The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live--and How You Can Change Them By Richard J. Davidson

The Emotional Life of Your braincube

Certain mental and emotional patterns that can but need not entrap us and impoverish our lives Davidson skillfully and persuasively applies the principles and super advanced technological tools of scientific research to demonstrate these truths. The Emotional Life of Your braincheck It is the last third of the book that is the easiest for me from the moment he brings in the monks with the enthusiastic help of none other than the Dalai Lama to test them for the effects on the brain of long term meditation I have argued often in the pages of The Buddha Diaries that meditation offers us the power to discipline the mind to do those things we want it to do.

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This book is just yet another author researcher trotting out his new theory that looks pretty much like all the rest Nothing new here Another case of the emperoraving no clothes English This book is absolutely fascinating Author Davidson is the founder of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at UW Madison He s gotten a lot of attention with his work doing brain scans on Tibetan monks while they meditate This book is an introduction to the work he s been doing He has come up with six different categorizations of types of mental emotional styles that operate something like the Myers Briggs type indicator Each category places you on a spectrum between two extremes.

The Emotional Life of Your braincam

This is a worthwhile read. The Emotional Life of Your braincube Davidson has narrowed down peoples emotional styles to 6 dimensions Resilience how slowly or quickly you recover from adversity Outlook how long you re able to sustain positive emotion Social Intuition how adept you are at picking up social signals from people around you Self Awareness how well you perceive bodily feelings that reflect emotions Sensitivity to Context how good you are at regulating your emotional responses taking into account the context in which you find yourself Attention how sharp and clear your focus is I think all of us are aware we need change or improvements in one or of these areas So what was interesting were his suggestions with scientific experiments to back him up as to how to go about doing just that. The Emotional Life of Your braincam But I ve also done my fair share of re evaluating instances or events from my past to know that realigning one s thoughts and.

