Projections: A Story of Human Emotions

A groundbreaking tour of the human mind that illuminates the biological nature of our inner worlds and emotions, through gripping, movingand, at times, harrowingclinical stories [A] scintillating and moving analysis of the human brain and emotions.Nature Beautifully connects the inner feelings within all human beings to deep insights from modern psychiatry and neuroscience.Robert Lefkowitz, Nobel Laureate Karl Deisseroth has spent his life pursuing truths about the human mind, both as a renowned clinical psychiatrist and as a researcher creating and developing the revolutionary field of optogenetics, which uses light to help decipher the brains workings. In Projections, he combines his knowledge of the brains inner circuitry with a deep empathy for his patients to examine what mental illness reveals about the human mind and the origin of human feelingshow the broken can illuminate the unbroken. Through cutting-edge research and gripping case studies from Deisseroths own patients, Projections tells a larger story about the material origins of human emotion, bridging the gap between the ancient circuits of our brain and the poignant moments of suffering in our daily lives. The stories of Deisseroths patients are rich with humanity and shine an unprecedented light on the selfand the ways in which it can break down. A young woman with an eating disorder reveals how the mind can rebel against the brains most primitive drives of hunger and thirst; an older man, smothered into silence by depression and dementia, shows how humans evolved to feel not only joy but also its absence; and a lonely Uighur woman far from her homeland teaches both the importanceand challengesof deep social bonds. Illuminating, literary, and essential, Projections is a revelatory, immensely powerful work. It transforms our understanding not only of the brain but of ourselves as social beingsgiving vivid illustrations through science and resonant human stories of our yearning for connection and meaning.