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Rainy Brain, Sunny Brain
The New Science of Fear and Optimism
- Author: Elaine Fox
- Category: Non-fiction Health Psychology Science
- Publisher: Heinemann (UK) / Basic Books (US)
- Pub date: March 2012
- Length: 100,000 words
About Rainy Brain, Sunny Brain
At the heart of RAINY BRAIN, SUNNY BRAIN lies a deceptively simple question. Why are some people more responsive to carrots and some to sticks? Why are some driven to take dangerous risks, whilst others shun even the merest hint of danger? And why do some of us see life’s proverbial glass as half empty, and some of us see it as half full?
Decades of research in neuroscience and psychology are now beginning to unravel the mysteries of the brain’s interactive networks, and to provide answers to questions about our deepest fears, anxieties and pleasures. Here, Dr Elaine Fox, whose groundbreaking research led to publication in early 2009 of a paper about the “optimist gene”, will explain why it is that certain knowledge or events – such as the onset of a debilitating disease or the occurrence of a personal tragedy – will leave some of us cowed, anxious or even clinically depressed, whilst some of us will be able to carry on, as before, barely affected by it. She will reveal how the latest neuroscientific and genetic research demonstrates that the optimist quite literally tunes in to the bright side of life, whilst the pessimist seems doomed to looking forever towards the dark side.
RAINY BRAIN, SUNNY BRAIN will argue that understanding the neural mechanisms underlying these primal reactions – the push and pull of fear and fun – provides a unique window into our current fears, uncertainties and addictions; why they are so pervasive and persistent; and finally, what we can do about them. Science tells us that while we are unlikely to be able to completely eradicate primary fears and desires there are ways in which we can control and reinterpret them. Knowledge may not help us in overcoming the brain’s automatic response to an immediate threat or pleasure but it can be very powerful in overcoming the more controlled response to fear and excitement. Professor Fox’s own research conducted over the last 20 years has directly addressed these questions, and this, along with that of many other experts in the field is brought together for the first time in RAINY BRAIN, SUNNY BRAIN.
About the Author
Elaine Fox is a psychologist and neuroscientist who has researched widely on the science of emotions. She grew up in the 1970s in Dublin and has worked at St James Hospital Dublin, University College Dublin, Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand and has been a visiting senior scientist at the MRC Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge. She is currently Head of the Department of Psychology & Centre for Brain Science at the University of Essex.
Elaine has published widely on the scientific aspects of fear and optimism, and her work, which has appeared in many leading scientific journals, has been summarized in an academic book Emotion Science: Neuroscientific and Cognitive Approaches to Understanding Human Emotions (published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2008).
Her scientific discoveries on the genetic aspects of optimism have been discussed widely across the national media, and led to her appearance in an ABC documentary presented by Michael J. Fox (no relation) entitled The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist, as well as the writing of her first commercial project, RAINY BRAIN, SUNNY BRAIN.