How do emotions work? This might seem like an odd question since we all experience emotions every day: happiness at seeing an old friend, sadness while watching a tragic film, fear of losing the ones we love. Emotions seem automatic. Your heart skips a beat, your nerves do a little dance, your face moves in familiar ways, and you are carried away by the experience. Nevertheless, from a scientific standpoint, what are emotions really?
For centuries, famous thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Darwin and Freud, as well as countless other scientists, have tried to explain emotion using common sense. Emotions feel natural and uncontrollable, the reasoning went, so they surely must be built into us from birth. In recent years, however, the field of neuroscience – the study of how the…
