Jack Panksepp, chair of Animal Well-being Science, and professor, integrative physiology and neuroscience at Washington State University, has been an outlier in neuroscience research for a number of years. He is known for his YouTube videos of rats laughing and playing when he tickles them. This book is a massive compendium of decades of research, co-authored by Lucy Biven, who trained at the Anna Freud Centre and is, incidentally, the daughter of the late psychoanalyst Charles Brenner. It is intended to be accessible to the informed lay reader but may require patience and fortitude to wade through.

Throughout the book, the reader is often reminded of Panksepp's ongoing struggle with the experience of (undeserved) marginalization in the field of neuroscience. This stems, as he describes it, from his challenging