Archaeology of Mind

What makes us happy? What makes us sad? How do we come to feel a sense of enthusiasm? What fills us with lust, anger, fear, or tenderness? Traditional behavioral and cognitive neuroscience have yet to provide satisfactory answers. The Archaeology of Mind presents an affective neuroscience approach—which takes into consideration basic mental processes, brain functions, and emotional behaviors that all mammals share—to locate the neural mechanisms of emotional expression. It reveals—for the first time—the deep neural sources of our values and basic emotional feelings. This book elaborates on the seven emotional systems that explain how we live and behave. These systems originate in deep areas of the brain that are remarkably similar across all mammalian species. When they are disrupted, we find the origins of emotional disorders: - SEEKING: how the brain generates a euphoric and expectant response - FEAR: how the brain responds to the threat of physical danger and death - RAGE: sources of irritation and fury in the brain - LUST: how sexual desire and attachments are elaborated in the brain - CARE: sources of maternal nurturance - GRIEF: sources of non-sexual attachments - PLAY: how the brain generates joyous, rough-and-tumble interactions - SELF: a hypothesis explaining how affects might be elaborated in the brain The book offers an evidence-based evolutionary taxonomy of emotions and affects and, as such, a brand-new clinical paradigm for treating psychiatric disorders in clinical practice.

"[A] successful overview of the affective systems . . . . [O]f interest not only to basic scientists interested in preclinical modeling but also to clinicians and clinical researchers interested in the neurobiology of addiction, emotional disorders, and novel pharmacological and psychosocial interventions.", "[W]ill appeal to anyone who seeks to understand the origins of our emotions and the mechanisms that tie our affective experiences to our behaviors. Clinicians and psychotherapists are an obvious potential audience. Panksepp and Biven . . . contend that an affective neuroscience perspective has a lot to offer to psychiatric research and practice. . . . [T]his text is accessible to a host of researchers trained in that theoretical tradition, including, but not limited to, the rapidly growing community of evolutionary psychologists across diverse academic disciplines. . . . [W]ould be appropriate reading for an advanced undergraduate course or a graduate seminar across the many disciplines that are now adopting neuroscientific methods of inquiry to study human psychology and behavior.", "Integrative, judicious, creative, welcoming of divergent perspectives, and very accessible, this is a grand synthesis and should be part of every library. . . . Essential. ", "[A]n exhaustive work, covering a neglected and often misunderstood field . . . . Nowhere else will you really find due diligence done on the non-conscious biases of humans and animals . . . . [E]ssential reading, not only to us as mind professionals, but to teachers, parents, personal and physical trainers and coaches. Emotions are still everything, and vital to understanding why we are what we are, and why we do and have done, everything in the past and now. An amazing buy.", "The book will be of special interest to psychiatrists and other mental health professionals, but it is also accessible to students, parents, educators, and animal behaviorists. "

Jaak Panksepp, PhD, was the Baily Endowed Chair of Animal Well-Being Science at Washington State University's College of Veterinary Medicine, emeritus Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychology at Bowling Green State University, and the Head of Northwestern University's Falk Center for Molecular Therapeutics. Lucy Biven trained at the Anna Freud Centre in London, and has served as Head of the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy at the Leicestershire National Health Service in England. She is currently a reader for the Journal of Neuropsychoanalysis.