How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

This is best thought of two books - the first, up to chapter 8, is a revelatory look at the category error we've made around understanding emotions, revealing through a wide variety of experiments and research how emotions are constructed in real time as an act of categorization - they don't "exist" anywhere in the body. The second, comprising most of the rest of the book, is a combined self-help book/pontification about topics that Barrett is demonstrably unqualified for (there are so many sections that essentially begin "I don't know anything about this area, but let me shoot from the hip and tell entire fields why they're wrong and how to do it better"). Citing misleading, racist stereotypes in the final chapter doesn't help. I would highly recommend picking up this book from your library and putting it down after chapter 8.

Even though it's been a few years since I listened to this one, it often resurfaces in my thoughts. In short, the theory of #emotion presented in this book is powerful because of its flexibility and its ability to explain: - how #reframing is even possible - how there can be such large #emotional differences between cultural groups - how it could have been possible that the way humans construct emotion has changed over the course of #history