Emotional: The New Thinking About Feelings

by Leonard Mlodinow

We've been told we need to master our emotions and think rationally to succeed. But cutting-edge science shows that feelings are every bit as important to our success as thinking.

You make hundreds of decisions every day, from what to eat for breakfast to how to influence people, and not one of them could be made without the essential component of emotion. It has long been held that thinking and feeling are separate and opposing forces in our behaviour. But as best-selling author Leonard Mlodinow 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 improve your relationship to frustration, fear, and anxiety? What can you do to live a happier life? The answers lie in understanding emotions. Taking us on a journey from the labs of pioneering scientists to real-world scenarios that have flirted with disaster, Mlodinow shows us how our emotions help, why they sometimes hurt, and what we can make of the difference.

Cutting-edge research and deep insights into our evolution, biology, and neuroscience promise to help us understand our emotions better and maximize their benefits. Told with characteristic clarity and fascinating stories, Mlodinow's exploration of the new science of feelings is an essential guide to making the most of one of nature's greatest gifts to us.

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction, Science, Self Help, Audiobook, Neuroscience, Health

250 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 14, 2022

About the author

Leonard Mlodinow is an American theoretical physicist and mathematician, screenwriter and author. In physics, he is known for his work on the large N expansion, a method of approximating the spectrum of atoms based on the consideration of an infinite-dimensional version of the problem, and for his work on the quantum theory of light inside dielectrics.
He has also written books for the general public, five of which have been New York Times best-sellers, including The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, which was chosen as a New York Times notable book, and short-listed for the Royal Society Science Book Prize; The Grand Design, co-authored with Stephen Hawking, which argues that invoking God is not necessary to explain the origins of the universe; War of the Worldviews, co-authored with Deepak Chopra; and Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior, which won the 2013 PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. He also makes public lectures and media appearances on programs including Morning Joe and Through the Wormhole, and debated Deepak Chopra on ABC's Nightline.

Reviews

[Brian Clegg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Leonard Mlodinow has a mixed pedigree as a science writer, responsible with Stephen Hawking for the infamously naive The Grand Design in which the authors told us that we don't need philosophy any more, because science now has all the answers. However, he feels on more comfortable ground in Emotional, which assesses the importance of emotions to us, and how they have long been underrated, or even considered an obstacle to rational thought.

This is a popular science book in the classic American narrative style, where each chapter begins with a story about real people to put the science into context (and there are often more stories through the chapter). This is obviously a great way to explore this very human science (and we learn that even fruit flies appear to have a kind of emotion), though sometimes there is too much storytelling and not enough of the science.

The underlying theme throughout is how important emotions are to everything from decision making to survival. We discover the differences between a reflex and an emotional response and how our rational abilities are helped by emotions, except when the emotions get out of control. Mlodinow also goes beyond the brain to bring in the relationship of the rest of the body and the mind - we don't talk about gut feelings, or a visceral emotion for nothing. Along the way we visit emotions from anxiety to joy, rage to lust via embarrassment, fear and pride. Although the market is totally overloaded with neuroscience books at the moment, there's plenty here that isn't commonly covered.

To begin with, I had thought this would be a four star review. The book opens well and is convincing about how we underestimate the importance of emotion. However, my initial enthusiasm did not continue at the same level. Mlodinow comes across as evangelical on emotions to the point of overplaying their role. There's something of the the law of the instrument about it - because he is so focussed on emotions, Mlodinow sees their influence everywhere, in ways that don't always seem convincing.

One broad concern is that despite referencing many social science studies, there is no mention of the replication crisis - it wasn't clear how many of these studies are sound. A couple of specific issues too. In illustrating valence and persistence, two of the 'five properties' of emotion states (valence, persistence, generalisability, scalability and being automatic), Mlodinow imagines an 'ancient ancestor' who gets in an emotional state on encountering a snake: the author ascribes to emotion that she will continue to keep an eye out for snakes afterwards, without explaining why this might not be simply a result of rationally thinking 'If I've seen one, I might see another.'

In another example, Mlodinow describes a circumstance during the Second World War where his father makes a last-minute decision not to get into a truck which was subsequently attacked with all in it killed. According to Mlodinow, his father's rational mind had told him to get in the truck, but his body's 'sensor system' had analysed 'additional information, subtle clues about his environment and bodily state' that enabled him to go beyond rational thought. Yet we are given no evidence that this was the case rather than a matter of random luck. In the past, I've not got on a plane because I had a last minute feeling it was going to crash. It didn't. It was just a useless random feeling, not some warning from my body - the kind of irrational response we get all the time. It's simply bad science to assume that Mlodinow's father's action was prompted by the near-magical abilities of what the author later describes as 'core affect'.

Some interesting material, then, but the way it is presented suffers from confirmation bias. Mlodinow wants emotions and core affect to be particularly important in how we do things and finds evidence that shows this, while rarely justifying it sufficiently to be acceptable. The science may be there, but we aren't presented with enough of it to be convinced.

[Ryan Boissonneault · Rating 4 out of 5]

You probably think you know a lot about emotions. You experience them directly on a daily basis, you can name most of them, and you see them expressed in others. You’ve likely been taught that emotions are discrete, universal, and that you’re better off suppressing them or otherwise overcoming them with reason. This is the conventional view of emotion, and it has been handed down to you through millennia of intellectual history. It’s also entirely misguided.

In Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking, theoretical physicist and science popularizer Leonard Mlodinow shows us why the traditional view of emotion fails to hold up to scientific scrutiny—in particular to the latest findings of affective neuroscience—and how a new picture is emerging of emotion as a core component of cognition—integrated with and complementary to reason.

To understand what emotions are, it’s useful to start with what they’re not, and unfortunately that requires unlearning centuries of false notions and oversimplifications.

The confusion stems from a model of the brain known as the “triune brain.” Originally formulated by the neuroscientist Paul MacLean, this model describes the brain as being composed of three discrete parts: (1) the reptilian cortex (lizard brain), responsible for our most basic instinctual behaviors; (2) the limbic system, responsible for the higher emotions found in mammals, primates, and humans; and (3) the neocortex, responsible for complex planning, abstract thinking, and language. These structures, the theory goes, were sequentially added to the mammalian brain over the course of evolution.

