The Nature of the Beast

"The Nature of the Beast offers a stellar new paradigm for investigating inner brain states like emotion. With his famously clear-headed logic and a plain-spoken walk through the data, Anderson crafts a stunningly coherent and compelling work whose implications are potentially vast—especially if, as seems likely, it enables breakthrough treatments in psychiatric care, at long last."—Patricia Churchland, University of California, San Diego

“The Nature of the Beast presents an insightful new framework for understanding how the brain regulates emotion. With wry humor, David J. Anderson walks readers through the wonders of how neurons—funny little computational units of the brain—give rise to such rich and complex things as emotions. His fruitfly work is both legendary, and well, fruitful, in helping to elucidate how it is that our brains respond to information in the environment. Of all the major emotion books to have come out in the past decade, this is the most illuminating and useful of the bunch. An incredible work.”
 —Dr. Daniel Levitin, author of Successful Aging

“We humans spend most of our waking hours in a subjective state, wallowing in a “felt" sense of life. What is that and how do brains create it? Fearlessly, David Anderson takes on the central issue of neuroscience and provides a roadmap to truly understand this reality. Surprisingly, he reveals the way to get there is to study the fly brain not the millions of psychiatric patients that are waiting for help. This field needs new ideas and this book provides it.”—Michael S. Gazzaniga, University of California, Santa Barbara