Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking

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.