The Emotional Life of Your Brain
In many human cultures emotions have been considered something suspect. Capricious, fleeting, and difficult to control, emotion is often set up as the enemy of rationality. As the field of neuroscience developed, emotional responses were often looked upon as scientific artefacts, something that distracted from studying the brain under “normal” conditions. The prime focus of study was the frontal cortex and its ability to carry out the so-called higher functions of logic and deduction.
However, neuroscience is beginning to discover that emotional responses may be more complex. Instead, they could be important cognitive elements that play a crucial role in shaping the human personality. In their new book The Emotional Life of Your Brain neuroscientist Richard J. Davidson and science journalist Sharon Begley argue that emotions are as integral a part of our personalities as our reasoning ability, intelligence, or demeanour. In fact, according to the authors, our emotional response to a situation is what makes our personality unique. “I’ve seen thousands of people who share similar backgrounds respond in dramatically different ways to the same life event,” Davidson notes in the book. The difference is due to what the authors define as each person’s unique “emotional style.”
According to Davidson, emotional style is made up of six dimensions: Resilience, Outlook, Social Intuition, Self-Awareness, Sensitivity to Context, and Attention. Each individual falls along a continuum in each of these dimensions. For example, some people may demonstrate a level of social intuition that borders on clairvoyance while others may traipse through life blissfully unaware of social cues. Most of us fall somewhere in between, and where we fall on all six of the dimensions determines our emotional style.
While the concept of emotional style may reek of pop psychology, Davidson bases his theories on patterns of neural activity and other biological mechanisms. His reliance on “hard science,” like cutting edge brain imaging techniques, sets him apart from the run of the mill self- help gurus. However, there is most definitely more than a tinge of the classic self-help ethos in The Emotional Life of Your Brain. Much of this comes from the authors’ descriptions of how an individual can, through concerted effort, change their emotional responses to external stimuli and remould their emotional style.
The idea that we can change our personality, an idea based on the scientific concept of neuro-plasticity, means we are not locked in a pre-disposed set of reactions and character traits. Instead, we carry with us the tools to tweak our traits. Davidson and Begley suggest methods that might help people reform their emotional style. Among these is meditation, which brain imagery shows can strengthen or change neural connections. The message is clear: Biology, especially psychobiology, is not destiny. We can train our brain through various techniques the same way we train our bodies with sport or exercise.
Ultimately, the message conveyed by The Emotional Life of Your Brain is upbeat and individualistic, not unlike the great bulk of self-help literature currently available. However, the authors’ citation of cutting edge science and insistence on basing his ideas in biology sets the book well apart from most other popular psychology volumes. The result is a work that manages to breathe new life into many tired self-help mantras, including the hackneyed refrain of mind over matter.
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