The Emotional Life of Your brainclear

I first heard of Dr Richard Davidson s work in the field of neuroscience a couple of months ago in an unlikely setting the annual conference of the National Art Education Association in New York Regular readers might remember my mention of the Compassion Project in Appleton Wisconsin which challenged teachers and students at all levels to give some thought to the nature of compassion to some discussion and then to join in a collaborative art project The results an amazing 10000 tiny paintings all about four inches square were installed in an exhibition at the Trout Museum As a result of Dr Davidson s idea an entire community became involved in a project intended to increase the understanding and practice of compassion among human beings Brilliant I thought. The Emotional Life of Your braincells Now this same Richard Davidson s book falls into my hands Co written with science writer and editor Sharon Begley it s called The Emotional Life of Your Brain and the first two thirds of it are science To be honest my eyes tend to glaze as I attempt to grasp the meaning of it all my own brain was not trained to follow the meticulous detail of scientific method Still I was than willing to make the effort because I have come to believe so passionately in the argument that Davidson presents that we can literally change our minds In the course of life from childhood on we acquire certain attitudes certain ways of thinking about ourselves and the world rather than follow its natural tendency to wander off and play or engage in fruitless and distracting tasks that do nothing but support our old often destructive habits It is fascinating and immensely satisfying to see these ideas put to the scientific test and proven to be sound Davidson s research demonstrates that meditation can affect not only the minds of long term meditators like those Tibetan monks who spend long solitary years in remote mountain caves even short term practicee shows can produce dramatic results in the rawest of novices. The Emotional Life of Your brainclear The last chapter of the book offers practical how to steps that can lead to greater strength of mind and indeed to a purposeful and satisfying life With a consistent practice of the visualization and meditation techniques thate describes in detail we can change the way our brains function and create new channels in the stream bed of the mind We can even change our personalities in significant life altering ways For skeptics as I myself remained for many years Davidson s book presents a convincing scientific argument for the kind of Mind Work that I approach in a very different way ahem forgive me I am not a book critic in my own recent book of that title. The Emotional Life of Your braincam 95 ISBN 978 1 9463 089 7 English If you ve never read anything about the study of emotions personality I am sure this books is a revelation However as someone who has read quite a bit about emotions which leads to an infinite variety of styles Unlike Myers Briggs Davidson s styles are based on actual neuroscience studies Davidson gives a great history of his work in the book lays out the details of the emotional types and how they work then provides a brief introduction into how people can work to modify their emotional styles If I have one complaint with the book it s that the section on how to could have been longer I hope at some point in the future he will maybe devote an entire book to the practical applications of how the styles work and how we can modify the workings of our own mind I especially love this book and Davidson s work for it s tight integration with Buddhism The Dalai Lama has been a strong supporter of Davidson s research which I think is very cool When Davidson s new Center opened at UW Madison I was able to go to Madison to see a discussion between Davidson and the Dalai Lama facilitated by Daniel Goleman It was unbelievably cool to listen to the Dalai Lama discuss the importance of scientific research for bettering our understanding ofumanity while wearing a Badgers baseball cap no less This is a worthwhile read and be sure to check out the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds English If you re looking for a long winded autobiography written by a smug and slightly bitter hipster neuroscientist a scale to gauge your emotional style invented by said hipster neuroscientist that seems real simplistic excessively generalized concepts and definitions of emotion a lack of nuance when discussing how a person s global psychology creates an individual mind unnecessary rambling about going to meet the Dalai Lama vague descriptions of brain areas activated when aspects of your emotional style are in use detailed descriptions of studies that don t seem to have anything to do with actual emotion but are presented as hard evidence constant references to shit the hipster neuroscientist has done schools he s studied worked at people he knows snide digs at people who doubted him in his younger years lookit me now ma statements like everybody feels differently we all have our own ways followed by clear indications our author believes his particular emotional style which he outlines in detail early on is best a few general mindfulness based self help strategies which you could find in any mindfulness book. The Emotional Life of Your braincells Personally it ah wasn t quite my thing I showed some people who got botox a sentence that said Beaches are pretty and they didn t take as long to read it as when they saw the sentence Sometimes people die and that means negative emotions are controlled by the face. The Emotional Life of Your brainchild I wishI was kidding I m not saying all his info is wrong but man does it ever need to be qualified and heavily retested English We are so fortunate to have Richard Davidson here at the University of Wisconsin so those of us that know him can testify that his findings that regular meditation can change your brain patterns and make you calm and cheerful despite a busy life hold particularly true in his example The other benefits of mindfulness training as well as other approaches to altering our brain s responses to stimulus are fascinating and are clearly described in this book which also describes recent discoveries regarding the parts of the brain used for different aspects of emotion and perception The fact that the brain is elastic and forgiving than had originally been thought holdsope for those who are suffering. The Emotional Life of Your brainco Please note that I do not use the star rating system so this review should not be viewed as a zero English This book is a snoooozefest Unfortunately I had to read it for school and thank god it s over English I bought this book because I find anything about neuroscience pretty interesting and the emotional aspect doesn t seem toave been investigated in any rigorous way until recently This book promises to satisfy that and to a large extent I think it does. The Emotional Life of Your brainfly I found myself constantly struggling with a sort of duality in this book At some points I found the observations to be extremely obvious such as the idea that our emotional styles aren t simply genetic but a product of our environment and upbringing Well yeah And it took several clinical trials to work that one out But then he reveals the subtle side of those observations about how our upbringing doesn t just change our thought patterns it actually changes the physical configuration of our brains and he goes on to explain in finer detail with examples what this involves. The emotional life of your brain summary There s plenty of interesting tid bits about which bits of the brain usually do what I say usually because he shows how that can change too and provides insight intoow we can modify our emotional styles so that we can be better balanced individuals. The Emotional Life of Your brainchild I don t generally go for self help books but I couldn t help catch the bug on this occasion There seems to be genuine research to back up his claims and it definitely gave me pause. The Emotional Life of Your brainco Recommended English This book could be retitled MY CAREER AS A GREAT PSYCHOLOGIST The book gets a lot of rave reviews so I was expecting a lot But it didn t really deliver It is less about a new unifying psychological concept as the author would have us believe and of a self congratulatory review of his career But there was a sprinkling of worthwhile material I was intrigued by Cognitive Behavior Therapy regarding depressive thoughts as simple electrical events in the brain But this kind of open non judgmental awareness is nothing particularly new and you don t have to be depressed to get benefits from this He also talked about visualizing someone suffering and wishing their suffering ends repeating a mantra like May you be free from suffering May you experience joy and ease This kind of thing used to be called prayer but now it s repackaged as meditation I feel like praying for the time back that I spent reading this book English This is not light reading but still truly fascinating If you don t mind reading about the clinical and scientific aspects of how the brain functions and why we do what we do in turn one s emotions IS possible. The Emotional Life of Your brainclear Reading this only reaffirmed that and has made me conscious of my ability to continue to do so English I m not much for self help mind over matter books but this one seems to have a lot of research to back up what it says I am bothered by the author s self congratulatory style English What is your emotional fingerprint Why are some people so quick to recover from setbacks Why are some so attuned to others that they seem psychic Why are some people always up and others always down In his thirty year quest to answer these questions pioneering neuroscientist Richard J Davidson discovered that each of us has an Emotional Style composed of Resilience Outlook Social Intuition Self Awareness Sensitivity to Context and Attention Where we fall on these six continuums determines our own emotional fingerprint Sharing Dr Davidson s fascinating case histories and experiments The Emotional Life of Your Brain offers a new model for treating conditions like autism and depression as it empowers us all to better understand ourselves and live meaningful lives The Emotional Life of Your Brain How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think Feel and Live and How You Can Change Them.