Gratitude

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  This book had a nontraditional family with more than the usual number of parents. It began life with the editors Courtney Young and Andrea Schulz at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and eighteen months later, both had been wooed away by compelling job offers. For a few months, I was a single parent with support from Bruce Nichols, publisher at HMH and effectively the book’s great-great-grandfather. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt then hired Alex Littlefield as the new editor, who had a strikingly different vision of child-rearing from mine (leading to a stormy adolescence), but as is often the case, the best ideas come from vigorous debate, and I thank Alex for the way we ultimately shepherded a leaner and stronger book to its graduation day and released it into the world. I’m extremely grateful to the book’s adopted uncle, Jamie Ryerson at the New York Times, who helped at the last minute to trim three chapters that had become too lengthy and overwhelmingly technical. I am in awe of Jamie’s skill to pare down material to the absolute essentials while retaining its style and voice. He may look like a mild-mannered editor, but when he stands in just the right light, you can see his knightly armor glinting in the sun. Max Brockman, who is my agent and the village wizard, played an absolutely essential role in bringing this book to life. Not only did he navigate me through the ins and outs of the business, but each time we hit a hurdle during the long writing process, he was always ready with wise council. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Yes, it takes a village to write a book, but my village is not the only one on the planet of emotion research. The other major village, which I’ve called “the classical view,” is home to many creative and accomplished scientists, some of whom are my close colleagues. Our villages share territory, so we necessarily have conflicts and rivalries, but at the end of the day, we continue the debates over drinks and dinner. For two decades of animated discussion and close friendship, I thank James Gross and George Bonanno. Likewise, I am grateful to Paula Niedenthal, who introduced me to embodied cognition in general and to Larry Barsalou’s work in particular. For informative conversations, I also thank Andrea Scarantino, Disa Sauter (for details on her study of the Himba), Ralph Adolphs, and Steven Pinker. I’d also like to thank Jaak Panksepp, who a number of years ago graciously accepted Jim Russell’s and my invitation to come to Boston and teach a month-long graduate seminar on his theoretical views.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  AS I’D REQUESTED BACK in January, Ping Xi had laid out a set of clothes for me on the dining table: sneakers, track pants, T-shirt, zip-up hoodie. My credit cards and driver’s license, passport, birth certificate, and a thousand dollars cash were in the envelope I’d sealed and given him to hold. There was a bottle of Evian, an apple in a plastic bag from the grocery store, and a sample-size tube of Neutrogena sunscreen—a thoughtful touch. The table had been cleared of all the Post-it notes, which I appreciated, but then I found the cluster in the trash, like a tossed-out bouquet of daisies. I picked one up and read it: “Don’t forget: clothes, shoes, the envelope, keys. Buy me some sunscreen, please.” And then on another one, “Thanks, good luck.” A smiley face. My old white fur coat hung on the hook by the front door. A Post-it note stuck to the wall read: “When I bought this for you, it was simply because I wanted you to have it. I’ll really miss working with you. PX.” The door was unlocked. I got dressed, put the coat on, went out and down the elevator to the lobby and made my way dizzily toward the light exploding through the glass doors onto the street. “Miss?” I heard the doorman say. “Can you hear me?” Then the stiff rustle of his uniform pants as he squatted down and cradled my head in his hands. I hadn’t realized that I’d hit the floor. Someone brought me a glass of water. A woman held my hand and sat me in a leather armchair in the lobby. The doorman gave me the egg salad sandwich from his brown-bag lunch. “Is there anyone we can call?” People were so nice. “No, there’s nobody. Thank you. I just had a dizzy spell.” It took another week until I had the strength to make it outside and walk around the block. The next day I walked to Second Avenue. The next day, all the way to Lexington. I ate prepackaged egg salad sandwiches from a deli on East Eighty-seventh. I sat for hours on a bench in Carl Schurz Park and watched the lapdogs doddling around a tiled, fenced-in area, their owners dodging the sun and clicking at their cell phones. Someone left a collection of books out on the curb one day on East Seventy-seventh Street, and I brought them home and read them all cover to cover. A history of drunk driving in America. An Indian cookbook. War and Peace. Mao II.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  This book would not have been possible without the support of the larger village of colleagues who generously shared their expertise on my journey from the land of clinical psychology to the land of neuroscience, with stops in social psychology, psychophysiology, and cognitive science along the way. My friends Jim Blascovich and Karen Quigley mentored me in the basics of the peripheral nervous system, and Karen taught me facial EMG. My neuroscience education began with the incomparable Michael Numan, who was encouraging and constantly available for questions, and Richard Lane, who encouraged me when I was first interested in the brain basis of emotion and introduced me to Scott Rauch at Massachusetts General Hospital. Scott enthusiastically gave me the opportunity to learn brain imaging, although I had no clue what I was doing at the time. I am also indebted to Chris Wright, who helped me conduct my first brain-imaging study, and with whom I secured my first large imaging grant from the National Institute on Aging. And my heartfelt thanks go out to the generous and thoughtful colleagues who spent time answering my questions, including Howard Fields, who was always available for enticing and enlightening