Publisher's Synopsis
"When your dog growls and barks, you might assume that he's angry. But how do you know? You can't very well ask him. Even if you could, it's not at all clear that animals even have emotions like humans do. We still know very little about what emotions are and how they drive behavior. In fact, scientists haven't even been able to reach a consensus on how to study them. In The Nature of the Beast, neuroscientist David Anderson argues that the only way to solve this problem is to totally rethink our approach. One of the main sources of confusion is that we often fail to differentiate between feelings and emotions. Feelings are the subjective experiences of emotion, but they are not actually emotions. Anderson argues that emotions are internal states of the brain, similar to the state of being tired or thirsty, which you can observe in a brain's neural activity. They are like programs that our brain runs to address specific needs. Feelings
