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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
How did feelings evolve? How do they develop within us? What is their function, their use to us? How does our nervous system implement them?
How did feelings evolve? How do they develop within us? What is their function, their use to us? How does our nervous system implement them?
These four questions, posed in somewhat different form by the Nobel Prize-winning biologist Niko Tinbergen, propel psychologist Victor Johnston's well-crafted examination of human emotions. Drawing on recent advances in psychology, biology, and the cognitive sciences, he looks into such matters as the role of the emotions in psychological well-being ("the failure to develop an early emotional bond with a single caretaker leads to slow development, withdrawal, depression, and a variety of later developing social problems") and the adaptive advantages--or, at times, disadvantages--of such deep-seated inner feelings as envy and joy. Where earlier scientists were much given to exploring the emotions as responses to external stimuli, Johnston shows that "input from the external world is really not necessary for conscious experiences to occur," as experiments in dreams, sensory deprivation, and hallucinations have shown. Instead, he considers the rich inner world of the emotions as a problem of evolutionary theory, a matter of adaptation and response that favors the survival of genes. Johnston's overview of the science of emotions makes for consistently interesting reading, and it points the way to further research. --Gregory McNamee
From Publishers Weekly
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.
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