Except that the theory is wrong, or at best a major oversimplification. The latest science tells us that the three proposed structures of the triune brain are neither anatomically nor physiologically distinct, at least not entirely. All three structures send signals back and forth between themselves with significant anatomical overlap. The brain evolved—not by adding sequential layers on top of the basic lizard brain—but in a more integrated and complex manner with all three layers evolving simultaneously. Additionally, it is now known that emotions are not localized to specific areas of the brain within the limbic system, but are instead more widely distributed.

And it goes even deeper than that. Research also tells us that our emotions and logical reasoning are impacted, often subconsciously, by the information we receive from our sensory organs (capturing information about our environment) and from our internal sensors (capturing information about things like blood pressure, heart rate, ect.). All of this information is sent to the brain, impacting what is called our “core affect,” a term for how good or bad we feel overall in a particular situation. Because much of this happens at a subconscious level, we are often unaware of why we feel a particular way and are blind to the impact this has on our decision making.

Mlodinow offers two compelling examples to drive home the point. First, he shows how our gastrointestinal system (sometimes referred to as our “second brain” due to the complexity and magnitude of its neural activity) communicates bidirectionally with the brain and how this can have major impacts on our emotions and thinking. Studies have even demonstrated links between gut bacteria and the state of our mental health.

Second, Mlodinow shows how our decision-making process is colored by our emotions even when we’re completely unaware of it. In an incredible study that instantly became a classic, it was found that parole officers were significantly more likely to deny parole—not based on the facts of the case—but based strictly on the time of day the case was heard. In cases heard directly before lunch, parole was almost never granted, whereas the first cases heard at the start of the day were granted 60 percent of the time. Similar research has shown that this affects other professions as well, for example when doctors overprescribe antibiotics later in the day (as a result of fatigue).

The simple fact that the hearing officers were hungry or that doctors were tired was enough to drastically sway decision making. This shows that our brains are not neatly divided into a rational part and an emotional part, of which reason has complete control over; rather, cognition is an integrated mix of reason and emotion and can be impacted by factors we are not even aware of, including hunger, stress, and poor health more generally.

But emotions do not always lead to poor outcomes, and, in fact, often facilitate better decision making by providing our rational faculties with critical information. Mlodinow discusses several examples throughout the book, including the story of Stanislav Petrov, the lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defense Force who used emotion to override a rational thought process that would have otherwise triggered a nuclear war.

So while it’s true that sometimes emotion leads you in the wrong direction (eating too much junk food or consuming too much alcohol), other times it leads you in the right direction (sacrificing your well-being for the sake of your child). Rather than labeling emotion as good or bad, then, it’s probably best to think of emotion as a source of valuable information to use in your decision making processes.

But here’s the key takeaway: Even when emotion gets in the way of your goals, you counteract it, not solely via the use of reason, but with other countervailing emotions. If you want to resist the impulse to eat an entire carton of ice cream, for example, you’ll likely have to employ other emotions, such as the desire for better health, the aspiration for a leaner body, or the pride associated with self-control. Reason alone will never help you overcome a desire in the absence of some other accompanying motivating force.

As Mlodinow repeatedly reminds us, even when you’re behaving according to strict rules of logic, you cannot have goals or evaluate evidence without giving either some kind of emotional weight. Without emotions, we would have no desire to do or think about anything at all. The trick then, is not to oppose or suppress emotions, but to learn how to manage them effectively to align with your goals.

Here’s how to do that, according to the latest science.

How to Manage Emotions

As a quick recap, the traditional theory of emotions, as Mlodinow describes it below, is largely incorrect:

“The fundamental tenets of the traditional theory were that there are a handful of basic emotions shared by all humans; that those emotions have fixed triggers and cause specific behaviors; and that each arises in some dedicated structure within the brain.”

Instead, what affective neuroscience tells us is that there are many more emotions than we previously thought, that each emotion is complex and varied (e.g., different forms of fear), that different people can experience emotion differently, that emotion can be influenced by culture and context, that emotion is not localized to specific areas of the brain, and that emotion is used in tandem with reason when we think about anything. Emotion is better thought of as a functional state that drives us towards certain behaviors.

But most importantly, affective neuroscience shows us that emotion can be managed and manipulated for our own benefit. Here’s what the latest research suggests.

Let’s start with the positive emotions (happiness, joy, contentment, etc.). Obviously, we all desire positive emotional states but cannot simply wish them into existence. Emotions are often automatic, arising from a particular context, event, or thought pattern. I can’t just say to myself “be happy” and expect anything to change. But here’s what I can do, according to the research on the subject.

In general, the best thing I can do is something that shouldn’t be too surprising: exercise and eat healthy, nutritious foods. In the first part of the book, Mlodinow explored all the various ways in which the body’s “core affect” can influence emotion and decision making. A sedentary lifestyle with a poor diet creates a general negative feeling that is shown to amplify negative emotions. The act of exercising, eating well, and even meditating produces a positive core affect that will materialize in a greater overall mood. And so taking care of your body is the single best thing you can do—not only for your physical health—but for your mental health as well.

Other behaviors recommended by researchers in the field to enhance happiness include:

-Spending time with family and friends and generally prioritizing experiences over material possessions
-Expressing gratitude for everything you have
-Engaging in acts of kindness towards others
-Cultivating optimism and positivity
-Living in the present moment and savoring life’s simple pleasures
-Dedicating yourself to a lifelong goal or project

This is all good advice when things are going according to plan, but what do we do about life’s inevitable hardships and the associated emotions of fear, anxiety, sadness, depression, anger, envy, shame, guilt, etc.? Life is full of challenges, missed opportunities, disappointments, and pain. How do we deal with this without getting overwhelmed?

It’s useful to start with the general recognition that negative emotions, while unpleasant, ultimately evolved to help us recognize suboptimal conditions and to make the appropriate changes. Without negative emotions, you’d have little desire to change anything at all, so we can begin with a sense of gratitude for the emotional states that allow us to alter our behavior for the better.

Problems occur, however, when we let our negative emotions spin out of control, negatively impacting our lives or causing us to make poor decisions. Since we can’t avoid negative emotions, we shouldn’t try to fight, avoid, suppress, or dwell on them. Instead, we can use a few strategies to help us manage these negative emotions and even turn them into something positive. Mlodinow discusses three such strategies: acceptance, reappraisal, and expression.

