Product Description

The Emotional Brain provides a cutting-edge scientific background to such books as Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence, showing that while cognitive studies have tended to ignore the emotions, we are increasingly understanding how crucial they are to our evolutionary survival, as shortcuts to cut through conscious reasoning when speed and rules-of-thumb are more important and effective than logic. Much of our emotional life is lived unconsciously, and is far richer than simply our conscious feelings - for example, our conscious mind will already be reacting to situations of danger some time before we begin to be afraid. Not only does LeDoux present a fascinating insight into how our emotions function normally, but also provides a new understanding of emotional disorders.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #120092 in Books
• Published on: 1999-02-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Customer Reviews

A superb account of practical brain research
LeDoux shows how the evolution of brain structure directly influences behaviour, emotion and thought. Knowing the simple fact that the amygdala has temporal perceptual dominance over the cerebrum (and for that matter more'control' as measured through the ratio of outbound-to-inbound neural connectors between the amygdala and the cortex) is the sort of basic scientific fact that will hopefully temper many of the more esoteric claims of psychology. This is an excellent book if you are interested in a scientific understanding of human behaviour. If you are more interested in 'philosophical' issues and language games - give it a miss.

Laypersons will like it; Psychologists will NEED it...
For the layperson, LeDoux's book is an excellent account of the scientific search for understanding what emotions are and what they do. Comparing it to the several trendy books about measuring emotional intelligence isn't quite fair--this is not a self-help book that stresses the importance of good social skills (which to me, seems what emotional quotient boils down to). Instead, this book nicely weaves the best of psychological, biological, and cutting-edge neuroscientific research to give the reader a good picture of what scientists currently know about emotions and how emotions are experienced in the body and the mind. But despite the comprehensive scientific explanations, the book is extremely readable and filled with real-world implications. For a professor of neural science, LeDoux writes creatively (love those subheadings!), and I think this book can do for the study of emotions what Carl Sagan's Cosmos did for astronomy.

For psychologists, particularly psychotherapists, this book should be required reading. Despite dealing with people's emotions everyday, few therapists can give more than a basic explanation of what exactly an emotion is, and how it influences human functioning. This is partly because most textbook discussions of emotions are either too basic or too difficult, are just plain boring, or don't make the implications for therapists clear. LeDoux's book changes all that--I've reviewed several academic books, articles, and texts on understanding emotions, and kept coming back to this one. Do your graduate students (who may be groaning under the pressure of a dry neuroscience text!) a favor and make them all read The Emotional Brain--they'll be just as educated, and a lot more excited as well.

Emotionality in a nutshell
Ledoux outlines contemporary research related to emotionality from a neuroscientific perspective, yet retains a sense of humanity by exploring the psychological implications of current findings. Evolutionary biology plays a strong role in The Emotional Brain, such that emotional drives, such as fear, are inherited from our prehistoric ancestors, that conscious emotional experience can be reinterpreted as higher-order forms of survival instinct. Exploring anatomical areas in the brain related to emotional experience, such as the amygdala, and how projections from these areas to cortical regions influences behavior, suggest a physiological explanation for temperamental style. Even if you are not studying psychology or neurology, you will find that the contents of this book apply to everyday life and how we interpret emotional experience in general. Thus, I commend this book's scope and its ability to unlock imaginative flights, which will ultimately inspire me to design new research methods to approach unsolved problems.