Jacob

An enthralling account of a young Dutch-English man finding his identity in 1970s Japan. Immersed in the theatre scene, Buruma's adventures are simultaneously unique and universal. The detailed descriptions could only come from a prodigiously observant outsider. Yet the feelings of unmoored curiosity, longing, and desire for fraternity will be familiar to anyone who has been young and lost.

I was about halfway through when when I realized I was not getting what I wanted from Emotional. While I typically enjoy the pop-science format, heavy on descriptive stories tied together with personal narrative, this time it didn't work for me.

It's hard to be surprised or delighted by the main thesis ‘emotions are important' when the subject matter seems so intuitive. Design books have this same issue, because we all experience design we think we're intuitive experts, and it's tricky for the author to keep it engaging. Emotional is missing novelty and surprise, probably because of how it handles the science underpinning the thesis.

The book sidesteps the depth of its core science, the shortest path to novelty and surprise, because the brain basis for emotion is not settled. The best supported neuroscience is probably Lisa Feldman Barrett's theory of constructed emotion, the point of which is that an emotion is not necessarily tied to a brain region or universal across populations. Hard to build a narrative popular science book around the lack of evidence for the classical theory of emotion.

This is a subtly ambitious book that didn't connect with me. Perhaps other readers will find it more engaging, it's well written and full of fun anecdotes. But the personal narrative frequently leads to dead ends (his dad's close call getting into the truck) and the science is shallow, leaving lots of ‘so what' annotations in my margins. Perhaps my undergraduate background in psychology made me more of an ‘expert' than I realize, but I doubt it.

This is an important book. It reframes mental health around a foundational biological process and explain the ‘why' behind many observed coincidences relating to mental health, the gut, and the energy level required to live each day.

Your brain consumes fuel to function. At a high level of abstraction, mental illness occurs when parts of the brain are under-active, overactive, or active-at-the-wrong-time. Some brains may be more sensitive to fuel types, others brains learned to fuel to maximize survival in a particular environment (eg. alertness in an abusive childhood) but that optimization no longer serves them as adults. Instead, they have a brain wired for anxiety.

We know that repetition strengthens neural pathways, but what can we do to change how our brains operate? When we think of neuroplasticity, we can imagine that changing the brain requires energy, and new connections in a brain region shift the brain's overall energetic needs. Optimizing this fueling process supports the new energetic needs and reinforces the new homeostasis for how the brain metabolizes energy. Brain Energy helps explain why changes take time, why childhood environment is pivotal, and how interventions like SSRIs, psychotherapy or ECT impact the brain.

Once the mechanism of metabolism is clear, it's obvious why we should act to improve mitochondrial health. And amazingly, improving how our mitochondria function is straightforward: what we eat and when we eat it matters. Exercise is a cheat code to better mitochondrial health. Specific supplements can help, and common medications hinder.

If this sounds like old news, that's kind of the point. Brain Energy explains how so much of what we know is right, and why it works. The point of the book isn't novelty, it's to explain the relationship between seemingly unrelated medical ailments with science. Its a holistic system theory, not a singular intervention.

Perhaps the theory of Brain Energy is incorrect. I don't have the expertise to pick apart the reference material. I'm a mental health nerd with a psych degree and a few years of college level bio and chem - not a psychiatrist or researcher. At minimum, the theory is logical and free of the mystical philosophy that characterized mental health breakthroughs of the 20th century.

And yet, if the theory of Brain Energy is correct, we're teetering on the precipice of a new epoch. For individuals, it explains an aspect of who we are and how we can change. For society, it implies radical shifts to preventing and treating mental health with no and low-cost interventions. These ideas deserve to be shared widely and examined by all types of experts, Brain Energy might be momentous.