A pioneering neuroscientist offers a new way of understanding how emotions drive behavior Does your dog get sad when you leave for the day? Does your cat purr because she loves you? Do bears attack when they're angry? You can't very well ask them. In fact, scientists haven't been able to reach a consensus on whether animals even have emotions like humans do, let alone how to study them. Yet studies of animal emotion are critical for understanding human emotion and mental illness. In The Nature of the Beast, pioneering neuroscientist David J. Anderson describes a new approach to solving this problem. He and his colleagues have figured out how to study the brain activity of animals as they navigate real-life scenarios, like fleeing a predator or competing for a mate. His research has revolutionized what we know about animal fear and aggression. Here, he explains what studying emotions and related internal brain states in animals can teach us about human behavior, offering new insights into why isolation makes us more aggressive, how sex and violence connect, and whether there's a link between aggression and mental illness. Full of fascinating stories, The Nature of the Beast reconceptualizes how the brain regulates emotions-and explains why we have them at all.

David J. Anderson is Seymour Benzer Professor of Biology and Director of the TianQuaio and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech, where he studies the neurobiology of emotion. Anderson is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and founding advisor of the Allen Institute for Brain Research. He is a recipient of the Perl-UNC Neuroscience Prize and the Edward M. Skolnick Prize in Neuroscience, and a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Anderson has written for the New York Times, appeared on All Things Considered, and his TED talk on emotion has been viewed more than 1.5 million times. He lives in Pasadena, California.

Most of what we know about emotions is unreliable. It's gathered either by asking people about their feelings, or by putting them in an MRI and studying how they react to pretend situations, to which they are unlikely to respond as they would in real life. If we're ever going to understand how emotions work, we need a better way of studying them. In The Nature of the Beast, pioneering neuroscientist David J. Anderson reveals how he has begun to solve this problem. He and his team have figured out how to study the brain activity of animals as they navigate real-life scenarios, like foraging, fleeing a predator, or competing for a mate. His research has revolutionized what we know about animal fear and aggression. Here, he explains what his research can teach us about human behavior, offering new insights into why isolation makes us more aggressive, how sex and violence connect, and whether there's a link between aggression and mental illness.

Part How Emotions Are Made, part Mama's Last Hug, The Nature of the Beast reconceptualizes how the brain regulates emotions--and explains why we have them at all.