, carrying us away with the experience.

This understanding of emotion has been around since Plato. But what if it is wrong? In How Emotions Are Made, pioneering psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett draws on the latest scientific evidence to reveal that our common-sense ideas about emotions are dramatically, even dangerously, out of date - and that we have been paying the price. Emotions aren't universally pre-programmed in our brains and bodies; rather they are psychological experiences that each of us constructs based on our unique personal history, physiology and environment.

This new view of emotions has serious implications: when judges issue lesser sentences for crimes of passion, when police officers fire at threatening suspects, or when doctors choose between one diagnosis and another, they're all, in some way, relying on the ancient assumption that emotions are hardwired into our brains and bodies. Revising that conception of emotion isn't just good science, Barrett shows; it's vital to our well-being and the health of society itself.

About this title

Review:

How Emotions Are Made did what all great books do. It took a subject I thought I understood and turned my understanding upside down., Malcolm Gladwell

The definitive field guide to feelings and the neuroscience behind them. -- Angela Duckworth, bestselling author of Grit

A brilliant and original book on the science of emotion, by the deepest thinker about this topic since Darwin -- Daniel Gilbert, author of the bestseller Stumbling on Happiness

Meticulous, well-researched, and deeply thought out . . . For anyone who has struggled to reconcile brain and heart, this book will be a treasure; it explains the science without short-changing the humanism of its topic. -- Andrew Solomon, bestselling author of Far from the Tree and The Noonday Demon

Radical and fascinating ... How Emotions are Made defends a bold new vision of the most central aspects of human nature. -- Paul Bloom, author of Against Empathy and How Pleasure Works

Every lawyer and judge doing serious criminal trials should read this book. -- Baroness Helena Kennedy QC House of Lords, U.K.

Barrett's figurative selfie of the brain is brilliant., Booklist

A provocative, insightful, and engaging analysis ... You won't think about emotions in the same way after you read this important book. -- Daniel L. Schacter, author of The Seven Sins of Memory

The implications of Lisa Barrett’s work (which ‘only’ challenges two-thousand-year-old assumptions about the brain) are nothing short of stunning. Even more stunning is how extraordinarily well she succeeds. -- Nancy Gertner, Senior Lecturer on Law, Harvard Law School, and former U.S. federal judge for the United States District Court of Massachusetts

This is a provocative, accessible, important book. -- Robert Sapolsky, author of Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers and A Primate's Memoir

Book Description:

Emotions aren’t hardwired into you – you create them. A world-leading neuroscientist argues that understanding the origin and nature of emotions has huge implications for our future

About this edition

• Publisher: Pan
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1509837523
• ISBN 13: 9781509837526
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448