The Emotional Brain provides a cutting-edge scientific background to such books as Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence, showing that while cognitive studies have tended to ignore the emotions, we are increasingly understanding how crucial they are to our evolutionary survival, as shortcuts to cut through conscious reasoning when speed and rules-of-thumb are more important and effective than logic. Much of our emotional life is lived unconsciously, and is far richer than simply our conscious feelings - for example, our conscious mind will already be reacting to situations of danger some time before we begin to be afraid. Not only does LeDoux present a fascinating insight into how our emotions function normally, but also provides a new understanding of emotional disorders.

Joseph LeDoux is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science at NYU in the Center for Neural Science, and he directs the Emotional Brain Institute of NYU and the Nathan Kline Institute. He also a Professor of Psychiatry and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at NYU Langone Medical School. His work is focused on the brain mechanisms of memory and emotion and he is the author of The Emotional Brain, Synaptic Self, and Anxious. LeDoux has received a number of awards, including the Karl Spencer Lashley Award from the American Philosophical Society, the Fyssen International Prize in Cognitive Science, Jean Louis Signoret Prize of the IPSEN Foundation, the Santiago Grisolia Prize, the American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award, the American Psychological Association Donald O. Hebb Award, and Jean-Marie Delwart Foundation 2016 International Prize for Molecular and Cellular Mechanisms Underlying Mood. LeDoux is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the New York Academy of Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. His book Anxious received the 2016 William James Book Award from the American Psychological Association. LeDoux is also the lead singer and songwriter in the rock band, The Amygdaloids (amygdaloids.com), and in the acoustic duo, So We Are (soweare.net)