discussions about the relation between nociception, reward, and interoceptive processing; Vijay Balasubramanian, who provided extremely useful explanations in response to my extensive questioning about the visual system; Thom Cleland, who enthusiastically shared his insights on the olfactory system; Moran Cerf, who gave me the inside scoop on intracranial electrical recording in live humans; and Karl Friston, who rewarded my out-of-the-blue email on predictive coding with an insightful email discussion wrapped in encouragement. Several others provided helpful answers to my questions via email or Skype, including Dayu Lin, who provided a detailed discussion of her research using optogenetics; Mark Bouton, who taught me the basics of contextual learning in mammals; Earl Miller for explaining the implications of his single-cell recording research on category learning in macaques; and Matthew Rushworth, who offered additional details about his mapping of the anterior cingulate cortex. I also offer my enduring thanks to some of my neuroanatomy colleagues who responded quickly, and in good cheer, to my incessant questions, no matter how arcane: Barb Finlay for knowing everything about everything, off the top of her head, and sharing generously; Helen Barbas for her model of information flow in the cortex, which is the cornerstone of my approach to the predictive brain; Miguel Ángel García Cabezas for his detailed explanations of neuroanatomy at the cellular level; Bud Craig, who knows more about the insula than perhaps anyone else on the planet; Larry Swanson for his rapid and informative answers and for connecting me with other neuroscientists, such as Murray Sherman, who answered my questions about the thalamus; and Georg Striedter for his expertise on brain evolution.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Fear of Flying has been read by people who rarely read novels. For many aficionados, it is more than a book—it is a part of their lives. Often people will stop me on the street, on airplanes, in trains and tell me where they were when they first read “that book” and how it impacted their lives. “I remember I was in Greece, wondering whether to go to bed with a beautiful young man—and I did (or I didn’t), so thank you so much for changing my life.” One man I met at a New York dinner party exclaimed: “Whenever I saw that book on a woman’s night table, I knew I was gonna get lucky.” Isadora and I have been embraced (or denounced) as liberators, corrupters, teachers, friends. We have been banned and burned, but we have been read. And reread and underlined and passed along. For a writer, those are the ultimate compliments. I am more grateful than I can easily express. I used to worry that Fear of Flying was so much more famous than my twenty or so other books that it dwarfed my life’s work. I used to worry that they would put zipless fuck on my tombstone. Such worries are behind me. It is rare for an object of paper and ink to become an event in people’s lives. This book has had that extraordinary luck. As its maker, I am humbled by a miracle. —ERICA JONG New York City 11 December 2002 TWO “Every Woman Adores a Fascist” Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you. —Sylvia Plath A t 6 a.m. we landed at Frankfurt Flughafen and shuffled out into a rubber-floored lounge which, for all its gleaming newness, made me think of death camps and deportations. We waited an hour there while the 747 refueled. All the analysts sat stiffly on molded fiberglass chairs arranged in inflexible rows: gray, yellow, gray, yellow, gray, yellow…. The joylessness of the color scheme was matched only by the joylessness of their faces. Most of them were carrying expensive cameras, and despite their longish hair, tentative beards, wire-rimmed glasses (and wives dressed with an acceptably middle-class whiff of bohemia: cowhide sandals, Mexican shawls, Village silversmith jewelry), they exuded respectability. The sullen essence of squareness. That was, when I thought about it, what I had against most analysts. They were such unquestioning acceptors of the social order. Their mildly leftist political views, their signing of peace petitions and decorating their offices with prints of Guernica were just camouflage. When it came to the crucial issues: the family, the position of women, the flow of cash from patient to doctor, they were reactionaries.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  My daughter, Sophia, with grace and forbearance beyond her years, tolerated three years of my late-night, early-morning, and weekend preoccupations with her “little brother” (not to mention my occasional bouts of bad temper). If there was ever a justified case for sibling rivalry, this is it. Sophia, you are my girl. I wrote this book for you. I want you to understand the power of your own mind. When you were little, you would sometimes wake from a nightmare. We’d position your stuffed animals in a protective circle around your bed, and I would sprinkle some “fairy dust” and you’d get back to sleep. What’s remarkable is not that you believed in magic, but that you didn’t. We both knew it was pretend, and yet it worked. Your exuberant little four-year-old self had the superpower to create social reality with me, just as your courageous, funny, and insightful teenage self does now. You are an architect of your experience, even in times when you feel buffeted by the world. If Sophia was the reason that I began this book, then my husband, Dan, is the reason I completed it. Dan is often the calm behind my storm. For as long as I have known him, he has had an unshakeable belief in my ability to do the extraordinary. Dan read every word of every book draft, often several times, and made this book better than anything I could have managed on my own. My brain will never be free from his oft-asked question, “Is this for the 1 percent?” (by which he meant my scientific colleagues, as opposed to a general audience), although now I am more likely to smile when my brain is simulating it. Among his many superpowers is the ability to simultaneously edit this book, soothe my worries, rub my back, cook dinner, suspend our entire social life without a trace of bitterness, and collect enough takeout menus to sustain us during my final months of writing. He never flinched, not once, even after it became clear that I had gotten us into something much more challenging than either of us knew at the outset. Dan’s other superpower (beyond his uncanny ability to choose the right-sized Tupperware every time) is that he can make me laugh when no one else can, because he knows me in a way that no one else does. I awaken every day of my life filled with gratitude and awe that he is beside me. Appendix ABrain Basics

