Emotional Ignorance: Lost and found in the science of emotion

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Degene die het boek vertaald heeft, maakte vaak spelfouten wat betreft woorden in enkelvoud/meervoud. Burnett lost me when he talked about how, because of his type of loss, he experienced more anger than usual.

After losing his dad to Covid-19, Dean Burnett found himself wondering what it would be like to live a life without emotion. Written during lockdown after a personal loss Burnett’s own emotional journey and struggle to understand what he was (and still is) feeling infuses the book with personality and insight. Dean uses his recent experience to describe his own profound emotions and thoughts and also references his much loved family.It goes on to examine how pleasure and pain tread a fine line (one reason, Burnett suggests, why 50 Shades Of Grey was so popular – and so badly written), in the process expelling various myths around BDSM practises. Ik had het idee dat de schrijver, doordat hij zelf wetenschapper is, soms dingen te moeilijk beschreef voor de ‘gewone mens’. This comment made me more angry than anything else in this book and took my rating from a two-star to a one-star. As someone who reads a lot of scientific literature, my bar is high for public science - and there is a very particular sweet spot that I look for, a balance between technicality and readability - that this one hit quite well.

At the cost of some emotional budget burn sympathising with Dean Burnett, you will get neuroscience musings on a bit wide set of subjects collectively touching on our emotional systems/drivers. For those who are interested in emotion, there's absolutely nothing new or presented in a unique way. For me it worked well, I thought it lent flavour to the narration and prevented the science parts from getting too dry, but equally I can see how someone who was more affected by COVID19 than me (who was very lucky on multiple fronts) may find the continued reference to it triggering.I do feel mean for not giving this book a full 5 star rating, but I am putting the emotion to one side for the moment. That being said, it did feel a bit more of a diary in parts, as though writing this book was the author's equivalent of screaming into a void, which worked well initially but got a bit tiresome towards the end. The more aware we are of our emotions, the more we can moderate and control their effects and influence on ourselves. Whilst, as the author outlines, there is still a lot we don’t know about how emotions work and why they are so unpredictable there is a wealth of detail here to help the reader grasp our current understanding and a lot of the myths and fallacies that exist around the subject.

Ik heb van dit boek een leesexemplaar mogen lezen vanuit de boekhandel waar ik een bijbaan heb (de vertaalde Nederlandstalige variant: ‘Doe normaal!

Soms gebruikte hij bijvoorbeeld allerlei namen van verschillende gebieden in de hersenen, wat naar mijn idee vaak overbodig was en dus niet perse nodig. While it explains many areas in great detail very much of it should be common sense or part of the general consensus. Faber Members get access to live and online author events and receive regular e-newsletters with book previews, promotional offers, articles and quizzes. Burnett sought to comprehend the fundamentals of emotions, commencing with the most basic query: what is an emotion? Do you know how hormones such as testosterone affect the way we think and influence our emotions and then shape our behaviour?

Here's my practical advice: DO NOT compare your loss to other losses; this is toxic and harmful advice. Got a weird feeling that's it's author's therapy, a self-healing process of (re)connecting with semi-broken emotional-inner-workings, triggered by author's father passing. To unravel the larger complexity of emotions, it is necessary to examine specific instances of distinct and recognisable emotional manifestations and expressions. My one real quibble with it is that I would have preferred him not to describe his previous employment in the anatomy department as being awful, repeatedly.Dean Burnett was born and raised in Pontycymer, a working-class former mining village in the South Wales valleys, which explains his strong Welsh accent.