The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life | Joseph Ledoux

The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life | Joseph Ledoux | Improving the performance of your mind by understanding how the brain works

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The Emotional Brai...

	The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life Joseph Ledoux Simon & Schuster, 1998 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 33 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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.

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The Emotional Brain - the BEST

I found The Emotional Brain to be the most informative of 7 books that I ordered and read on the topic of emotions and the brain. After reading The Emotional Brain "cover to cover", the remaining books served as support and review of Joseph LeDoux's book but provided little additional information.

Improving the performance of your mind by understanding how the brain works

I have a special interest in training the mind to reduce negative thoughts and emotions with meditation exercises. I was therefore curious to find out if this book could give me some useful insights on this point.
It does. In emotions we depend on two competing systems. The "low road" or fast system that is very similar for all vertebrae animals and "high road" slow system that adds the Cortex for thinking into the circuit. That thinking capability is most strongly developed in the human species. The low road -slow systems follows the following steps:
Emotional stimulus -Sensory Thalamus - Amygdala -Emotional response
The competing parallel, slow system with half the speed has an additional link as follows:
Emotional stimulus- Sensory Thalamus-Sensory Cortex- Amygdala- Emotional response
The fast system is the best in case of real danger requiring instant reaction. But it can create trouble when a reaction is triggered by a false alarm leading to the wrong reaction. The slow system involving the Cortex evaluates the emotional stimulus, considers the context, and examines the options before deciding on the reaction and thus avoiding wrong reactions. It also has learning capability. Mistakes are not repeated. Training the mind will strengthen the influence the Cortex will have on the reaction. When I feel a sudden burst of anger, I now realise that it is probably the result of the fast road short-circuiting the Cortex circuit. So I pause to gain control of my anger.
The second useful idea is that memory of past experiences colour our views without us being aware of it. For example I had a bad experience working with a fast talker that turned out to be unreliable. The next time I met a fast talker I was instantly negative to that person without being aware why. I now ask myself before taking a position. Am I prejudiced?
The third point is awareness of the enormous advantage humans have of having a large fore brain that allows us instead of reacting automatically to emotional stimulus being able to make plans, analyse risk and analyse consequences. Analytical meditation strengthens this planning and evaluation capability.
The fourth point is that I understand better why it is so hard to reduce egocentric tendencies. The fast circuit is excellent for survival because it leads to instant action. But survival reactions without thinking only consider my survival without considering the consequences of my actions on others. Bringing the "primitive" system under control is therefore hard work.
The fifth point is the irreparable damage excessive continuous stress does to the memory system in the Hippocampus. That illustrates the merits of meditation to develop the ability to stay calm under high stress circumstances.
Complex systems are explained with excellent diagrams. The book may be a bit long for leaders in business, 300 pages. But, I think that the benefits make the effort to read it worthwhile. Understanding how your brain works helps you in training your mind

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A needed book of emotions and their role in the brain

Having read LeDoux's other work, I was pleased with this work, much as I enjoyed his previous work. In this book LeDoux explores the role of emotions in neuroscience. He does a fairly thorough job of explaining the history of the study of emotions through both psychology and neuroscience. I found his arguments about the limbic system persuasive, and his analysis of fear and also the memory intriguing.

If there's one complaint I have, it's that I wish he'd focused on other emotions besides fear. He never really explains, for instance, where the emotion of happiness might be located. There may not be studies focused on that, but while he makes some interesting arguments for multiple systems of emotions, since his focus is only on fear, it doesn't make his argument as persuasive as it could be.

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An engrossing read into Emotional Brain

What makes this book a good read? Primarily, the answer has to be that the subject is important and interesting for anybody who has for once wondered 'why was I not my real self when faced with fear/anxiety?' or 'Just if I could have held my emotions under control there?' Secondly, the area of work seems to be in its primitive stage. And accordingly, there are not many alternate books to be devoured if somebody is interested in this subject.

As far as the author - Joseph LeDoux -is concerned, I like his way of approaching the whole problem of making progress in understanding emotional brain. Not using the mental tools he has been handed by academics he had the intelligence to go where his research took him. Having said that, I would like to add, that the whole account could have been presented in a better way. Some could argue, he has done decent job at explaining complexities in simple terms for any layman to understand. I agree. Just that Daniel Gilbert's excellent work at that - in Stumbling on Happiness - has created an anchor in my mind.

Overall, I would not hesitate in recommending this book to anybody who wants to understand the emotional aspect of our mind.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

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