A neuroscientist and psychologist of note, Lisa Feldman Barrett recounts in this book how as a doctoral student she ran some laboratory experiments the results of which, according to the then-accepted scholarly wisdom, made no sense.
After rerunning the experiments multiple times, she decided that it was the scientists of the time who were wrong, not her experiments! This set her on the road to this remarkable book which lays out in detail how our emotions literally are “made” by our brain.
Understanding how this emotion-creation process functions, she shows, carries substantial implications, e.g., in the U.S. legal system where, relative to “cold-blooded murder”, an emotion-allowance is made for “crimes of (seemingly inexplicable and hence partly excusable) passion”. But what if passions were not inexplicable? Should this allowance still be made?
I think readers will find their reasoning and their emotions well-challenged by this book.
Preeminent psychologist Lisa Barrett lays out how the brain constructs emotions in a way that could revolutionize psychology, health care, the legal system, and our understanding of the human mind. “Fascinating . . . A thought-provoking journey into emotion science.”—The Wall Street Journal “A singular book, remarkable for the freshness of its ideas and the boldness and clarity with which they are presented.”—Scientific American “A brilliant and original book on the science of emotion, by the deepest thinker about this topic since Darwin.”—Daniel Gilbert, best-selling author of Stumbling on Happiness The science of emotion is in the midst of a…
I was piqued by the opportunity to read a Syrian author, one who decided not to flee the war-torn country. In this high-end novel, Khalifa tells the life stories of a gaggle of childhood friends of different ethnolinguistic and religious backgrounds, with the action taking place in and around the ancient Syrian city of Aleppo.
You’ll be swept up in pure “don’t leave your favorite chair” storytelling and the seemingly endless drama of life in Middle Eastern cultures and histories.
A sweeping tale of life and death, set in the Syrian capital at the turn of the twentieth century from the International prize winning author of Death is Hard Work and In Praise of Hatred.
"A soulful and perfectly unsentimental writer." Hisham Matar
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December, 1907: one morning after a night of drunken carousing in the city, Hanna and his friend Zakariya return home to their village near Aleppo-only to discover a scene of tragedy. A devastating flood has levelled their homes, shops and places of worship, and their neighbours, families and children are nearly all dead. Their lives will…
I first read Orwell’s 1984 as a youngster, perhaps 50 or more years ago. It was a scary book then, and it is an even more scary book now!
First published in 1949, it was aimed at the then-Soviet Union and the totalitarian countries in its emerging ideological orbit. Today, one would list Russia, China, North Korea, and similar countries. But wait! With the advent of the internet, CCTV, “smart” phones and their data gobbling “apps” and (un)social media, data brokers, and the “dark” web, privacy today has vanished everywhere. State and corporate surveillance has become commonplace even in so-called democracies.
Orwell’s dystopian novel remains relevant today. Give it another read.
1984 is the year in which it happens. The world is divided into three superstates. In Oceania, the Party's power is absolute. Every action, word, gesture and thought is monitored under the watchful eye of Big Brother and the Thought Police. In the Ministry of Truth, the Party's department for propaganda, Winston Smith's job is to edit the past. Over time, the impulse to escape the machine and live independently takes hold of him and he embarks on a secret and forbidden love affair. As he writes the words 'DOWN WITH BIG…
What war does to humans is amply documented. What war does to the rest of nature is not. War and Nature sifts through the available data to ask how differences in conflict type, technology, location, and duration produce different environmental harms (and sometimes none). The book produces numerous unexpected insights and concludes with a practical agenda for collecting and evaluating scientific evidence in future wars and suggestions about what the world's nature conservation organizations can do to help protect nature in war.