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  They say publishing a book is like having a baby, but it takes longer and hurts more. Appropriately, this “baby” has many parents. There would be no Sex at Dawn without the insight, encouragement, and patience of our families, especially Frank, Julie, and Beth Ryan, Joana and Manel Ruas, Alzira Remane, Celestino Almeida, and Danial Jethá. Stephan Lang (whose name we inexcusably misspelled in the hardcover version of this book) and Henriette Klauser were incredibly generous in helping us put together a convincing book proposal. Our agent, Melissa Flashman, spent countless hours guiding us through the transition from proposal to manuscript. Unlike most agents, she kept reading and offering wise counsel throughout the entire publishing process, for which we are sincerely grateful. Many thanks to Ben Loehnen, our editor at HarperCollins, who believed in the book from the get-go (even while no doubt discreetly disagreeing with some of its content), and assistant editor Matthew Inman, for his rapid-response professionalism. Lisa Wolff did a first-class copyedit, catching more than a few potentially embarrassing mistakes. Those that snuck through or that we slipped in later are nobody’s fault but our own. Frank Ryan (WBE), Stanton Peele, Stanley Krippner, Julie Holland, Britt Winston, and Steve Mason masochistically read and re-read early drafts of the entire messy manuscript. Their comments were sadistically honest, which is exactly what we needed. In addition to their crucial scholarship, Robert Sapolsky, Todd Shackelford, Helen Fisher, Daniel Moses, and Frans de Waal contributed scarce free time to review parts of the manuscript. Finally, we thank the following people (in random order) for the many kinds of support and encouragement they’ve given us: Michael and Mireille Lang, Brian and Crosby O’Hare, Marta Cervera, Alejandra Peña, Dorothianne Henne, Naomi and Don Norwood, Octavi de Daniel, Adam Mendelson, Richard Schweid, David Darnell, Señor Manolo Reyes, Matt Dondet, Mark Plummer, Cybele Tom, Sean Doyle, Santiago Suso, Victoria Ribera, Antonio Berruezo, Eric Patterson, Don Cooper, Martijn van Duivendijk, Peggy and Raul Rossel, Nacho and Leo Valls-Jové, Celine Salvans, Carmen Palomar Lopez, Anamargarita Otero-Robertson, Viram, Voodoo, Maria da Luz Venâncio Guerreiro, João Alves Falcato, Mario Simões, Steve Taylor, Vince and Carrie Stamper, Susie Bright, Jacqui Deegan, and, of course, Dan, Terry, and D.J. NOTES Please visit sexatdawn.com for the latest news, further discussion, and updates on the issues raised in this book, or to contact the authors. Introduction 1. Maybe as recently as 4.5 million years ago. For a recent review of the genetic evidence, see Siepel (2009). 2. de Waal (1998), p. 5. 3. Some of these numbers are reported in McNeil et al. (2006) and Yoder et al. (2005). The hundred billion figure comes from http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-fg-vienna-porn25-2009mar25,0,7189584.story. 4. See “Yes, dear. Tonight again.” Ralph Gardner, Jr. The New York Times (June 9, 2008): http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/arts/09iht-08nights.13568273.html?_r=1 5. Full disclosure: Murdoch also owns HarperCollins, the publisher of this book. 6. Diamond (1987).

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  When you are with them, act as if they were stars and you were basking in their glow. Get them to talk, particularly about themselves. In social situa- The Seducer's Victims—The Eighteen Types • 153 tions, mute your own colors and let them look funny and radiant by com- parison. In general, play the Charmer. The reward of seducing Crushed Stars is that you stir up powerful emotions. They will feel intensely grateful to you for letting them shine. To whatever extent they had felt crushed and bottled up, the easing of that pain releases intensity and passion, all directed at you. They will fall madly in love. If you yourself have any star or dandy tendencies it is wise to avoid such victims. Sooner or later those tendencies will come out, and the competition between you will be ugly. The Novice. What separates Novices from ordinary innocent young peo- ple is that they are fatally curious. They have little or no experience of the world, but have been exposed to it secondhand—in newspapers, films, books. Finding their innocence a burden, they long to be initiated into the ways of the world. Everyone sees them as so sweet and innocent, but they know this isn't so—they cannot be as angelic as people think them. Seducing a Novice is easy. To do it well, however, requires a bit of art. Novices are interested in people with experience, particularly people with a touch of corruption and evil. Make that touch too strong, though, and it will intimidate and frighten them. What works best with a Novice is a mix of qualities. You are somewhat childlike yourself, with a playful spirit. At the same time, it is clear that you have hidden depths, even sinister ones. (This was the secret of Lord Byron's success with so many innocent women.) You are initiating your Novices not just sexually but experien- tially, exposing them to new ideas, taking them to new places, new worlds both literal and metaphoric. Do not make your seduction ugly or seedy— everything must be romantic, even including the evil and dark side of life. Young people have their ideals; it is best to initiate them with an aesthetic touch. Seductive language works wonders on Novices, as does attention to detail. Spectacles and colorful events appeal to their sensitive senses. They are easily misled by these tactics, because they lack the experience to see through them. Sometimes Novices are a little older and have been at least somewhat educated in the ways of the world. Yet they put on a show of innocence, for they see the power it has over older people. These are coy Novices, aware of the game they are playing—but Novices they remain. They may be less easily misled than purer Novices, but the way to seduce them is pretty much the same—mix innocence and corruption and you will fasci- nate them.