Those familiar with Stoicism and Buddhism will recognize the first strategy—acceptance. Rather than fighting against our emotions, we simply accept them and the circumstances that produce them, while finding alternative emotions to combat them and to give us the motivation to persevere. By focusing only on what we can control—and accepting that which we can’t—we can direct our energy to dealing with any difficult situation we encounter.

This is how James Stockdale was able to endure more than seven years as a prisoner of war. In 1965, his plane was shot down over Vietnam, leading to his imprisonment and years of torture and solitary confinement. After Stockdale was released and returned to the US, he wrote a series of books and lectured on how Stoicism, particularly the philosophy of Epictetus, helped him to endure the horrors of imprisonment in a hostile, foreign country. Ultimately, Stockdale embraced the strategy of acceptance. In a 1993 speech, Stockdale described his thoughts after his plane was hit:

“After ejection … I whispered to myself: I’m leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus … as I ejected from that airplane was the understanding that a Stoic always kept separate files in his mind for (A) those things that are “up to him” and (B) those things that are “not up to him.” Another way of saying it is (A) those things that are “within his power” and (B) those things that are “beyond his power.” Still another way of saying it is (A) those things that are within the grasp of “his Will, his Free Will” and (B) those things that are beyond it. All in category B are “external,” beyond my control, ultimately dooming me to fear and anxiety if I covet them. All in category A are up to me, within my power, within my will, and properly subjects for my total concern and involvement. They include my opinions, my aims, my aversions, my own grief, my own joy, my judgments, my attitude about what is going on, my own good, and my own evil.”

Stockdale, like all practicing Stoics, learned to replace one emotion (desire for external things outside one’s control) with another (desire to work on one’s own character and virtue regardless of circumstances). In this view, Stoics do not suppress emotions—as is commonly perceived—but rather reappraise/substitute them. Stoics do not lack desire, they just channel desire inward.

Practicing acceptance does not mean that we’ll never experience pain; it only means that when we do, we can focus on reappraising it as a challenge to overcome, an opportunity to build character, or as a necessary path toward something better.

And this brings us to the second strategy discussed by Mlodinow—reappraisal. As mentioned previously, the best way to counteract a negative emotion is with a countervailing emotion. In the case of Stockdale, rather than succumbing to fear, anxiety, and depression, Stockdale used his study of Stoicism to reframe the situation as an opportunity to apply his training and develop his character in the context of a situation he had no control over.

If this can work for Stockdale in the context of years of torture and imprisonment, it can work for the rest of us, who, while facing our own unique hardships, will probably never have to endure such brutal conditions.

Reappraisal also works in a variety of situations. For example, we can take emotions like the fear of public speaking and reappraise them, converting the negative energy we feel into positive motivation to deliver an effective speech or presentation. We can’t help but feel the fear, but we can use it in a constructive way.

Over time, and as we face and conquer our negative emotions, we develop confidence and skill in our ability to do so, setting off a virtuous cycle. This can be aided by Mlodinow’s third strategy—expression. Essentially, this is positive self-talk and the cultivation of optimism. While it sounds a little far-fetched, there is actually plenty of research supporting the idea that confidence and the phenomenon of the self-fulfilling prophecy enhances performance. Positive expression is just one means towards greater confidence in your ability to handle adversity.

Overall, we can see that it is almost never advantageous to suppress emotions or to try to reason yourself out of negative ones. You either have to reappraise negative emotions into something constructive or else override one emotion with another. Stoicism is particularly attuned to this strategy, which accounts for its widespread appeal and revival in recent years. But you don’t have to be a Stoic to take advantage of this general advice.

A Better View of Emotions

Affective neuroscience, by giving us a more complete picture of our emotion as fully integrated with our cognition, shows us that emotion is not our enemy to be overcome by our rational faculties. Emotions are functional states, sources of information the brain needs to make decisions, guiding our behavior in the right direction. But that requires that we understand where our emotions come from, how they impact us, and how we can leverage them for our own benefit. In this regard, Mlodinow’s latest book gives us all the tools we need for one of the most critical life skills one can develop: emotional intelligence.

[David Wineberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

The learning curve to understand how humans work has gone parabolic. In the just the past few years, scientists have finally discovered there are brain systems that manage pleasure, that are separate from systems that manage desire. There is an actual cacophony going on in our bodies, 24 hours a day, as everything communicates in its own channel, to its own audience, and acts accordingly. They are discovering the locations of things like anxiety, happiness, disgust, guilt and shame. Mostly they are discovering that none of these things works in isolation. They only work in concert, in consultation, in combination. Leonard Mlodinow explores some of these discoveries using his delightful and addictive storytelling style in his latest book Emotional.

Personally, the most compelling finding is that last one, that nothing works by itself alone. Isolating and triggering a trait gives you nothing but a dysfunctional person. You can’t have the full effect of any function without the input and effects of several others. This is part of the reason why brain functions have been so difficult to nail down, and why nailing them down has produced so little for science.

We have been vainly searching for the controller, the seat of the mind and a soul, continuously ignoring the evidence that results. There is no controller. We are interacting systems. Every system plays its part and the result is a person, a personality, a mind. There is a command network, but it works with numerous other networks to collectively present who we are to the world, and to ourselves. Emotions color those factors, and are colored by them. Everything is a two way street.

The degree of determination or drive makes a difference. It is filtered and affected by other control systems. The sunny or cloudy outlook makes a difference. Bad experiences do too. The matrix nature of us makes it hard to put everything in its own place, much less make it predictable or changeable. But then, we’re not meant to do that. We are instead complex beings, the products of an infinite number of factors, permutations and combinations. That’s precisely what makes humans different from other beings. We have a “core affect” that is the net of all these inputs.

In a series of dazzling stories, Mlodinow traces discoveries, both on purpose and accidental, and what impact they have had on our understanding of ourselves. In this book, he employs himself and his family. His parents, both Holocaust survivors, were two completely different people, whose scarring led to totally different personalities for them. His siblings and children fit into some of the stories, and of course Mlodinow himself is hyper sensitive to his own actions, attitudes and thought processes, which factor into several of the tales, if only because he was writing this book. It makes for a fast paced and varied read, far more autobiographical than readers have come to expect of him.

During the course of the book, Mlodinow’s mother, who starts out in her 90s, is profiled as a young mother with her own unique take on the world and raising her children. She ages as the book progresses, ending up in a nursing home where he cannot visit her because of Covid-19. She isn’t the backbone of the book, but her personality is relevant at several points, causing emotional reactions in Mlodinow as she declines.

