What 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.
