That's Disgusting: Unraveling The Mysteries Of Repulsion (2012) - Plot & Excerpts
Rachel Herz, a scientist who studies smells, wrote her first book about alluring scents. This book explores the opposite side, and goes far beyond olfactory issues.Disgust, she tells us, is the most complicated and the most socially learned of all our basic emotions. The others -- happiness, anger, sadness and fear -- are more instantaneous, gut level emotional responses. But disgust has to be learned from our parents or other adults (which is why small children will happily pick up their own feces or drag home a dead cat in their wagons).At its best, disgust is an emotion that serves the evolutionary purpose of avoiding illness from rotten food or contaminated liquids, and by extension, keeps us from getting sick from infected people. But these ancient impulses have their very dark side, because disgust is also the emotion most exploited by tyrants and demagogues to create hatred toward certain groups, and in cases like the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, it is a deliberate and devastating tactic.There are times when the findings Herz cites get a little confusing for me, in that they sometimes seem to contradict each other, but all in all, this was a fascinating journey through the emotion that we may understand and appreciate the least.And the chapter on how disgust can be both an obstacle and a spur to sex is worth the price of admission.For anyone interested in psychology and the emotional life, a recommended book. It should come as no surprise that this book was intriguingly revolting...such that there were times that I physically had to put the book down and breathe and try to clear my head...and yet I kept reading. And that is the curious thing about this book and the human reaction: Gross! But tell me more! I don't necessarily agree with all the author's theories and find her contradictory at times, and even wish I could still claim ignorance about some bizarre human behaviors she shared; however, there was enough fascinating information to keep me rabidly reading.
What do You think about That's Disgusting: Unraveling The Mysteries Of Repulsion (2012)?
Really interesting for about half the book. Then it begins to repeat itself.
—matty75411
Fascinating book, if you can get over the eeeeuuuuuw factor.
—khinchitzin93
