Take a photo of a barcode or cover
This book is absolutely fascinating. Author Davidson is the founder of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at UW-Madison. He's gotten a lot of attention with his work doing brain scans on Tibetan monks while they meditate.
This book is an introduction to the work he's been doing. He has come up with six different categorizations of types of mental/emotional styles that operate something like the Myers-Briggs type indicator. Each category places you on a spectrum between two extremes, which leads to an infinite variety of styles. Unlike Myers-Briggs, Davidson's styles are based on actual neuroscience studies.
Davidson gives a great history of his work in the book, lays out the details of the emotional types and how they work, then provides a brief introduction into how people can work to modify their emotional styles. If I have one complaint with the book, it's that the section on "how-to" could have been longer. I hope at some point in the future he will maybe devote an entire book to the practical applications of how the styles work, and how we can modify the workings of our own mind.
I especially love this book, and Davidson's work, for it's tight integration with Buddhism. The Dalai Lama has been a strong supporter of Davidson's research, which I think is very cool. When Davidson's new Center opened at UW-Madison, I was able to go to Madison to see a discussion between Davidson and the Dalai Lama facilitated by Daniel Goleman. It was unbelievably cool to listen to the Dalai Lama discuss the importance of scientific research for bettering our understanding of humanity (while wearing a Badgers baseball cap no less!).
This is a worthwhile read, and be sure to check out the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds.
This book is an introduction to the work he's been doing. He has come up with six different categorizations of types of mental/emotional styles that operate something like the Myers-Briggs type indicator. Each category places you on a spectrum between two extremes, which leads to an infinite variety of styles. Unlike Myers-Briggs, Davidson's styles are based on actual neuroscience studies.
Davidson gives a great history of his work in the book, lays out the details of the emotional types and how they work, then provides a brief introduction into how people can work to modify their emotional styles. If I have one complaint with the book, it's that the section on "how-to" could have been longer. I hope at some point in the future he will maybe devote an entire book to the practical applications of how the styles work, and how we can modify the workings of our own mind.
I especially love this book, and Davidson's work, for it's tight integration with Buddhism. The Dalai Lama has been a strong supporter of Davidson's research, which I think is very cool. When Davidson's new Center opened at UW-Madison, I was able to go to Madison to see a discussion between Davidson and the Dalai Lama facilitated by Daniel Goleman. It was unbelievably cool to listen to the Dalai Lama discuss the importance of scientific research for bettering our understanding of humanity (while wearing a Badgers baseball cap no less!).
This is a worthwhile read, and be sure to check out the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds.
I will say from the outset that this book was better than I thought it was going to be. That said, I didn’t have very high hopes to start. OK, that’s a bit unfair. "The Emotional Life of Your Brain" (TELoYB) is a decent read and does introduce some useful ideas I had not heard before. But, at the end of the day I didn’t feel all that smarter for reading it. TELoYB is one part professional autobiography, two parts popular psychology and one part self-help.
The professional autobiography parts follow coauthor Richard Davidson from his undergraduate days at NYU to his faculty position at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In many ways, the biographical stories are the book’s best moments, especially if you’ve spent any time in academia. There is something universal about the anxieties felt by young graduate students and new professors regardless of subject area.
The popular psychology comes from the exploration of the six emotional styles of resilience, outlook, social intuition, context, self-awareness and attention. The self-help bits come from the self tests you can take to assess yourself on these six emotional styles. Frankly, I found these self tests to be the least convincing bits of the book. It seems impossible to get a valid psychology result if you know that you’re being evaluated, especially when you the do the evaluating on yourself. Nonetheless, they are interesting categories and worth thinking about.
The overall conclusion to take away from the book is one that I’ve heard elsewhere (and more convincingly..."See The Brain That Changes" Itself) – the brain can change itself. In the case of emotional styles, the path to plasticity favored by Davidson leads him to various meditation techniques that are certainly worth exploring for the interested reader.
The professional autobiography parts follow coauthor Richard Davidson from his undergraduate days at NYU to his faculty position at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In many ways, the biographical stories are the book’s best moments, especially if you’ve spent any time in academia. There is something universal about the anxieties felt by young graduate students and new professors regardless of subject area.
The popular psychology comes from the exploration of the six emotional styles of resilience, outlook, social intuition, context, self-awareness and attention. The self-help bits come from the self tests you can take to assess yourself on these six emotional styles. Frankly, I found these self tests to be the least convincing bits of the book. It seems impossible to get a valid psychology result if you know that you’re being evaluated, especially when you the do the evaluating on yourself. Nonetheless, they are interesting categories and worth thinking about.
The overall conclusion to take away from the book is one that I’ve heard elsewhere (and more convincingly..."See The Brain That Changes" Itself) – the brain can change itself. In the case of emotional styles, the path to plasticity favored by Davidson leads him to various meditation techniques that are certainly worth exploring for the interested reader.
