Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking
Ratings7
Average rating3.7
We’ve all been told that thinking rationally is the key to success. But at the cutting edge of science, researchers are discovering that feeling is every bit as important as thinking in this "lively exposé of the growing consensus about the limited power of rationality and decision-making" (The New York Times Book Review). You make hundreds of decisions every day, from what to eat for breakfast to how you should invest, and not one of those decisions would be possible without emotion. It has long been said that thinking and feeling are separate and opposing forces in our behavior. But as Leonard Mlodinow, the best-selling author of Subliminal, tells us, extraordinary advances in psychology and neuroscience have proven that emotions are as critical to our well-being as thinking. How can you connect better with others? How can you make sense of your frustration, fear, and anxiety? What can you do to live a happier life? The answers lie in understanding your emotions. Journeying from the labs of pioneering scientists to real-world scenarios that have flirted with disaster, Mlodinow shows us how our emotions can help, why they sometimes hurt, and what we can learn in both instances. Using deep insights into our evolution and biology, Mlodinow gives us the tools to understand our emotions better and to maximize their benefits. Told with his characteristic clarity and fascinating stories, Emotional explores the new science of feelings and offers us an essential guide to making the most of one of nature’s greatest gifts.
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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.
