Top Highlights

• Like the rest of the world, it is governed and described by principles we can discover but cannot change.
• The Western world’s first physician, Hippocrates, proposed in 450 B.C. that emotions emanate from the brain. He was right—but for the next twenty-five hundred years, medicine could offer nothing further about the details of emotional life.
• Logical but dubious derivations follow: emotional maturity is synonymous with emotional restraint.
• In this book, we demonstrate that where intellect and emotion clash, the heart often has the greater wisdom. In a pleasing turnabout, science—Reason’s right hand—is proving this so. The brain’s ancient emotional architecture is not a bothersome animal encumbrance. Instead, it is nothing less than the key to our lives. We live immersed in unseen for...
• French mathematician Blaise Pascal wrote, The heart has its reasons whereof Reason knows nothing. Pascal was correct, although he could not have known why. Centuries later, we know that the neural systems responsible for emotion and intellect are separate, creating the chasm between them in human minds and lives.