Emotional Life of Your Brain
This longawaited book by a pioneer in brain research offers a new model of our emotions- their origins, their power, and their malleability. For more than thirty years, Richard Davidson has been at the forefront of brain research. Now he gives us an entirely new model for understanding our emotions, as well as practical strategies we can use to change them. Davidson has discovered that personality is composed of six basic emotional "styles," including resilience, self-awareness, and attention. Our emotional fingerprint results from where on the continuum of each style we fall. He explains the brain chemistry that underlies each style in order to give us a new model of the emotional brain, one that will even go so far as to affect the way we treat conditions like autism and depression. And, finally, he provides strategies we can use to change our own brains and emotions-if that is what we want to do. Written with bestselling author Sharon Begley, this original and exciting book gives us a new and useful way to look at ourselves, develop a sense of well-being, and live more meaningful lives.
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What Hacker News says
- There's a book you might want to recommend: "The emotional life of your brain" by Richard Davidson.
Written by a neuroscientist, it gives a thorough, scientifically tested framework for classifying traits of personality and changing them.
- Optimism is just one side of the story.
A modern and experimentally grounded system of "emotional styles" is provided by neuro-scientist Richard J. Davidson, in his book "The emotional life of your brain".
A bit more nuanced than the "Big Five", he maps emotional traits along six axes: resilience, outlook, social intuition, self-awareness, sensitivity to context and attention.
Optimism would be "outlook" here, which is interesting because it's a different thing than resilience. Being optimistic isn't the opposite of being pessimistic, it's two different skills.
There are neurological explanations for each of the traits and there are exercises given to move your mind along each axis.
- I can't recommend this often enough:
Check out "The emotional life of your brain" by Richard Davidson and Sharon Begley.
It is applied neuro-science. A refined version of the "big five" character traits along with scientifically verified explanations where they originate in the brain and how to change them.
- Best, and most scientific [0] book in this regard: "the emotional life of your brain" by Richard J. Davidson.
One of the TLDR: the feeling of being happy and being sad are not the same brain-function with a sign reversed. Just because you're not happy doesn't imply you are sad and vice versa, just because you're not sad doesn't imply you're happy.
You have to train not-being-sad and being-happy independently!
[0] every hypothesis was experimentally tested!
