Emotional Life Of Your Brain, The: How Its Unique Patterns Affect The Way You Think, Feel, And Live - And How You Can Change Them (2012) - Plot & Excerpts
This book covers Richard's account and experiences as a budding scientist, growing into areas which conventional science frowned upon at the time - namely meditation. He tells us of his studies, their findings and comes to conclusions about his 'six dimensions of emotional style' and gives a few methods to train each dimension in one direction or the other.These six dimensions that make up our individual style include: the outlook dimension (positive or negative), resilience (fast or slow to recover), socially intuitive (puzzled or socially in tune), self-awareness (opaque or aware), sensitivity to context (tuned in or tuned out) & attention (focused or unfocused). He goes on to say that the extremes of all of these dimensions have negative potential consequences that people often don't think of, for example that too much positivity may end up getting us into trouble, taking situations too lightly or getting on people's nerves.Then come the experiments, which are interesting and do have real-world consequences - but are not conclusive. Nonetheless, I gathered a lot of value from this book; it helped me realise that changing some elements of emotional style is possible and that there are some specific ways to train each one.Essentially, there is value in this book for those who may not be completely satisfied with their emotional dealings or who's lives are being interrupted by lack of development in any of the areas. The beginning of this book was absolutely fantastic and really interesting, although it took me a long time to read because I found myself needing to put the book down for a few minutes to really understand what each chapter was saying. As the book progressed, however, I found it a little harder to follow, almost as though it was an entirely different concept. Although I followed logically Dr. Davidson's thought progression, I found myself wondering if meditation was the right area to look at for emotional analysis (this may be because I have never tried to participate in meditation; this book has made me want to), but this may have been because I was on a plane while reading most of it and that made it harder to concentrate or test out some of Dr. Davidson's ideas. Overall, I found the book to be fascinating, and I hope to learn more about this topic in the future.
What do You think about Emotional Life Of Your Brain, The: How Its Unique Patterns Affect The Way You Think, Feel, And Live - And How You Can Change Them (2012)?
If you think we need more than Myer's Briggs to understand our emotions, please read this book.
—sbrant559
Loved this book, very interesting, informative, perhaps a little dry at times.
—onread
A must-read for all the lovers of neurosciences and spirituality.
—bondi92