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Out of gratitude and certainly love, she elevated this Jewish dandy and novelist to the peerage, making him Earl of Beaconsfield, the realization of a life- long dream. Disraeli knew how deceptive appearances can be: people were always judg- ing him by his face and by his clothes, and he had learned never to do the same to them. So he was not deceived by Queen Victoria's dour, sober exterior. Beneath it, he sensed, was a woman who yearned for a man to appeal to her feminine side, a woman who was affectionate, warm, even sexual. The extent to which this side of Victoria had been repressed merely revealed the strength of the feelings he would stir once he melted her reserve. Disraeli's approach was to appeal to two aspects of Victoria's personality that other people had squashed: her confidence and her sexuality. He was a master at flattering a person's ego. As one English princess remarked, "When I left the dining room after sitting next to Mr. Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest man in England. But after sitting next to Mr. Disraeli, I thought I was the cleverest woman in England." Disraeli worked his magic with a delicate touch, insinuating an atmosphere of amusement and relax- ation, particularly in relation to politics. Once the queen's guard was down, he made that mood a little warmer, a little more suggestive, subtly sexual— though of course without overt flirtation. Disraeli made Victoria feel desir- able as a woman and gifted as a monarch. How could she resist? How could she deny him anything? Our personalities are often molded by how we are treated: if a parent or spouse is defensive or argumentative in dealing with us, we tend to respond the same way. Never mistake people's exterior characteristics for reality, for the character they show on the surface may be merely a reflection of the people with whom they have been most in contact, or a front disguising its own opposite. A gruff exterior may hide a person dying for warmth; a repressed, sober-looking type may actually be struggling to conceal uncon- trollable emotions. That is the key to charm—feeding what has been repressed or denied. By indulging the queen, by making himself a source of pleasure, Dis- raeli was able to soften a woman who had grown hard and cantankerous. Indulgence is a powerful tool of seduction: it is hard to be angry or defen- sive with someone who seems to agree with your opinions and tastes. Charmers may appear to be weaker than their targets but in the end they are the more powerful side because they have stolen the ability to resist. 2.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I did not really need anyone to read my work at that point (because the work was mostly a preparation for the work to come) but I very much needed someone to approve of the act of writing. He did that. At times it was not clear whether he approved of my writing just so that I would not bother him in his depression or whether he enjoyed playing Henry Higgins to my Eliza Doolittle. But the fact was that he believed in me long before I believed in myself. It was as if during that long bad time in our marriage we reached each other indirectly through my writing. Though we did not read it together, we were united by it in our retreat from the world. We were both learning how to fish the unconscious. Bennett was sitting almost motionless in the living room pondering his father’s death, his grandfather’s death, all the deaths that had been heaped on his shoulders when he was barely old enough to grasp his own life. I was in my study writing. I was learning how to go down into myself and salvage bits and pieces of the past. I was learning how to sneak up on the unconscious and how to catch my seemingly random thoughts and fantasies. By closing me out of his world, Bennett had opened all sorts of worlds inside my own head. Gradually I began to realize that none of the subjects I wrote poems about engaged my deepest feelings, that there was a great chasm between what I cared about and what I wrote about. Why? What was I afraid of? Myself, most of all, it seemed. I began two novels in Heidelberg. Both of them had male narrators. I just assumed that nobody would be interested in a woman’s point of view. Besides, I didn’t want to risk being called all the things women writers (even good women writers) are called: “clever, witty, bright, touching, but lacks scope.” I wanted to write about the whole world. I wanted to write War and Peace —or nothing. No “lady writer” subjects for me. I was going to have battles and bullfights, and jungle safaris. Only I didn’t know a damn thing about battles and bullfights and jungle safaris (and neither do most men). I languished in utter frustration, thinking that the subjects I knew about were “trivial” and “feminine"—while the subjects I knew nothing of were “profound” and “masculine.” No matter what I did, I felt I was bound to fail. Either I would fail by writing or fail by not writing. I was paralyzed. Thanks to my luck, my sadness, my strange relationship with my husband, my stubborn determination (which I did not at all believe in then), I managed to write three books of poems in the next three years. I scrapped two and the third was published. Then a whole new set of problems began.