The brain/body connection is more central here. Who we are affects our bodies in ways that often affect others and how they perceive and experience us. There are even several personality tests towards the end, that might or might not help readers see how others see them. Mlodinow says there are no right or wrong answers, just potential insights.

A lot is quite recent: “It wasn’t until 2015 that, fueled by recent advances in genetics, scientists began to uncover the true roots of such illnesses (like bipolar and schizophrenia). Much more work needs to be done, but we now know that they arise in patients having fewer genes involved in signaling between neurons and more genes related to neuro-inflammatory cells, which leads to low-level but chronic brain inflammation. An excess of dopamine production, related to the reward system, also seems to play a role but in a more complex and subtle manner.” We are beginning to see what makes people different, and why, from a physiological standpoint.

One of the non-emotions common in humans is the need to categorize. Everything must fit in a bucket somewhere. So emotions are classified as positive or negative: “The sum of all the research on positive emotion is that people who have plenty of positive emotion in their lives tend to be healthier and more creative and to get along well with others. Positive emotion makes us more resilient, strengthening the emotional resources needed for coping, and broadens our awareness, allowing us to see more options when faced with a problem.” (Maybe so, but it reads like a horoscope.)

And negative emotions serve to keep people on their toes. He gives the example of financial traders who must make split second decisions that could make or lose hundreds of millions of dollars – all day long. Being affable is not an asset here. Those with more negative outlooks and attitudes are more successful in trading. The bottom line is there is no “correct” way to be a human.

Scientists have discovered, quite by accident at first, that motivation is not the same as desire or pleasure. Rats can be seen not to eat their favorite foods unless motivation is triggered as well as desire, and not enjoy their favorite foods but eat them just to stay alive if the pleasure function is missing. This is more evidence of multiple systems interacting to produce a functioning being.

So with humans. Various faults and failings in the interconnected networks can make some seem unemotional, lacking the key functions of self-preservation, or empathy. Their very presence can be offputting to fully functioning people and therefore make it difficult for them to have fully operational relationships. All this is fine insight scientists are only now assembling.

For all that, I fought the book as I read it. A book called Emotional, at least to me, should be or at least contain, stories of outbursts, dysfunction, gaining self-control, learning to accept others, self-editing, manipulation and life-changing adjustments. Self control and self awareness are key factors when examining emotions, I would have thought. It should examine gender differences and the leveraging of emotions in manipulative fashions. What does too little mean? What about too much? The book actually contains none of this: nothing about what most readers would consider emotions. It is only and all about this broader span of functions that most people would not consider emotions eg. guilt, shame, determination, motivation and disgust:

“Hunger (a Primordial emotion) is an emotion that helps us decide whether to eat something available (walk away from free food) rather than just employ a series of rules.” He says there are five states distinguishing emotions from reflexes, but readers will find that doesn’t bridge the gap.

He says some emotions are “social emotions” like guilt, shame, jealousy, indignation, gratitude, admiration, empathy and pride. As I read, I kept thinking – that’s not an emotion! It’s a mood, or a state, a reflex, a trigger or a reaction – but not an emotion as I know them. It’s not a good way to read a fine book. It really needs some explaining right up front. Or a better title. Maybe Expanding Emotions.

It concludes with three ways to gain control of emotions: acceptance, appraisal and expression. We’re probably most familiar with the last one, where talking it out or writing it down defuses the emotion, such as anger or hurt. So it’s not just a physiology book. It is very much an affective psychology journey as well.

Mlodinow takes great pains to describe it all and make it understandable with his always-appropriate stories. But I have a two sentence shortcut for regaining control over emotions. It’s old but still quite trustworthy: Don’t sweat the small stuff. And: It’s all small stuff. That’s a key life lesson that should be front and center. Just by itself, it explains most of what you need to know about emotions.

David Wineberg

[Mircea Petcu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Secole la rând filosofii au pus emoțiile în opoziție cu rațiunea. Cercetările recente din neuroștiință au arătat că emoțiile ajută gândirea rațională să ia cele mai bune decizii. Iar emoțiile sociale (vina, rușinea, admirația, recunoștiința etc.) ar sta la baza raționamentului moral.

Trebuie să fac rost de cartea lui Antonio Damasio, ”Eroarea lui Descartes”. Damasio merge mai departe și consideră emoția și rațiunea fațete ale aceluiași proces.

[Venky · Rating 4 out of 5]

The ability to break down complicated topics to a degree of simplicity that succeeds in conveying their import but without diluting the underlying essence, is a rare trait. Leonard Mlodinow is greatly invested with this wonderful gift. A prolific author of Science, Mlodinow weaves his magic once again in the upcoming book, “Emotional”. More often than not we are used to being admonished for engaging in conduct driven by emotion. But are such rebukes warranted? Is precedence of sentiment over rationality such a bad thing after all? Mlodinow in his thought provoking book juxtaposes empirical analysis with psychological factors to demonstrate how emotions play a leading role in our lives.

On the 26th of September 1983, at the peak of the Cold War, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov was manning a graveyard shift whose mission was to constantly check for missile attacks emanating from the United States. While he was monitoring the machines, he suddenly noticed five ominous red dots surfacing on the screen. This meant that the United States had launched five Minuteman missiles at the Soviet Union. Petrov’s protocol under such circumstances dictated an immediate reporting to his superiors so that the Soviet Union could also launch its own nuclear warheads even though such an act would invariably lead to a Mutually Assured Destruction of two global superpowers. Petrov however hesitated, as his gut instincts told him there might have been a potential system malfunction. At the cost of being branded a traitor – if the missile attack was genuine, his country would be annihilated without having a chance to fight back due to a delay in responding – Petrov decided to wait for a heart stopping twenty minutes before informing his superiors of a probable false alarm. His assessment turned out to be bang on target: the warning system had failed due to some sort of extraneous interference. No missile was launched against USSR. Later, when queried on the reason for his reticence, Petrov famously remarked, “I refused to be guilty of starting World War III.”