I've always been fascinated with neuroscience and the understanding of the inner works of our brain. As the author points out, there are more books on cognitive psychology and less concerning how we deal with emotions. This was even truer a few decades ago.
The book is well written and the author takes the reader through his personal scientific journey from the beginning of his career to what is now this branch of neuroscience. As some other readers noticed, in the beginning, it seems that the author may be too self-centered, it seems as if he's more interested in showing his accomplishments than anything else. However, in the end, everything makes sense. The book layout takes you from discovering the six dimensions of the emotional brain, to assess your own set point in a scale for each one of those dimensions, and ultimately in the last chapter describes some of the tools that might help us to change our setpoints, toward one side or the other.
I liked his scientific approach, he doesn't jump to conclusions but rather he uses well-designed experiments and technology to assess the effectiveness of certain methods that aim to assess or change our emotional states.
He simplifies the discourse so it's accessible to everyone but he offers a glimpse on how our brain areas and connections are continuously changing entities.
The book is well written and the author takes the reader through his personal scientific journey from the beginning of his career to what is now this branch of neuroscience. As some other readers noticed, in the beginning, it seems that the author may be too self-centered, it seems as if he's more interested in showing his accomplishments than anything else. However, in the end, everything makes sense. The book layout takes you from discovering the six dimensions of the emotional brain, to assess your own set point in a scale for each one of those dimensions, and ultimately in the last chapter describes some of the tools that might help us to change our setpoints, toward one side or the other.
I liked his scientific approach, he doesn't jump to conclusions but rather he uses well-designed experiments and technology to assess the effectiveness of certain methods that aim to assess or change our emotional states.
He simplifies the discourse so it's accessible to everyone but he offers a glimpse on how our brain areas and connections are continuously changing entities.
Valuable read, if not a bit long winded in places. I appreciated the expansion on the emotional styles that make us unique and how the brain processes and interprets emotion. Much of the text is dedicated to the research and history of studying emotion and the brain, and also expounding upon the authors' experiences in researching this multidimensional topic. But I'll admit there were times the narrative lost my attention because it was so bogged down in the actual portrayal of these experiences and information. That's one of the reasons why it took me so long to pick this up, through a series of starts and stops. I thought it was very interesting and valuable, but even as an academically oriented text, I don't think there was a cohesiveness to the topic highlighted in each chapter versus what was portrayed. The questionaires on emotional patterns/dimension and diagrams highlighting the different parts of the brain were valuable, though, and I think people who want an introduction to how the brain functions with respect to emotions and its reactions will like this as a scientific read. For a self-help read, however, it's a bit weighted.
Overall score: 3/5
Note: I received this as an ARC from NetGalley, from the publisher Penguin Group (USA).
Overall score: 3/5
Note: I received this as an ARC from NetGalley, from the publisher Penguin Group (USA).
I enjoyed the aspects of meditation in this book and how you can use it to rewire your brain. I also appreciate the specificity of how to rewire for the six different aspects of your emotional style; however, I felt that the book could have shaved off 20ish pages that focus mostly on his personal life and personal discoveries. I can see how some would like this, but for me it just seemed unnecessary. Also, in the anecdote about a person with autism Davidson interacted with, he did not consistently use person-first language, which irked me.
I highly recommend to anyone interested in how #mindfulness affects the brain. Excellent!
An exceptional, thought provoking book that outlines, in laymen's terms, the recent neuroscience research that shows that certin emotional attributes (resilience, social awareness, attention, outlook, self-awareness, sensitivity to context)are linked to specific activity in the brain - and are not hard-wired. The authors (Davidson and Sharon Begley) worked on the project with the Dalai Lama and the University of Michigan years ago that demonstrated that meditation changes the brain. Sure to be of interest and value to anyone who works with people/children.
A solid read on neuroplasticity. It's written in a very accessible way. I docked a star because I think the solutions/exercises the author presents will leave the reader wanting more.
Richard Davidson summarized over 35 years' of his research into this book. Collaborators with Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence) and Paul Ekman, Richard demonstrated fascinating links between one's "Emotional Style" (Resilience, Outlook, Social Intuition, Self-Awareness, Sensitivity to Context and Attention / Focus) with brain activity and the degree to which different parts of your brain communicate with each other. Given neuro-plasticity, different parts of our brains can be taught to change how it behaves, what tasks it "manages" and how it communicates with other parts of the brain, thereby allowing ourselves to change our "Emotional Style" (if we want to) such as becoming more resilient to set-backs and having a more optimistic outlook. There are a few interesting questionnaires towards the front which allows you to measure your own "Emotional Style". Skip to the final chapter for some tips & exercises on how to "teach your brain to change". This final chapter only contains limited tips (primarily based on different types of mediations proven to have success in changing certain levers on the Emotional Style dimensions so my wish is that Richard will write a sequel specifically focusing on the "How You Can Change" part.
This book definitely made me more optimistic. A lot of people assume that "they are the way they are", and this book really helps to see that you can actually change your emotions, when you think about them and will them to change.