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I elected to be her patient, after all. She gave me everything I asked for, and I appreciated her for that. I’m sure there were others like her out there, but the ease with which I’d found her, and the immediate relief that her prescriptions provided, made me feel that I’d discovered a pharmaceutical shaman, a magus, a sorcerer, a sage. Sometimes I wondered if Dr. Tuttle were even real. If she were a figment of my imagination, I’d find it funny that I’d chosen her over someone who looked more like one of my heroes—Whoopi Goldberg, for example. “Dial 9-1-1 if anything bad happens,” Dr. Tuttle told me. “Use reason when you feel you can. There’s no way to know how these medications will affect you.” At the beginning of this, I’d look up any new pills she gave me on the Internet to try to learn how much I was likely to sleep on any given day. But reading up on a drug sapped its magic. It made the sleep seem trite, just another mechanical function of the body, like sneezing or shitting or bending at the joint. The “side effects and warnings” on the Internet were discouraging, and anxieties over them amplified the volume of my thoughts, which was the exact opposite of what I hoped the pills would do. So I filled prescriptions for things like Neuroproxin, Maxiphenphen, Valdignore, and Silencior and threw them into the mix now and then, but mostly I took sleeping aids in large doses, and supplemented them with Seconols or Nembutals when I was irritable, Valiums or Libriums when I suspected that I was sad, and Placidyls or Noctecs or Miltowns when I suspected I was lonely. Within a few weeks, I’d accumulated an impressive library of psychopharmaceuticals. Each label bore the sign of the sleepy eye, the skull and crossbones. “Do not take this if you become pregnant.” “Take with food or milk.” “Store in a dry place.” “May cause drowsiness.” “May cause dizziness.” “Do not take aspirin.” “Do not crush.” “Do not chew.” Any normal person would have worried about what the drugs would do to her health. I wasn’t completely naive about the potential dangers. My father had been eaten alive by cancer. I’d seen my mother in the hospital full of tubes, brain dead. I’d lost a childhood friend to liver failure after she took acetaminophen on top of DayQuil in high school.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  I’m also grateful to Ronda Heilig, an agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Peter DiDomenica, who developed the TSA’s Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT) program while director of security policy at Boston Logan International Airport, for speaking with me about the ways that the classical view informed training at their respective agencies. Thanks also to the rest of the team at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: Naomi Gibbs, Taryn Roeder, Ayesha Mirza, Leila Meglio, Lori Glazer, Pilar Garcia-Brown, Margaret Hogan, and Rachael DeShano. I realize that it might sound odd, but I also want to acknowledge the Internet for playing an important part in the writing of this book, which required integrating and synthesizing copious material from diverse fields rapidly. When I had an idea, I was able to investigate it instantly by downloading relevant research papers in minutes, or buying virtually any book with overnight shipping. So a hearty thank-you to the engineers who brought us Google, Amazon (though for the amount I spent, they should be thanking me), and the many scientific journal websites that make their papers available online. This book was created in part with open-source software, including Subversion and a suite of Linux-based tools. And let’s not forget those who kept my body budget solvent during the writing of this book. I am truly, deeply grateful for their love and encouragement to Ann Kring, Batja Mesquita, Barb Fredrickson, James Gross, Judy Edersheim, Karen Quigley, Angie Hawk, and Jeanne Tsai. They provided both intellectual challenge and comfort during the long months of writing, not to mention the continual influx of chocolates, coffee, and other treats to keep me going. Special thanks for vital social support also goes to Florin and Magdalena Luca, and Carmen Valencia. I am deeply thankful for my extended family’s support. This includes my sisters-in-law, Louise Greenspan and Deborah Barrett; my goddaughter, Olivia Allison; and my nephew, Zac Rodrigo; and of course the incomparable (Uncle) Kevin Allison, whom you met virtually in chapters 6 and 7. And my deepest thanks to Mike Alves, trainer extraordinaire, and Barry Meklir, my miracle-working physical therapist, who together kept me walking and typing after sitting for sixteen hours a day; and to Victoria Krutan, who embodies the best of what massage therapy has to offer.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  In a similar vein, I owe a very special debt of gratitude to my distinguished colleague Bob Levenson. It is a gift when someone with a different point of view engages you in honest conversation, and Bob truly embodies this spirit of scientific exploration every time we meet. His curiosity and insightful observations consistently challenge me, and I consider him one of my most valued colleagues. I also have a deep appreciation and respect for Paul Ekman, who helped to chart the course of research on emotion for the past five decades. We may not agree on the scientific details, but I admire his courageous path. When Paul began presenting his findings in the 1960s, he was shouted down at meetings, called a fascist and a racist, and generally disrespected due to prevailing attitudes of the time.* He showed formidable tenacity to pursue his vision of the classical view, and ultimately he brought the science of emotion into the public eye. Back in the village of constructed emotion, I offer my heartfelt thanks to the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory at Northeastern University and Massachusetts General Hospital, which I direct with Karen Quigley. Our lab is one of the enduring pleasures and sources of pride in my career as a scientist. The community of hard-working, talented research assistants, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and research scientists contributed immeasurably to the body of knowledge that made this book possible. All the members (past and present) can be found at affective-science.org/people.shtml. Those whose valuable contributions are specifically cited in this book include Kristen Lindquist, Eliza Bliss-Moreau, Maria Gendron, Alexandra Touroutoglou, Christy Wilson-Mendenhall, Ajay Satpute, Erika Siegel, Elizabeth Clark-Polner, Jennifer Fugate, Kevin Bickart, Mariann Weierich, Suzanne Oosterwijk, Yoshiya Moriguchi, Lorena Chanes, Eric Anderson, Jiahe Zhang, and Myeong-Gu Seo. In addition to their important scientific contributions, I am grateful to the lab members for their endless patience and encouragement. They never once complained about my periodic absences (at least when I was in earshot) and occasionally endured long delays in their own progress as I raced to complete this book.