Pioneering developments in the world of medicine have resulted in a paradigm shift in our understanding and evaluation of emotions. A whole new field of psychology called “affective neuroscience” threatens to upend entrenched dogmas that have informed us regarding the role played by emotions. A technique referred to as “connectome” for instance, allows scientists to trace various connections among neurons, creating a sort of circuit diagram for the brain. A connectome enables scientists to explore specific cells in different regions of the brain, and comprehend the electric signals that generate thoughts, feeling and behaviours. Thus there is a ‘determination switch’ that when turned on, complements the physiological resolve leading to ordinary human beings accomplishing extraordinary feats. When James Buster Douglas felled the seemingly invincible “Iron” Mike Tyson in what was, and is still, deemed to be the greatest upset in the history of boxing, he was channeling both his physical resilience as well as his psychological determination. The death of his mother a mere three weeks before the bout, instead of driving him to despair, drove him to levels of concentration which he unfortunately never regained after his historic victory.

The Darwinian notion of emotion was based on a ‘triune model’. This model contends that the human brain is made up of three successively more sophisticated layers. The deepest layer is responsible for basic survival instincts, the middle or the limbic layer takes care of the emotional aspects and the outermost or the neocortex layer is the repository of rational thoughts. However modern research in the domains of neuroscience have demonstrated that the layering is not as simple or elementary as it is made out to be. There is a complex interaction between the layers, the existence of which was not observed earlier.

Mlodinow also illustrates how emotions guide the process of thinking. The heart warming story of Nobel Laureate Paul Dirac whose introverted and apparently stone hearted life was transformed by Margit, a divorcee and the sister of a fellow physicist Eugene Wigner is a heart warming story. The brilliant Dirac married Margit and they were together for fifty years before only death parted the couple.

Mlodinow also in the latter half of the book provides his readers with an emotional questionnaire. The reader upon answering a set of questions can determine their scores based on various emotions such as anger, love, aggression, anxiety and grief. With a view to dovetail our emotions in setting us onto the right path, Mlodinow recommends a regimen of physical activity combined with the practice of mindfulness. He also draws on research done by Sonja Lyubomirsky, A Russian born American Professor of Psychology. According to Lyubomirsky, conscious acts such as optimistically pondering over one’s future, devoting time to family and friends, engaging regularly in acts of kindness towards others, striving to live life in the present moment, committing to lifelong goals etc would go a long way in making emotion a faithful and reliable ally.

Mlodinow also devotes some space in informing the viewers about his personal experience involving the application of emotions. Both his parents were Holocaust survivors. In fact his father owed his life and survival to an inexplicable moment of emotional reaction. Deciding at the last second not to get inside a truck that had a band of resistance friends, Mlodinow’ s father watched with stupefaction as a band of SS soldiers intercepted the truck and gunned down all its occupants. Mlodinow’ s mother who died at the ripe old age of ninety eight carried the emotional scars of a concentration camp all through her life. The final Chapter in which Mlodinow described her passing, after contracting the COVID-19 virus, but not before putting up a grand fight, is both heart breaking as well as life affirming.

Next time anybody reprimands you for being too very emotional or acting without reason, please do not get bogged down. Instead use the three techniques alluded to by Mlodinow in assessing and reassessing your thought, word and deed. First develop a sense of stoic attitude. Learn to accept things that cannot be changed and instead plan on how acceptance can be turned to your advantage. Second, inculcate an attribute of reappraisal. When confronted with a difficult situation, try to discover an element of optimism and then reappraise your odds. Finally, express your emotions. At the heat of the moment, put down every thought that assails you in writing. There is no need to share what you have written with anyone. Expressing your thoughts and feelings at the moment of occurrence and getting back to them later makes you feel and become more sanguine.
More than anything else, please get yourself a copy of “Emotional”!

(Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking by Leonard Mlodinow is published by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group and will be available for sale on the 11th of January 2022)

Thank You, Net Galley for the Advance Review Copy

[Fern Adams · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was such a brilliant book to begin 2022 with! I love it when the first book of the year starts off well, though it does set a difficult precedent for the next few!

4.5 stars

‘Emotional’, as the title suggests, looks at the subject of emotions from a neuroscience lens. Mlodinow debunks the idea that emotions are something that are irrational and should be dismissed and instead successfully argues they play far more of an essential role in being human and our everyday lives than we often realise. Through a range of examples from fruit flies and alcohol, to judges decisions being influenced by the time of day, to even a time nuclear war was prevented thanks to one man’s gut instinct, this is a book full of insightful information!

It also is a practical handbook too as quizzes allow you to establish your own emotional profile and the influence this may have on your own life and things you can do to adjust this.

What I really appreciated however was Mlodinow practicing what he preached and setting aside time to show how his own emotions, especially those relating to his mother who had deteriorating health at the time of writing, influenced him. This perhaps was the best example of all in the book as it broke away from the impersonal, which we often associate with science, to show just how impractical and often inaccurate that can be. It also made it far more readable and engaging too to see the author as a human and how his research played out in reality.

I really enjoyed this one and am going to have to go and look up more of Mlodinow’s work!

Thank you to the publisher for sending me an ARC in exchange for an honest review! 😃

[Mehtap exotiquetv · Rating 3 out of 5]

In diesem Buch wird schriftlich visualisiert welche Funktion „Emotionen“ haben und wie physiologische Veränderungen in Gehirn die emotionale Empfindung beeinträchtigen können.

Es gibt deutlich bessere Bücher, die das Thema behandeln. Ich empfand es teilweise sehr kurz angeschnitten und sehr oberflächig erklärt.

[Maher Razouk · Rating 5 out of 5]

على الرغم من أن أفلاطون رأى أن عواطفنا وعقلانيتنا تعمل بانسجام ، إلا أنه في القرون التي تلت أفلاطون ، أصبح يُنظر إلى هذين الجانبين من حياتنا العقلية على أنهما يعملان بالتعارض مع بعضهما البعض. كان يُنظر إلى العقل على أنه أسمى وحتى أنه مقدس ، بينما يجب تجنب العواطف أو احتوائها. وافق الفلاسفة المسيحيون لاحقًا على هذا الرأي جزئيًا. لقد صنفوا شهوات الإنسان وعواطفه على أنها خطايا يجب على الروح الفاضلة أن تتجنبها ، لكنهم اعتبروا الحب والرحمة فضائل.

