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The Nature of the Beast: How Emotions Guide Us Hardcover – March 15, 2022

by David J. Anderson (Author)
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 38 ratings
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A pioneering neuroscientist offers a new way of understanding how emotions drive behavior

Does your dog get sad when you leave for the day? Does your cat purr because she loves you? Do bears attack when they’re angry? You can’t very well ask them. In fact, scientists haven’t been able to reach a consensus on whether animals even have emotions like humans do, let alone how to study them. Yet studies of animal emotion are critical for understanding human emotion and mental illness.
 
In The Nature of the Beast, pioneering neuroscientist David J. Anderson describes a new approach to solving this problem. He and his colleagues have figured out how to study the brain activity of animals as they navigate real-life scenarios, like fleeing a predator or competing for a mate. His research has revolutionized what we know about animal fear and aggression. Here, he explains what studying emotions and related internal brain states in animals can teach us about human behavior, offering new insights into why isolation makes us more aggressive, how sex and violence connect, and whether there’s a link between aggression and mental illness.
 
Full of fascinating stories, The Nature of the Beast reconceptualizes how the brain regulates emotions–and explains why we have them at all.

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  1. Print length
    304 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Basic Books
  4. Publication date
    March 15, 2022
  5. Dimensions
    6.35 x 1.35 x 9.8 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1541674634
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1541674639
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

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"The Nature of the Beast offers a stellar new paradigm for investigating inner brain states like emotion. With his famously clear-headed logic and a plain-spoken walk through the data, Anderson crafts a stunningly coherent and compelling work whose implications are potentially vast—especially if, as seems likely, it enables breakthrough treatments in psychiatric care, at long last."―Patricia Churchland, University of California, San Diego

“The Nature of the Beast presents an insightful new framework for understanding how the brain regulates emotion. With wry humor, David J. Anderson walks readers through the wonders of how neurons—funny little computational units of the brain—give rise to such rich and complex things as emotions. His fruitfly work is both legendary, and well, fruitful, in helping to elucidate how it is that our brains respond to information in the environment. Of all the major emotion books to have come out in the past decade, this is the most illuminating and useful of the bunch. An incredible work.”
 ―Dr. Daniel Levitin, author of Successful Aging

“We humans spend most of our waking hours in a subjective state, wallowing in a “felt" sense of life. What is that and how do brains create it? Fearlessly, David Anderson takes on the central issue of neuroscience and provides a roadmap to truly understand this reality. Surprisingly, he reveals the way to get there is to study the fly brain not the millions of psychiatric patients that are waiting for help. This field needs new ideas and this book provides it.”―Michael S. Gazzaniga, University of California, Santa Barbara

About the Author

David J. Anderson is Seymour Benzer Professor of Biology and Director of the TianQiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech, where he studies the neurobiology of emotion. Anderson is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and founding advisor of the Allen Institute for Brain Research. He is a recipient of the Perl-UNC Neuroscience Prize and the Edward M. Skolnick Prize in Neuroscience, and a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Anderson has written for the New York Times, appeared on All Things Considered, and his TED talk on emotion has been viewed more than 1.5 million times. He lives in Pasadena, California. 

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Basic Books (March 15, 2022)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1541674634
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1541674639
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.05 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.35 x 1.35 x 9.8 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 38 ratings

About the author

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David J. Anderson

David J. Anderson

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Dr. Anderson is the Seymour Benzer Professor of Biology, the Leadership Chair and the Director of the TianQiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, CA. He is also an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He received his A.B. from Harvard, his Ph.D. in Cell Biology from the Rockefeller University, where he trained with the late Nobel Laureate Guenter Blobel, and his postdoctoral training at Columbia University with Nobel Laureate Richard Axel. For the first 20 years of his career, Dr. Anderson's research originally focused on the biology of neural stem cells. More recently, Dr. Anderson has switched his research focus to the study of neural circuits that control emotional behaviors in animal models. He has been at the forefront of applying new technologies for neural circuit manipulation, such as optogenetics and pharmacogenetics, to the study of emotional behaviors such as fear, anxiety and aggression, in both mice and the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Anderson has trained over 50 postdoctoral fellows and Ph.D. students in his 32 years on the faculty at Caltech. He has been a recipient of continuous research support from the NIH since 1986, and an HHMI Investigator since 1989. He has also been a Paul G. Allen Distinguished Investigator. Dr. Anderson has received additional funding from agencies and foundations such as NARSAD, the Pew Foundation, the Simons Foundation, and the Sloan Foundation. Dr. Anderson's awards include an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, Searle Scholars Award, the Charles Judson Herrick Award in Comparative Neurology, the Alden Spencer Award in Neurobiology from Columbia University, the 2017 Perl-UNC Prize in Neuroscience and the 2018 Edward M. Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience from MIT. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2007 was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He has authored over 200 articles in peer-reviewed journals, including Nature, Cell and Neuron, and has served as an adviser for the Allen Institute for Brain research and the NIH BRAIN Initiative. Dr. Anderson’s TEDx talk, “Your brain is more than a bag of chemicals,” has been viewed more than 1.4 million times.

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
38 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

BOOM
5.0 out of 5 stars Do fruit flies feel fear?
Reviewed in the United States on March 27, 2022
Verified Purchase
We can't know what fruit flies, mice, or even chimpanzees feel, but David Anderson and his team have created a clear framework for analyzing emotion primitives in bugs and animals. Emotion primitives is a term coined by the author and refers to the evolutionary building blocks of emotions. His book takes us on an incredible scientific journey of ingenuity, luck, and utilization of the latest technological advances to unlock secrets of emotion primitives.

David challenges the view put forward by Lisa Feldman Barrett in her book How Emotions Are Made, in which she argues that emotions don't live in distinct parts of the brain. Yet, David's team consistently manipulates emotion primitives in the lab by targeting specific brain regions. For example, nuanced aspects of defensive behaviors and aggression were essentially turned off and on by isolating the same group of neurons across different species.

I love the part of his story when his wife challenges him to connect his scientific discoveries with their usefulness in real-world applications. With this in mind, he addresses why the FDA has failed to approve any new psychiatric drugs in 50 years and suggests that his research can help pave the way for effective mental health medications.

While we can't tell what fruit flies feel, David has illustrated that they experience far more than just reflexes. The same building blocks of human emotions are active in bugs and beasts.
9 people found this helpful
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CST
5.0 out of 5 stars A fantastic and important read.
Reviewed in the United States on April 27, 2022
I am a career neuroscientist (but have no formal relationship to the author or business affiliation to the book or publisher). The Nature of the Beast is a wonderful read for anyone interested in the neuroscience of emotions, aggression and how internal states drive behavior. Anderson is the world expert in these topics. The book is accessible to non-scientists and deeply rooted in data. All people, but especially those who know or treat people with emotional or behavioral disorders would be wise to read this book.
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Berliner
3.0 out of 5 stars not overly well written and mainly on flies and mice
Reviewed in Germany on June 11, 2022
Verified Purchase
Ich habe dieses Buch gelesen als Kontrapunkt zu Lisa Berret Feldman‘s Position.
Ich fand es allerdings weder besonders gut geschrieben, noch haben sich hier viele Aha-Erlebnis eingestellt.
es bleibt bei einer robusten Aufzählung derzeitiger Forschungsergebnisse zu Fruchtfliegen und Mäusen
3 people found this helpful
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BH
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book. Clearing concise information. Best book on the subject matter available.
Reviewed in Australia on September 7, 2023
Verified Purchase
Extremely well written. Clear and concise.
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