The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional LifeWhat happens in our brains to make us feel fear, love, hate, anger, joy? do we control our emotions, or do they control us? Do animals have emotions? How can traumatic experiences in early childhood influence adult behavior, even though we have no conscious memory of them? In The Emotional Brain, Joseph LeDoux investigates the origins of human emotions and explains that many exist as part of complex neural systems that evolved to enable us to survive. Unlike conscious feelings, emotions originate in the brain at a much deeper level, says LeDoux, a leading authority in the field of neural science and one of the principal researchers profiled in Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence. In this provocative book, LeDoux explores the underlying brain mechanisms responsible for our emotions, mechanisms that are only now being revealed. The Emotional Brain presents some fascinating findings about our familiar yet little understood emotions. For example, our brains can detect danger before we even experience the feeling of being afraid. The brain also begins to initiate physical responses (heart palpitations, sweaty palms, muscle tension) before we become aware of an associated feeling of fear. Conscious feelings, says LeDoux, are somewhat irrelevant to the way the emotional brain works. He points out that emotional responses are hard-wired into the brain's circuitry, but the things that make us emotional are learned through experience. And this may be the key to understanding, even changing, our emotional makeup. Many common psychiatric problems - such as phobias or posttraumatic stress disorder - involve malfunctions in the way emotion systems learn and remember. Understanding how thesemechanisms normally work will have important consequences for how we view ourselves and how we treat emotional disorders. |
From inside the book
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Page 18
... emotional experi- ence . Feelings of fear , for example , occur as part of the overall reaction to danger and are no more or less central to the reac- tion than the behavioral and physiological responses that also occur , such as ...
... emotional experi- ence . Feelings of fear , for example , occur as part of the overall reaction to danger and are no more or less central to the reac- tion than the behavioral and physiological responses that also occur , such as ...
Page 282
... emotions feel the way they do . Neither would it tell us what goes wrong in emotional disorders or suggest ways of treating or curing them . In order to understand what an emotion is and how particular emotional feelings come about we ...
... emotions feel the way they do . Neither would it tell us what goes wrong in emotional disorders or suggest ways of treating or curing them . In order to understand what an emotion is and how particular emotional feelings come about we ...
Page 299
... emotional feelings and mere thoughts are generated by different subsymbolic systems . The other is that emo- tional feelings involve many more brain systems than thoughts . When we are in the throes of emotion , it Once More , with Feelings ...
... emotional feelings and mere thoughts are generated by different subsymbolic systems . The other is that emo- tional feelings involve many more brain systems than thoughts . When we are in the throes of emotion , it Once More , with Feelings ...
Other editions - View all
The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life Joseph Ledoux Limited preview - 1998 |
The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life Joseph Ledoux Limited preview - 2015 |
Common terms and phrases
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