Anxious
Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety
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- 3,49 €
Publisher Description
“[Anxious] helps to explain and prevent the kinds of debilitating anxieties all of us face in this increasingly stressful world.” —Daniel J. Levitin, author of The Organized Mind and This Is Your Brain On Music
A comprehensive and accessible exploration of anxiety, from a leading neuroscientist and the author of Synaptic Self
Collectively, anxiety disorders are our most prevalent psychiatric problem, affecting about forty million adults in the United States. In Anxious, Joseph LeDoux, whose NYU lab has been at the forefront of research efforts to understand and treat fear and anxiety, explains the range of these disorders, their origins, and discoveries that can restore sufferers to normalcy.
LeDoux’s groundbreaking premise is that we’ve been thinking about fear and anxiety in the wrong way. These are not innate states waiting to be unleashed from the brain, but experiences that we assemble cognitively. Treatment of these problems must address both their conscious manifestations and underlying non-conscious processes. While knowledge about how the brain works will help us discover new drugs, LeDoux argues that the greatest breakthroughs may come from using brain research to help reshape psychotherapy.
A major work on our most pressing mental health issue, Anxious explains the science behind fear and anxiety disorders.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Drawing on years of research, neuroscientist LeDoux (Synaptic Self) delves into the subject of anxiety and fear, depicting both emotions as cognitive constructs. Consciousness is key to his framework, which presupposes that to be either fearful or anxious about something is to be aware of it. Animals come up frequently as points of both comparison and departure from our experience as conscious humans. The intended audience is never explicitly stated but seems to be scientists and scientifically knowledgeable layreaders, though all the information is fairly comprehensible and made even more so through illustrations. It's unclear to what degree LeDoux's theories can be generalized to more practical applications: his sustained focus on animal emotions means that discussions of the countless people who suffer from anxiety disorders are relegated to the later chapters. This book's sheer heft might be anxiety-provoking in its own right for some readers, but for the interested and informed it will open up new worlds of thinking and feeling.