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Back to that miniskirted young poet who taught poetry at the 92nd Street Y, read her work at colleges, high schools and coffee shops and was still wondering whether to finish her Ph.D. so as to have “something to fall back on.” Her publisher wanted a novel from her, but she was so fearful of showing her fiction that she submitted a second book of poems. And just to show you how different publishing was then, her publisher accepted it. (The book became Half-Lives, 1973, published just six months before Fear of Flying.) But now her publisher started to get impatient. “Where’s that novel you’re working on?” he kept asking. “You’ll see it soon,” I kept saying. Yet I was nervous about showing The Man Who Murdered Poets because I knew in my heart it was an evasion of the book I had to write. Eventually I gathered the courage to reveal that partial manuscript to Aaron Asher. He read it quickly and pronounced: “It’s publishable, but I won’t publish it and someday you’ll thank me. Why don’t you go home and write a novel in the female voice of your poems?” Talk about the right words at the right time. I had just received permission to write Fear of Flying. (Why I needed male permission is another story.) Aaron had edited gods of my literary pantheon, like Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, so his judgment seemed beyond dispute. I will always be grateful to him for rejecting my first novel and giving me the kick in the pants I needed to start Fear of Flying. I wrote with a combination of exuberance and panic. As I scrawled the scenes on yellow legal pads, I promised myself I would never show the manuscript to anyone. That self-deception was the only way I could continue. It’s a stratagem I still recommend to young writers. Knock that critical parent off your shoulder! Write for your own eyes only. If you think about the public, any public, you’re likely to be blocked. I still have occasion to remind myself of that whenever I start a new book. Fear of Flying was published in hardcover in November 1973. Contrary to popular belief, it was not an instantaneous blockbuster. Thought to be a literary first novel by a poet, it was given an arty cover and printed in a rather small edition. If it had not been for the enthusiasm of the paperback editor—Elaine Koster, now a literary agent—who fell in love with the novel and bought it to reprint the following year, it might not have been given more than a token hardcover printing.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  In fact, it could be argued that without the Second Wave of the feminist movement, not only would the blossoming of women writers of the last three decades never have occurred, but neither would the experiments with female consciousness of John Irving, John Updike, Jeffrey Eugenides and so many other gifted writers. Happily, women’s writing has profoundly changed all our literature. Back to that miniskirted young poet who taught poetry at the 92nd Street Y, read her work at colleges, high schools and coffee shops and was still wondering whether to finish her Ph.D. so as to have “something to fall back on.” Her publisher wanted a novel from her, but she was so fearful of showing her fiction that she submitted a second book of poems. And just to show you how different publishing was then, her publisher accepted it. (The book became Half-Lives , 1973, published just six months before Fear of Flying. ) But now her publisher started to get impatient. “Where’s that novel you’re working on?” he kept asking. “You’ll see it soon,” I kept saying. Yet I was nervous about showing The Man Who Murdered Poets because I knew in my heart it was an evasion of the book I had to write. Eventually I gathered the courage to reveal that partial manuscript to Aaron Asher. He read it quickly and pronounced: “It’s publishable, but I won’t publish it and someday you’ll thank me. Why don’t you go home and write a novel in the female voice of your poems?” Talk about the right words at the right time. I had just received permission to write Fear of Flying. (Why I needed male permission is another story.) Aaron had edited gods of my literary pantheon, like Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, so his judgment seemed beyond dispute. I will always be grateful to him for rejecting my first novel and giving me the kick in the pants I needed to start Fear of Flying. I wrote with a combination of exuberance and panic. As I scrawled the scenes on yellow legal pads, I promised myself I would never show the manuscript to anyone. That self-deception was the only way I could continue. It’s a stratagem I still recommend to young writers. Knock that critical parent off your shoulder! Write for your own eyes only. If you think about the public, any public, you’re likely to be blocked. I still have occasion to remind myself of that whenever I start a new book. Fear of Flying was published in hardcover in November 1973. Contrary to popular belief, it was not an instantaneous blockbuster.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  It began life with the editors Courtney Young and Andrea Schulz at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and eighteen months later, both had been wooed away by compelling job offers. For a few months, I was a single parent with support from Bruce Nichols, publisher at HMH and effectively the book’s great-great-grandfather. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt then hired Alex Littlefield as the new editor, who had a strikingly different vision of child-rearing from mine (leading to a stormy adolescence), but as is often the case, the best ideas come from vigorous debate, and I thank Alex for the way we ultimately shepherded a leaner and stronger book to its graduation day and released it into the world. I’m extremely grateful to the book’s adopted uncle, Jamie Ryerson at the New York Times, who helped at the last minute to trim three chapters that had become too lengthy and overwhelmingly technical. I am in awe of Jamie’s skill to pare down material to the absolute essentials while retaining its style and voice. He may look like a mild-mannered editor, but when he stands in just the right light, you can see his knightly armor glinting in the sun . Max Brockman, who is my agent and the village wizard, played an absolutely essential role in bringing this book to life. Not only did he navigate me through the ins and outs of the business, but each time we hit a hurdle during the long writing process, he was always ready with wise council. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Yes, it takes a village to write a book, but my village is not the only one on the planet of emotion research. The other major village, which I’ve called “the classical view,” is home to many creative and accomplished scientists, some of whom are my close colleagues. Our villages share territory, so we necessarily have conflicts and rivalries, but at the end of the day, we continue the debates over drinks and dinner. For two decades of animated discussion and close friendship, I thank James Gross and George Bonanno. Likewise, I am grateful to Paula Niedenthal, who introduced me to embodied cognition in general and to Larry Barsalou’s work in particular. For informative conversations, I also thank Andrea Scarantino, Disa Sauter (for details on her study of the Himba), Ralph Adolphs, and Steven Pinker. I’d also like to thank Jaak Panksepp, who a number of years ago graciously accepted Jim Russell’s and my invitation to come to Boston and teach a month-long graduate seminar on his theoretical views.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  “A lot of psychic diseases get passed around in confined public spaces. I sense your mind is too porous. Do you have any hobbies?” “I watch movies.” “That’s a fun one.” “How’d they get the rats to meditate?” I asked her. “You’ve seen rodents breed in captivity? The parents eat their babies. Now, we can’t demonize them. They do it out of compassion. For the good of the species. Any allergies?” “Strawberries.” With that, Dr. Tuttle put her pen down and stared off into space, deep in thought, it seemed. “Some rats,” she said after a while, “probably deserve to be demonized. Certain individual rats.” She picked her pen back up with a flourish of the purple feather. “The moment we start making generalizations, we give up our right to self-govern. I hope you follow me. Rats are very loyal to the planet. Try these,” she said, handing me a sheath of prescriptions. “Don’t fill them all at once. We need to stagger them so as not to raise any red flags.” She got up stiffly and opened a wooden cabinet full of samples, flicked sample packets of pills out onto the desk. “I’ll give you a paper bag for discretion,” she said. “Fill the lithium and Haldol prescriptions first. It’s good to get your case going with a bang. That way later on, if we need to try out some wackier stuff, your insurance company won’t be surprised.” I can’t blame Dr. Tuttle for her terrible advice. I elected to be her patient, after all. She gave me everything I asked for, and I appreciated her for that. I’m sure there were others like her out there, but the ease with which I’d found her, and the immediate relief that her prescriptions provided, made me feel that I’d discovered a pharmaceutical shaman, a magus, a sorcerer, a sage. Sometimes I wondered if Dr. Tuttle were even real. If she were a figment of my imagination, I’d find it funny that I’d chosen her over someone who looked more like one of my heroes—Whoopi Goldberg, for example. “Dial 9-1-1 if anything bad happens,” Dr. Tuttle told me. “Use reason when you feel you can. There’s no way to know how these medications will affect you.” At the beginning of this, I’d look up any new pills she gave me on the Internet to try to learn how much I was likely to sleep on any given day. But reading up on a drug sapped its magic. It made the sleep seem trite, just another mechanical function of the body, like sneezing or shitting or bending at the joint. The “side effects and warnings” on the Internet were discouraging, and anxieties over them amplified the volume of my thoughts, which was the exact opposite of what I hoped the pills would do.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  We’ve received lovely messages from people like Frans de Waal and Sarah Hrdy—certainly two of the most prominent authorities in the evolution of human sexuality—although they don’t necessarily agree with everything we wrote. On the other hand, Alan Dixson, a prominent primatologist we quote extensively, trashed us in an interview he gave to a paper in New Zealand, but he admitted he hadn’t read the book, he was just responding to what he’d heard about it. That’s been sort of typical of the most negative critical responses so far. They admit they haven’t read Sex at Dawn, but they dismiss it anyway. Megan McArdle, the business and economics editor at The Atlantic, wrote what is probably the most negative review to date, and she openly admitted she was only halfway through the book when she wrote it. DS: I saw that! “Humans aren’t like bonobos…because we’re not like bonobos!” CR: Right. Rock-solid logic there, no? She apparently felt so threatened by the book that she couldn’t think straight. I mean, she accused us of leaving out any discussion of jealousy as it didn’t fit our model, somehow missing Chapter 10, which is called “Jealousy: A Beginner’s Guide to Coveting Thy Neighbor’s Spouse.” But as I said, the negative response has been much less than we were expecting, and is understandable; lots of people feel threatened by the arguments we’ve made. We’ve received lots of support from academics and clinicians. We’ve heard from scholars at the Kinsey Institute, professors all over the country who are assigning the book to their students, and we were honored when Sex at Dawn was chosen as the best consumer book of 2010 by the Society for Sex Therapy and Research (SSTAR). DS: I’m so sorry Cacilda couldn’t join you on this trip. What was her role in the book? CR: Cacilda is one of two psychiatrists who run a psychiatric facility with close to a hundred patients. So she’s pretty tied to her day job these days, much as she’d love to participate more in interviews and meet readers. Strangely, a few people have interpreted her non-presence in interviews as evidence that I made her up just to give the book some cover with women readers. Seriously!

