Why am I passionate about this?
I love words, their sound, and their power. When I was a little girl, I would adopt one and make it my own. My parents long recalled my love affair with “nonsense,” which I would wield like a wand when hearing anything silly or irrational. I think words are interwoven with what we feel in a deep and inextricable way. I am also fascinated with how Indian thought offers millennia of wide and deep explorations of human experience in ways that trouble the basic assumptions of the modern West.
Maria's book list on helping you identify emotions you didn’t know you had
Why did Maria love this book?
I find Lisa Feldman Barrett both riveting and accessible. She’s a neuroscientist who can write lucidly, and she has a new tale to tell about what emotions are.
Far from being universal essences with single, identifiable fingerprints (aka Darwin or Ekman), emotions are constructed in a neuroplastic way by the complex interactions of the brain, body, language, culture, and experience. Emotions are made, not given.
And she gave me one of my favorite ideas: “emotional granularity,” the notion that the richer our emotional vocabulary and ability to name and describe our experience, the wiser and more flourishing our lives.
7 authors picked How Emotions Are Made as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
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…