Molecules of Emotion: Why You Feel the Way You Feel

The bestselling and revolutionary book that serves as a “landmark in our understanding of the mind-body connection” (Deepak Chopra, MD).

Why do we feel the way we feel? How do our thoughts and emotions affect our health?

In her groundbreaking book Molecules of Emotion, Candace Pert—an extraordinary neuroscientist who played a pivotal role in the discovery of the opiate receptor—provides startling and decisive answers to these and other challenging questions that scientists and philosophers have pondered for centuries.

Pert’s pioneering research on how the chemicals inside our bodies form a dynamic information network, linking mind and body, is not only provocative, it is revolutionary. By establishing the biomolecular basis for our emotions and explaining these scientific developments in a clear and accessible way, Pert empowers us to understand ourselves, our feelings, and the connection between our minds and our bodies—or bodyminds—in ways we could never possibly have imagined before. From explaining the scientific basis of popular wisdom about phenomena such as "gut feelings" to making comprehensible recent breakthroughs in cancer and AIDS research, Pert provides us with an intellectual adventure of the highest order.

Molecules of Emotion is a landmark work, full of insight and wisdom and possessing that rare power to change the way we see the world and ourselves.

Dr. Candace B. Pert (1946–2013) was an internationally recognized neuroscientist and pharmacologist who played a key role in the discovery of the opioid receptor. Dr. Pert published over 250 research articles and was featured as an expert in Bill Moyers’s PBS series Healing and the Mind, in PBS’s Healing Quest. She was a significant contributor to the emergence of Mind-Body Medicine as an area of legitimate scientific research in the 1980s, earning her the title of “The Mother of Psychoneuroimmunology,” and “The Goddess of Neuroscience” by her many fans. Translated into over ten languages, her bestselling book The Molecules of Emotion was a groundbreaking provides startling and decisive answers to these and other challenging questions that scientists and philosophers have pondered for centuries.

Deepak Chopra, MD, founder of the Chopra Foundation and Chopra Global, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a clinical professor of family medicine and public health at the University of California, San Diego, and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of more than ninety books, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. Time magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.”