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Far from being enraged at having his genetic legacy called into question, a man in these societies is likely to feel gratitude to other men for pitching in to help create and then care for a stronger baby. Far from being blinded by jealousy as the standard narrative predicts, men in these societies find themselves bound to one another by shared paternity for the children they’ve fathered together. As Beckerman explains, in the worst-case scenario, this system may provide extra security for the child: “You know that if you die, there’s some other man who has a residual obligation to care for at least one of your children. So looking the other way or even giving your blessing when your wife takes a lover is the only insurance you can buy.”6 Lest any readers feel tempted to file this sort of behavior under B.A.D. (Bizarre And Distant), similar examples can be found quite close to home. The Joy of S.E.Ex. Understanding is a lot like sex; it’s got a practical purpose, but that’s not why people do it normally. FRANK OPPENHEIMER Desmond Morris spent months observing a British pro soccer team in the late 1970s and early 1980s, later publishing his thoughts in a book called The Soccer Tribe. As his title suggests, Morris found the behavior of the teammates to be strikingly similar to what he’d encountered among tribal groups in previous research. He noted two behaviors particularly salient in both contexts: group leveling and nonpossessiveness. “The first thing you notice when footballers talk among themselves,” Morris wrote, “is the speed of their wit. Their humour is often cruel and is used to deflate any team-mate who shows the slightest signs of egotism.” But echoes of prehistoric egalitarianism reverberate beyond ego deflation in the locker room, extending to sexuality as well. “If one of them scores (sexually), he is not possessive, but is only too happy to see his team-mates succeed with the same girl.” While this may strike some as unfeeling, Morris assured his readers that this lack of jealousy was “simply a measure of the extent to which selfishness is suppressed between team-mates, both on the field and off it.”7 For professional athletes, musicians, and their most enthusiastic female fans, as well as both male and female members of many foraging societies, overlapping, intersecting sexual relationships strengthen group cohesion and can offer a measure of security in an uncertain world. Sometimes, perhaps most of the time, human sex isn’t just about pleasure or reproduction. A casual approach to sexual relationships in a community of adults can have important social functions, extending far beyond mere physical gratification. Let’s try putting this liquid libido into dry, academic terms: we hypothesize that Socio-Erotic Exchanges (S.E.Ex. for short) strengthen the bonds among individuals in small-scale nomadic societies (and, apparently, other highly interdependent groups), forming a crucial, durable web of affection, affiliation, and mutual obligation.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  I am also especially grateful to Joanne Miller, chair of the psychology department at Northeastern University, and to the rest of my colleagues in the department, for their support and patience as I completed this book. I am indebted to the funding agencies and fellowships that made it feasible for me to write this book. These include fellowships from the American Philosophical Society and the James McKeen Cattell Fund from the Association for Psychological Science, as well as generous support from the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences; in particular, I am most grateful to Paul Gade, who was my program officer at ARI at the time, and who has continued to offer me encouragement and moral support. The research reported in this book was additionally funded by the generous support of granting agencies under the helpful guidance of their program officers. This includes the National Science Foundation, particularly Steve Breckler, who gave me my first neuroscience grant; the National Institute of Mental Health, particularly Susan Brandon, who oversaw my K02 Independent Scientist Award, Kevin Quinn, and Janine Simmons; the National Institute on Aging, particularly Lis Nielsen; the National Cancer Institute, particularly Paige Green and Becky Ferrer; the National Institutes of Health Director’s Pioneer Award; the National Institute of Child Health and Development; the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences, particularly Paul Gade, Jay Goodwin, and Greg Ruark; and the Mind and Life Institute, particularly Wendy Hasenkamp and Arthur Zajonc. I owe a very special debt of gratitude to the people who handled the legal, administrative, and logistical aspects of the book: Fred Polner (my attorney) and Michael Healy (attorney at Brockman, Inc.); Emma Hitchcock and Jiahe Zhang for creating some of the brain images contained in this book; Rosemary Marrow at Redux Pictures; Chris Martin and Elyna Anderson at the Paul Ekman Group; Beverly Ornstein, Rona Menashe, and Dick Guttman for permission to use Martin Landau’s photograph; Nicole Betz, Anna Neumann, Kirsten Ebanks, and Sam Lyons for ultra-fast search and retrieval of research papers on request; and Jeffrey Eugenides for his wonderful conceptual combinations for much-needed emotion concepts.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Yes, it takes a village to write a book, but my village is not the only one on the planet of emotion research. The other major village, which I’ve called “the classical view,” is home to many creative and accomplished scientists, some of whom are my close colleagues. Our villages share territory, so we necessarily have conflicts and rivalries, but at the end of the day, we continue the debates over drinks and dinner. For two decades of animated discussion and close friendship, I thank James Gross and George Bonanno. Likewise, I am grateful to Paula Niedenthal, who introduced me to embodied cognition in general and to Larry Barsalou’s work in particular. For informative conversations, I also thank Andrea Scarantino, Disa Sauter (for details on her study of the Himba), Ralph Adolphs, and Steven Pinker. I’d also like to thank Jaak Panksepp, who a number of years ago graciously accepted Jim Russell’s and my invitation to come to Boston and teach a month-long graduate seminar on his theoretical views. In a similar vein, I owe a very special debt of gratitude to my distinguished colleague Bob Levenson. It is a gift when someone with a different point of view engages you in honest conversation, and Bob truly embodies this spirit of scientific exploration every time we meet. His curiosity and insightful observations consistently challenge me, and I consider him one of my most valued colleagues. I also have a deep appreciation and respect for Paul Ekman, who helped to chart the course of research on emotion for the past five decades. We may not agree on the scientific details, but I admire his courageous path. When Paul began presenting his findings in the 1960s, he was shouted down at meetings, called a fascist and a racist, and generally disrespected due to prevailing attitudes of the time. * He showed formidable tenacity to pursue his vision of the classical view, and ultimately he brought the science of emotion into the public eye. Back in the village of constructed emotion, I offer my heartfelt thanks to the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory at Northeastern University and Massachusetts General Hospital, which I direct with Karen Quigley. Our lab is one of the enduring pleasures and sources of pride in my career as a scientist. The community of hard-working, talented research assistants, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and research scientists contributed immeasurably to the body of knowledge that made this book possible.