Name: The emotional brain
ISBN: 9780684803821

The emotional brain

Here is one of the first popular books to examine our emotions from a biological rather than psychological perspective--an authoritative work by one of the principal researchers profiled in Daniel Goleman's national bestseller, Emotional Intelligence. The Emotional Brain is a provicative and far-reaching account of what our emotions are, how they operate in the brain and how they influence our lives.

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rramadassJul 2024

Emotions/Feelings are fundamental to existence itself i.e. they are the drivers for everything else. There is a lot of fascinating research/understanding going on in this domain which is worth studying. You might find the following two books interesting;

1) The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life by Joseph Ledoux.

2) How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett.

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thereticentMar 2022

It's very cool field, in my opinion. Some good journals for your topic would be Journal of Affective Neuroscience, and Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.

For books, I really enjoyed LeDoux's The Emotional Brain and Damasio's Looking for Spinoza.

But the general neuropsych journals like Neuropsychology, Neuropsychology Review, Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, The Clinical Neuropsychologist, and Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology touch on those topics as well, but not as consistently.

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avindrothJan 2021

So book on memory reconsolidation isn't necessarily a methodology, but a bit of science that I used to justify the methods I used. This book[1] by Bruce Ecker is good.

Yeah Kukla is a hard book to get, but very worth it. It provides a comprehensive view of history of psychology, with a strong (good) bias against behavioral psychology.

I would look into Eugene Gendlin's Focusing[2][3], as first steps. Then stuff by Mark[4][5], or Gestalt Therapy[6].

The key to all of this I think is literally doing whatever you want to do. This can't be explained in one go (unfortunately), but you should basically engage in your vices. If you are curious or none of these resources suffice, you can also DM me at https://twitter.com/eating_entropy.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Unlocking-Emotional-Brain-Eliminating...

[2]: https://www.amazon.com/Focusing-Eugene-T-Gendlin/dp/05532783...

[3]: https://www.amazon.com/Power-Focusing-Practical-Emotional-Se...

[4]: https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/

[5]: https://meditationstuff.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/folding-...

[6]: https://www.amazon.com/Gestalt-Therapy-Excitement-Growth-Per...

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sethwmJun 2017

I would recommend exploring Emotional Brain Training (EBT) [1]. Wired for Joy [2] and Spiral Up [3] are two related books on the subject. Find a therapist that works in this space to coach you through it.

[1] https://www.ebtconnect.net/what_is_ebt

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Wired-Joy-Revolutionary-Creating-Happ...

[3] Sorry I can't find it anywhere

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aliseyJul 2015

Every basic emotions researcher comes up with a different list. But most of the lists include some version of fear, anger, disgust, and joy (but not sadness). "Emotional Brain" by Joseph LeDoux, chapter 5 has more info on various lists. From the same book:

James Averill, a major proponent of social constructivism, describes a behavior pattern, called “being a wild pig”, that is quite unusual by Western standards, but is common and even “normal” among the Gururumba, a horticultural people living in the highlands of New Zealand. The behavior gets its name by analogy. There are no undomesticated pigs in this culture, but occasionally, and for unknown reasons, a domesticated one will go through a temporary condition in which it runs wild. But the pig can, with appropriate measures, be redomesticated and returned to the normal pig life among the villagers. And, in a similar vein, Gururumba people can act this way, becoming violent and aggressive and looting and stealing, but seldom causing harm or taking anything of importance, and eventually returning to routine life. In some instances, after several days of living in the forest, during which time the stolen objects are destroyed, the person returns to the village spontaneously with no memory of the experience and is never reminded of the event by the villagers. Others, though, have to be captured and treated like a wild pig - held over a smoking fire until the old self returns […]

Averill uses “being a wild pig” to support his claim that “most standard emotional reactions are socially constructed or institutionalized patterns of response” rather than biologically determined events.

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SafariDevelopJan 2015

SM is indeed that proof -- she is admirably surviving without fear, and being mostly happy at it as well.

You tried to counter it first by lumping fear together with pain.

Next, you tried to counter it by pointing to some hypothetical group of fearless people that were dead specifically due to lacking fear. I asked if you could point who these people were. I'm genuinely curious to learn and understand how in modern times -- where people with their elaborate plans, not snakes with their instantaneous attacks, are the common threat -- a person of average or above intelligence could end up risking their own lives without having to involve fear.

Your argument for evolutionary conservation doesn't hold at all. Intelligence evolved fairly recently (in evolutionary terms) and thus, pending genetic tampering by us, it should take a plenty of time for any such adaptations to be successful. Besides, fear was indeed essential to us prior to intelligence evolving, as the quick and dirty survival mechanism of instincts was all that we had to survive and reproduce successfully.

> Why does the only cited example lead an extraordinarily risky life?

What I'm asking, specifically, is: are their other (cited or non-cited) examples of a woman or a man with no fear whatsoever leading an ordinary or below-ordinary life? I'm more that happy rescind all that I've written to you here if you could successfully provide them. After all, you have a track record of doing meticulous research.

> How many white female artists ever get held up like that? Or 4 times? Hell of a coincidence...

Are you suggesting that those 4 gunpoint/knifepoint perpetrators were influenced to do so, in part, due to SM being fearless? It really is hard to say without understanding her life context. Besides, this is going down the speculative path.

>> All that these scientists could come up with over the years to justify their (and the general public's) fear of lack of fear is those four incidents of being held at knifepoint and gunpoint. > 'All'?

Yes -- and I'm not too sure what you were aiming to point here -- I took the liberty to assume that people like Antonio Damasio wanted to specifically find out/ bring out incidents from her life to buttress their opinion of fear being essential even to modern humans (he did say this in his book 'The Emotional Brain'). Of course, these scientists are also interested in the larger goal of understanding fear itself -- they have published a plenty of useful material -- but it also helps to know they have biases of their own to bring to the table.

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