نشأ مصطلح "العاطفة" من عمل توماس ويليس ، طبيب لندن من القرن السابع عشر. لقد كان أيضًا خبيرًا في علم التشريح ، وإذا فارقت الحياة وأنت تحت رعايته ، فهناك فرصة جيدة لتشريحك. في مواقف الحياة أو الموت ، لم يكن من المريح معرفة أن طبيبك سيفوز في كلتا الحالتين. لكن ويليس كان لديه أيضًا مصدر آخر للجثث : فقد حصل على إذن من الملك تشارلز الأول لإجراء تشريح للجثث على المجرمين المشنوقين.

في سياق بحثه ، حدّد ويليس العديد من أجزاء الدماغ التي ما زلنا ندرسها حتى اليوم. والأهم من ذلك ، أنه وجد أن السلوكيات المنحرفة للعديد من المجرمين يمكن إرجاعها إلى سمات محددة لتلك الأجزاء . اعتمد علماء الفسيولوجيا في وقت لاحق على عمل ويليس لفحص الاستجابات الانعكاسية عند الحيوانات.
.
Leonard Mlodinow
Emotional
Translated By #Maher_Razouk

[Camelia Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice summary of the updated research on human emotions.

“Scientists now know emotion is profoundly integrated into the neural circuits of our brain, inseparable from our circuits for rational thoughts. We could live without the ability for reasons, but we would be completely dysfunctional if we couldn’t feel. Emotion is a part of the mental machinery we share with all higher animals, but even more than rationality its role in our behavior is what sets us apart from them.”

Some takeaways:

Chapter 3: The Mind-Body Connection: Two core body effects: negative and positive. Mindfulness meditation makes you aware of your core body effect. Emotions are tightly linked to our core body effect. Emotions arise without intentional effort. What used to be called “drives”, such as hunger, thirst and sexual desire, are now seen as emotions. Gut-brain connection is bi-directional. The separation of the brain and the body is artificial.

Chapter 5 Where Feelings Come From: The theory of emotional construction, at least to some extent. Emotion is not innate and hard-wired, or not always?

Chapter 6: motivation: wanting versus liking: neurological basis for the difference between wanting and liking. Patients suffering from addiction stop liking what they are addicted to but they keep wanting it. The discovery of the brain region that is in charge of motivation.

Chapter 7: Determination: aerobic exercises that boost your heart function can also help your general mental grit. Benefits of meditation: attention control, emotion regulation and to increase self-awareness.

Part III is Emotional Profile. The author has listed several questionnaires that would help you find out your own emotional profile.

[dilara🍒 · Rating 5 out of 5]

özellikle psikoloji öğrencilerine ve psikolojiyle yakından ilgilenenlere gözüm kapalı tavsiyemdir. hiç bilmeden aldığım ama benim beklentimin çok çok üzerinde çıkan başarılı ve bilimsel çalışmalar ile desteklenmiş bir kitap.

[Max Nemtsov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Книжка вполне дельная, как практически все у Млодинова, - особенно для таких неспециалистов, как я. Автор опять пишет качественный нонфик - что немаловажно, человеческим языком, а не на псевдонаучном воляпюке, - который по нынешним временам может, конечно, особо триггернуть нынешних этических хунвэйбинов и комсомольцев (ну а как иначе - многие аспекты эмоций сильно гендерно-обусловлены).

Если же счистить с его рассуждений всю западную позитивистскую шелуху, оказывается, что в практической своей части книжка вполне похожа, к примеру, на общевойсковое наставление по шаматхе. Во всяком случае, о пользе "осознанности" автор говорит нам прямо - он просто не может заставить себя употребить понятие "буддизм".

[Saku Mantere · Rating 2 out of 5]

A remarkably disappointing take on a significant topic: how emotions interact with reasoning. The book is a lost opportunity, because in his search of a ”scientific” view on emotions, the physicist author glosses over how emotions interact with higher reasoning, limiting himself to lab studies, augmented with glorified anecdotes about physicists, heavyweight boxers and astronauts. A look into decades of work in psychodynamic and therapy literatures might have helped deliver a much more insightful story. A formulaic structure and writing style make the book look like many other non-fiction mass market books that come out these days.

[Killian De Geest · Rating 5 out of 5]

Veel bijgeleerd, ook over mezelf

[Vincent · Rating 1 out of 5]

Honestly I learned nothing from this book. Why is over 2/3’s of the book focused on regurgitating popular studies and books and providing little to no analysis on it? And than the actual “tools” are a 20 page after though? Also pretty much every nuance is missed in this book.

First of all changing your thinking and relation to your emotions is HARD. The author presents it as a easy thing. Just change your appraisal of the situation! That’s lovely, but that is something that can take YEARS to change, especially if someone has one or more disorders. When you struggle with depression and anxiety like I do it’s easy to spiral and get caught up in those emotions and feelings because that is part of struggling with a mental health disorder. To be like lol take this little measure on anxiety and change your appraisals in about 20 pages feels disrespectful and honestly neglectful too.

In general, the author doesn’t offer any form of new information or even usual information in this book. He simply restates the findings from popular, well known studies and than moves on.

From the beginning I knew this book was written by someone who wasn’t within a field that dealt with helping people process their emotions because, again, this lacks the nuanced understanding of the complicated nature of emotions. Studies only can tell you so much. It is a completely different ball game to experience anxiety and complex emotions and also to help people process that. When you’re on the receiving end and even on the professional side of things, you begin to understand there is no one nice neat answer. Emotions are complicated and your relationship with them will be ever changing. That’s ok. That’s normal. With practice, emotions can become manageable and be described better. But it still takes time!

Overall I found this book lacking in every single aspect from start to finish. With a lack of interesting or well researched or useful information, this book feels like a cheap and tasteless money grab.

