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Unraveling the innate affective values of the human brain might be the most captivating, and conceptually critical, aspect of the entire mind sciences. In trying to understand the neural foundations for emotional behaviors and emotional experience, one is truly seeking to map out the neural ground of our being. We have seen a critical renaissance in affective neuroscience in the last tn years, as emotion has become increasingly the focus of empirical work, and a subject for major works by leading investigators, one of those leading the way being Antonio Damasio. In this—his third—major contribution to the ongoing discussion of how emotional valuing is organized in the human brain, Antonio Damasio sails gracefully over this increasingly large body of work. As discussions of our emotional nature are again penetrating deeply into the humanities (e.g., McLemee, 2003), many recognize that a common denominator for bringing clarity to this topic is a confrontation with the evolved (inherited) nature of our emotional apparatus which does not neglect nature–nurture interactions and the complex and diverse, socially constructed cultural manifestations of our feelings.
In the present offering, Damasio seeks to captivate those outside the mind sciences, as he continues to argue for the importance of certain brain and body processes in the generation of the many emotional feelings that characterize the pains and satisfactions of individual lives. Considering the degree to which this book reflects Damasio's meditation on a topic of great personal interest to him, and no less to us, rather than a fully balanced account of the scientific state of the field, we would note that our applause is directed more toward the former and our criticisms at the relative paucity of the latter. Damasio's reversion to what at least seems to us a more cortico-centric view of experienced emotions in the present book left us a bit saddened, for we had both fou