Joseph Ledoux And The Emotional Brain

To be quite honest, I personally do not and will not voluntarily read any science related, science fiction, or just science textbooks at all. But because it was required to choose a book and turn in a paper with a PowerPoint presentation, I decided to pick a book that I am somewhat interested in and thought would be easy to write a paper about. And since emotions are something every living creature has inside of them (well maybe a majority of them) I figured Joseph LeDoux’s book would give me an insight on grasping a better understanding the emotions and their role inside our body. And it actually did give me some knowledge about this topic. This book was not only about the emotions and the outcomes of the researches LeDoux performed, but it was also about the evolution, the thought, and the memory of the brain and how it all works inside humans and animals.

Just like every other scientist who has and will try to find an answer to the human brain and emotions, Joseph LeDoux also claims that we will never fully understand the neural foundation of emotion through humans. Yet, to soothe his curiosity of the many questions, he performs an experimental try towards animals and rats to unravel the brain’s emotional hidden secrets. He gives logical interpretation of what emotions are, how they operate in the brain, and why they have such important impacts on our lives. The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life written by Joseph LeDoux manages to blend psychology and biology in the neuroscience fields to portray the correlation among the brain and the emotion and allows readers to fairly define emotions in their own opinion and understand the complexity behind it through his well studied facts and quality themes t...

... middle of paper ...

...rritation, lust, and maybe even the emotion of being lovesick. What kinds of signals do the systems in our body send and react when somebody irritates us? What is the deal with being in love or infatuated- do nerves with wings (butterflies) actually form and flutter when the person we have a crush on talks to us or just passes by?

I think Joseph LeDoux did an amazing job on his work, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. Though I’m not a expert about emotions or even in the fields of science, I, in my personal opinion would definitely recommend this book to anybody who would ask for a book recommendation for class or even for pleasure because it does provide a steady understanding of the behind scenes of emotions and the role in it to evolutionary beings. AND it certainly was stress-free to flip each page one by one until the very end.