The Emotional Life of Your Brain

This groundbreaking book by a pioneer in neuroscience brings a new understanding of our emotions - why each of us responds so differently to the same life events and what we can do to change and improve our emotional lives. If you believe most self-help books, you would probably assume that we are all affected in the same way by events like grief or falling in love or being jilted and that only one process can help us handle them successfully. From thirty years of studying brain chemistry, Davidson shows just why and how we are all so different. Just as we all have our own DNA, so we each have our own emotional 'style' depending on our individual levels of dimensions like resilience, attention and self-awareness. Helping us to recognise our own emotional style, Davidson also shows how our brain patterns can change over our lives - and, through his fascinating experiments, what we can do to improve our emotional responses through, for example, meditation. Deepening our understanding of the mind-body connection - as well as conditions like autism and depression - Davidson stretches beyond mainstream psychology and neuroscience and expands our view of what it means to be human.