[Angie Boyter · Rating 4 out of 5]

4+ Very close to 5. We are often warned not to let our emotions control our lives and to concentrate on rationality in our decision making. If so, why do we have emotions in the first place? What is their role? How do they arise in our brains, and how can we or should we control them? Leonard Mlodinow’s Emotional delves into the latest (and some of the earliest!) theories about our emotions to try to answer these questions.
Mlodinow explains our current knowledge from the latest research about emotions, where they arise in our brains and their interactions with other parts of our bodies. I was surprised at how much of our understanding has come in the twenty-first century. He also tells us about the modern tools that enable researchers not only to trace how neurons are connected but even to control individual neurons in a brain. These tools have given rise to the field of “affective neuroscience”, which combines neuroscience with the study of personality and emotions. He also introduces a number of interesting concepts that lay people like me would not likely have heard, like “core affect”, which reflects your general state of well-being and influences your decisions and reactions as well as your emotions.
Much of this could have been a very dry read, but Mlodinow’s lively style made it fun. For example, many humans could relate to the behavior of male fruit flies who allay their disappointment at being rejected by a potential mate by drowning their sorrows in alcohol! Even the descriptions of the scientists were interesting, like Kent Berridge, who is an expert on the facial expressions of rats, a useful skill when you are studying emotions in animals.
Along the way, the book points out some practical lessons we can take away from the scientific insight. We all probably know that it is not a good idea to go grocery shopping when we are hungry, but laboratory studies have shown that hunger also lowers our resistance to other types of objects, so it might be a good idea to eat lunch BEFORE shopping at Macy’s. In addition, if we make a request of someone, they are more likely to grant it if we give a reason for the request, even if it is a flimsy one. This is not a “self-help” book, but there is an enormous range of emotional profiles, so the book provides some inventories that are used by scientists in their research so readers can see where they stand in comparison to others on shame, guilt, anxiety, anger, aggression, happiness, and romantic love.
One of the useful tips Mlodinow shares from the research is that we are more likely to be happy if we hang out with others who are happy. So I guess Mlodinow would recommend you read Emotional and, if it makes you happy, share it with your friends and hang out together.
I received an advance review copy of this book from Edelweiss and the publisher.

[Kirsti · Rating 4 out of 5]

When you were little, did you ever do something that drove your parent/grandparent/other caretaker up the wall? I did, and I got scolded to knock it off. But Leonard Mlodinow's mother used to scream, "Why am I still alive? Why didn't Hitler kill me?" (I'm paraphrasing because I listened to the audiobook instead of reading the print book.) As the child of two Holocaust survivors, Mlodinow seems compelled to try to figure out why people act the way they do. This book focuses on how our emotions affect the decisions we make. I haven't done the interactive parts yet, but I think this could be a practical guide for big crises and for daily life.

[Abigail · Rating 4 out of 5]

For some reason, I thought this would be more of a therapy-driven, case-study approach, but what I found was a deep dive into the evolution of emotion through the lens of laboratory and historical scientific development, and why we need them. While it wasn’t quite what I anticipated, I still found it insightful.

Mlodinow unpacks how our understanding of emotions has shifted over time, blending neuroscience, psychology, and personal anecdotes to illustrate just how central emotions are to decision-making, relationships, and everyday life. There’s some great wisdom in the way he explains not only why we feel, but how we can better understand and regulate those feelings.

I liked the self-assessments towards the end of the book! I sometimes find that I cannot identify if I am feeling guilt or shame, so that section was particularly insightful.

I am not a scientist, but this seemed very well researched.

[anchi · Rating 4 out of 5]

物理學家及知名作者雷納曼羅迪諾2022年初的新書大概是我趁特價入手後一直都沒空看的書之一，由於書的篇幅不長，剛好在這次出差的時候就一口氣看完。本書分為三大部分，何謂情緒、情緒的力量、和認識自己的情緒三部分。不得不說，物理學家寫書就是愛說點科學根據，因此第一部份情緒的介紹可以說是整本書最不有趣的一章，但是撐過去就好了。而整本書我覺得最好玩的是第三部分的情緒量表，藉由不同情緒的評估方法，讓讀者也能更加瞭解自己對於情緒的控管。如果是想從科學與演化角度去了解人的情緒由何而來、或是想理解自己的情緒特徵，這本書可以加入清單，當然如果你是作者的長期書迷，也不要猶豫。

[Kate Potapenko · Rating 4 out of 5]

Curiosity killed the cat, but... did you ever wander...
What's the difference between feeling and emotions?What's the difference between wanting and liking something?How different factors affect our decision making?
Turns out fruit flies are very similar to people in certain situations and they often look for alcohol after being rejected by opposite sex. Apparently it's not enough to like something in order to get motivated, you need to want it and not necessarily like it at all.. 
Many things that seemed kind of obvious, like feeling demotivated when you're depressed look different to me now as I understood the mechanics of it..
It's hard to share all the curious and wonderful things this book is filled with in a couple of sentences, but it's great.
It is well worded and easy to read, broken down into smaller chapters too, which helps as often reading something heavy on information you get a bit of an overload. 
It also has quite a few examples of when things are same but different and it makes you see a lot of what you knew before in a different light.
It is educational and entertaining! What else could you possibly want?!
P.S. There are also some questionnaires in the end if you want to find out more about your emotional profile.

[V · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was hard to maintain focus on the arguments Mlodinow was trying to make. I don't know if I was paying insufficient attention or if his presentation was just too subtle.

Brain geography/local function has always been difficult for me--hard to visualize chemical/electrical activity--so I kind of nodded blankly through the discussions of amygdala this and prefrontal cortex that.

I was a bit frustrated that the discussion of behavioral epigenetics did not go a bit further--specifically, how it is adaptive rather than maladaptive.

There was an awful lot of self-help-type material--especially in later chapters--for a book that is supposed to be about science, some of the language devolving into woo-adjacent statements.

Sorry, Lenny, didn't love this one.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

In his latest book, Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking, Leonard Mlodinow debunks the theory that began with the ancient Greeks claiming that “the mind consists of two competing forces, one ‘cold,’ logical, and rational and the other ‘hot,’ passionate, and impulsive.” Not surprisingly, advances in neuroimaging and other technologies have led to a host of new discoveries, which cumulatively inform a new field of psychology called “affective neuroscience.” Rather than competing forces, Mlodinow reveals that emotion, working alongside rationality, is an essential and influential player in how humans think and decide.

One such technology creates a brain mapping called the “connectome,” which enables scientists to explore what’s going on in the brain at the neuron level and to “decipher the electrical signals that generate your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.” Two other technological advances, “optogenetics” and “transcranial stimulation,” respectively enable the control of individual neurons in an animal’s brain and the stimulation or inhibition of neural activity in precise locations in the human brain.

Part I of the three-part book broadly covers current knowledge on the how-and-why of emotion evolution, and Part II examines the role of human emotion in “pleasure, motivation, inspiration, and determination." In saving-the-best-for-last style, the author sets the stage for Part III, which examines the growing field of “emotion regulation.” By far the most interesting aspect of the book, Mlodinow describes the latest instruments for discovering an individual’s personal emotional profile, which, in turn, creates critical self-awareness of where one’s feelings come from and how to control and manage them.

