by Richard J. Davidson
and, Sharon
Begley
I have mixed feelings about this book. Much of the book covers the biological basis for emotional style, how to determine what your emotional style is, and how to slightly tweak your style if it's holding your back...
Emotional style covers six traits which can all be measured in an fMRI-- Outlook, Sensitivity to Context, Social Intuition, Self Awareness, Attention, Resilience.
Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm having problems remembering the difference between "Sensitivity to Context" and "Social Intuition"
The book covers the experiments that lead to this discovery, and exercises that would help one increase or decrease there response to each style.
The book also has a large section on meditation, which actually turned me off of this topic. The benefits of mediation have been popping up in popular research. The book includes a history of how it became popular-- it seams that many of core neuro-emotion researchers were into forms of Buddhism. Not that I'm against Buddhism, just the bias is now more apparent to me. If these authors and researches had been into interpretive dance, would the benefits of interpretive dance be the topic?
Not that I doubt the benefits of meditation. It's just that I am no longer confident of the benefits of mediation relative to other choices.
The book discusses that monks who have gone through thousands of hours of compassion meditation and as a result have distinct signatures in the fMri's of their brains. What if I don't have thousands of hours to dedicate to compassion meditation? What if I instead spent thousands of hours actually being compassionate?
There are benefits to mindfulness mediation. What If I skip the mediation, and pay attention to what I am doing with nonjudgmental awareness?
The book hints at these questions, but never answers them.
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