Why We Feel: The Science of Human Emotion - Hardcover

Johnston, Victor S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 073820109X ISBN 13: 9780738201092

Publisher: Basic Books, 1999

Synopsis

Why do we think some people are beautiful? Why do orgasms feel good? Why do we get angry? Anxious? In this intriguing book, biopsychologist Victor Johnston explores the origins of human emotions. Drawing on computer science, neurobiology, and evolutionary psychology, he shows us that emotions are not some strange accident of nature, but are instead the basis of learning and reasoning, and help us to adapt to a complex, rapidly changing environment. In the process, he offers a radical new view of reality: What we see, hear, smell, feel—even what we consider beautiful—is not an accurate representation of the world around us; rather, our feelings are illusions, shaped by millions of years of evolution. In clear and colorful prose, Johnston helps us navigate the intimate relationship between our private conscious feelings and our biological survival—and tells us what this means for human creativity, innovation, and free will.

About this title

About the Author

Victor S. Johnston is a professor of biopsychology at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. His research on beauty has been featured in Newsweek and in "The Science of Sex," a Discovery Channel documentary.

Reviews

The world, according to Johnston, professor of psychobiology at New Mexico State University, is dramatically different from the way in which any of us experience it. In fact, he argues, the world is a dark, silent, tasteless, odorless and colorless place. We create all that we sense: the brilliant color of a sunset, the mouthwatering sweetness of a peach, the acrid odor of rotten eggs. All of our sensual abilities, indeed our ability to feel any emotions, are best envisioned as emergent properties of the neural processes in our brain. Sugar, for example, is neither inherently sweet nor satisfying. Rather, we believe it so because over evolutionary time those most drawn to the energy in sugar were the ones most likely to survive and successfully reproduce. Johnston does an impressive job of explaining how millions of years of evolution are capable of yielding complex behaviors. He demonstrates that computers are capable of learning and developing preferences. Arguing by analogy, he concludes that human reasoning and likes and dislikes are outgrowths of the evolutionary process by which neural networks deal with rapidly changing environments. Johnston concludes his challenging book by discussing the implications this sort of evolutionary worldview has on the concept of free will.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Pushing the Darwinist explanation of the mind, Johnson maintains that our emotions are "evolved adaptive illusions of a conscious mind." Whatever one's opinion of his argument, one can't gainsay the welcome rhetorical clarity of its presentation. Johnson is a psychobiologist who here interweaves his computerized experiments on facial recognition with an interpretation of the evolutionary advantages promoted by the primary emotions of fear, anger, joy, sadness, surprise, and disgust. These are emergent functions of the brain's organization, proposes Johnson, and their evolutionary fitness is shaped by each emotion's hedonic tone (pleasant or unpleasant) and its intensity. Tone and intensity receive the interesting definition of being "amplifications of the ultimate reproductive consequences arising from current . . . social circumstances" --that being one explanation of a person's disappointment over a dateless Saturday night. Johnson mitigates his material view of mind with the practical question of what being human would be like without emotion: quite possibly, impossible. Ably argued, his work is a provocative exploration of the emotional component of the mystery of consciousness. Gilbert Taylor

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 073820109X
• ISBN 13: 9780738201092
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224