Why We Feel: The Science of Human Emotion (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "WHEN I FIRST MET DAVID, HE WAS SITTING NERvously on a small wooden chair in a psychiatrist's office..." (more)
Key Phrases: affective value system, inner genetic algorithm, long ancestral history, Miss Maynell, John Blanchard, Round Robin (more...)

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?

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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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; illustrated edition edition (April 8, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 073820109X
• ISBN-13: 978-0738201092
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #927,995 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Pleasure To Read, December 16, 1999

By	Willem Vandenbroek (Ann Arbor, MI) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

A very well written and tightly argued look at "the science of human emotions" and a pleasure to read. I would also commend it as a good companion to the more widely publicized book by Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens. Johnston focusses on emotions and explains consciousness, including consciousness of emotions, as an "emergent phenomenon" of the composition and arrangement of the brain, and delves no further into anatomy. Damasio picks up from there and tries to say something about how the structure and organization of the brain actually accomplishes this property. Readers may want to ponder the conceptual device of "emergence" which plays such an important part in Johnston's exposition. To say that "speed" in a car is an emergent property of the car, and does not reside in the carburetor or the transmission, does not prevent us from showing how the carburetor and transmission accomplish speed, but does help us understand that selection is working on the whole system and the arrangement of its parts and not on the individual components. Likewise with consciousness. In addition, because Johnston is rhetorically opposing the idea of a correspondence theory of the truth, he stresses the arbitrariness, other than for survival, of the neural representations of our environment, which "really" consists primarily of a whirling chaos of photons, energy particles, and electromagnetic radiations. His argument is very effective, yet somehow our brain's ability to organize this environment has allowed us to come up with pi, build bridges that don't fall down, and develop a mathematics with an amazing capacity to describe the universe; our representations do seem to give us some powerful access to something out there. Both subjects display the force of Johnston's prose, which in part can be attributed, I think, to the clarity that derives from taking a strong rhetorical stance. Throughout the book, the sense one gets is of a powerful intellect in full command of his material.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Virtual Reality, November 28, 1999

By	JRK (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

Johnston is extremely convincing in his explanation of how pleasant and unpleasant sensations evolved. For example, he explains that the pleasant sensation of "sweetness" is not a property of sugar molecules, but an illusion of the brain that emerged through natural selection because sugar is a great source of energy. Using persuasive reasoning he explains such things as why rotten eggs smell bad, why tissue damage causes the illusion of pain, and why we feel complex emotions such as love and sadness. This book is a great read that may just challenge your entire view of reality.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Truly thought provoking, entertaining and well written., May 2, 2002

By	Jeff K. "jeff4314" (Fremont, CA.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Why We Feel (Helix Books) (Paperback)

Wow. I am what could be described as a "slacker" with "some college", but I enjoy reading books about science, particularly those that aim to explain why things are the way they are...I picked up "Why we Feel" because it seemed like an interesting topic. As a matter of fact, the guy at the counter read the tile and commented "That's a good question!". I feel that this is a book everybody should read. It gives so much insight into who we are that I feel truly thankful that I read it. Feelings. What would life be without them? As the author argues, there would be no point to life at all.

This book goes a long way to answering questions like why do some things feel good and others feel bad? I would sum it up thus: There is, in reality, no point for life to exist. So, emotions are nature's way of motivating us to keep on living! When you do something that will increase your chances of reproducing, you feel good. This includes falling in love, having sex, gaining resources such as food or shelter, etc. As an example on how a negative emotion helps you live, consider if you were a cave man and you found a bone with a particular size and shape that allowed you to beat up your enemies and kill animals for food. If you lost this tool one day, you would feel deep sadness. This negative feeling would be nature punishing you for losing a valuable resource that increases your chances for survival. The author explains how emotions evolved, and other concepts such as why we consider certain characteristics as "beautiful" and certain tastes as good are really just nature's way of steering us towards what we need to reproduce.

The book is short and completely free of fluff or egotistical rambling. The author writes extremely well and keeps a nice constant pace throughout. I read this book in two sittings and will re-read it many times I'm sure. As a non-scientist I found it slightly dense at times, but it's short and interesting enough to re-read. I recommend this book to anyone who is curious about why things are the way they are. If you want to learn about life, not just Human life, but your dog and animals as well, this is a wonderful book. You'll never look at yourself or other people the same way again after being exposed to what modern science has to say about the origin and purpose of human emotions. I will definately buy his next book, if there is one.