Mlodinow highlights the benefits of being able to manage one’s emotions and describes three effective approaches for accomplishing emotion regulation: acceptance, reappraisal, and expression. In acceptance, paraphrased as “the power of stoicism,” he clarifies some misinterpretations of that term. Rather than an avoidance of emotion, stoicism implies not being psychologically enslaved to emotions, but being in command of them. Controlled experiments involving the acceptance approach reveal “rationality and emotion working together.”

The reappraisal approach, paraphrased as “the power of spin,” focuses on choosing the meanings we assign to circumstances, events, and experiences. Mlodinow says that “Reappraisal involves recognizing the negative pattern developing in your thoughts and changing it to one that is more desirable, but in a manner that is still based in reality.” Finally, expression, or “the power of words,” seeks to defuse negative emotion by sharing it, in words, with trusted friends or someone significant in one’s life.

Mlodinow’s arguments are cogent and plainly presented in prose that causes no bumps on the road to intellectual understanding of new concepts related to the neuroscience behind human consciousness and behavior. The one minor criticism I have—and I have said this repeatedly for books on similar topics by various authors—is that it is of immense practical value to have a clearly-labeled diagram of the brain for quick reference. While the brain and its components may be familiar to neuroscientists and human biologists, lay readers (like yours truly) need helpful reminders with each new book on the subject.

Nevertheless, Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking is signature Mlodinow in terms of its power to engage and educate readers, and is a perfect follow-on to his previous book, Elastic: Unlocking Your Brain’s Ability to Embrace Change. Indeed, this reviewer has no hesitation in recommending the following excellent works by the same author: The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior, and The Upright Thinkers: The Human Journey from Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos.

[Alexandra Dav · Rating 4 out of 5]

4,5✨

Nu aș fi ajuns la ea dacă nu o primeam la o comandă pentru că titlul mi se părea cam fantezist, însă mă bucur că i-am dat o șansă. 
Este o carte interesantă, care explică foarte frumos anumite concepte și studii mai recente. 

Ce mi-a plăcut:
- că m-a ajutat să mă înțeleg puțin mai bine 
- teoria propusă, care a fost însoțită de explicații bune și de exemple
- conceptele noi aflate
- multele paragrafe colorate, care reprezintă fie noutăți, fie anumite informații pe care le-am vrut evidențiate de dragul de a le observa în viitor 
- chestionarele 
- cele câteva sfaturi practice 
- limbajul uzual, care a făcut lectura să fie cu atât mai plăcută 
- că m-a "ținut" în prezentare fără să mă plictisească 
- se citește și ușor 
- structura inspirată 
- coperta simplă, dar drăguță. 

Ce nu mi-a plăcut:
- anumite povestioare puteau să lipsească sau să fie mult mai scurte pentru că nu aduc un mare plus cărții 
- mă îndoiesc de unele studii menționate, motiv pentru care e nevoie de puțină cercetare în plus (nu am scăzut pentru acest aspect, doar menționez) 
- se repetă din idei și e obositor câteodată 
- cred că se putea pune mai mult accentul pe partea practică. 

Pentru mine a fost un titlu care a venit la momentul potrivit pentru că mi-a readus aminte de niște aspecte importante de care poate am uitat. 
În cele din urmă, nu pot decât să zic că mă bucur că am ajuns la ea acum. 

[Reni · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 ⭐️ (rounded up)

Mlodinow races through neuroscience and psychology like he just unlocked the secret that emotions aren’t useless - they’re actually our internal compass for decisions. He’s pumped to show how emotions guide us, blending science, stories, and a takedown of bad emotional myths. It’s well written, easy to understand, and leaves you feeling like you just ran an emotional marathon 🧠💥. Buckle up, it’s a wild ride through your feels! 😅

[Stephen Power · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author was able to make sense of a topic that I almost failed my first semester of college. Mlodinow was able to provide a history of the how psychologists thought emotions affected human action, and was able to draw in so many studies and real world experiences from others and himself that help the reader understand what he’s saying.

[Shashi Martynova · Rating 3 out of 5]

Небесполезный обзор эволюционной роли эмоций, современной психологии эмоций и того, как в их исследованиях в последние 15-20 лет задействуют всякие модные передовые технологии изучения мозга. Потребительский/гедонистический/достигательский подход к жизни и ее задачам, понятное дело, весь тут, другого не рассматривается, но было бы странно ждать от физика-калтеховца Млодинова ваджраянского воззрения на эмоции.
Так вышло, что я параллельно читала Дзогчена Понлопа Ринпоче "Emotional Rescue: How to Work with Your Emotions to Transform Hurt and Confusion into Energy That Empowers You" и слушала вебинар Лодро Сангпо "Four Ways of Working with Kleshas", и все это поверх всякого, сказанного на ту же тему Чогъямом Трунгпой и Дзонгсаром Кхъенце Ринпоче, и вот в таком разнообоазном комплекте оно прям очень по делу.

[Angela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Leonard Mlodinow explains fully why we do things. This book enables you to fully understand why we think and do things we do.

[Ali]

رد پای فلسفه رواقی گری در شناخت و کنترل احساسات هم دیده می‌شود. رواقیون نه فقط به تمام چالش‌های بشر فکر کرده بودند بلکه راه حل هم داشتند.

بر خلاف انتظارم بسیار متفاوت از کتاب‌های موفقیت و زرد راونشناسی بود و بدون رفرنس‌ به آزمایشات علمی، ادعایی مطرح نمی‌کرد.

[LauraTheReader · Rating 4 out of 5]

solidne 4 gwiazdki!

Pozycja naprawdę interesująca, na plus są aktualne eksperymenty i współczesne przykłady z literatury naukowej.

Książka uświadamia czytelnikowi jak ważne są emocje. Polecam!

[Jody Sperling · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the book and found many new ideas to consider. It's been several days since I finished the book, and nothing major is surfacing about the read, though that is less to do with the book being generic and more to do with how much I've been reading on this subject. Worth a read for anyone who wants to see the impact of emotion on human decision making.

[Grace Yoder · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enjoyable and provided a lot of practical insight. I’ll be revisiting this title.