Molecules of Emotion: Why You Feel the Way You Feel [Paperback]

I was excited about reading this book. When I begun reading it, I found it seemed to be giving me an account of her life story, rather than the subject I thought it was going to detail. I started off being quite interested in her story, but then getting very frustrated and wanting to get the point i.e. to tell me the science and the facts about emotions and why I feel the way I feel! I have struggled with this book - I keep putting it down, but keep telling myself I must push on to the important stuff. However I have now got about two thirds through the book and there must be about one page worth of interesting information about the "molecules of emotion". The rest is a rather self-interested description of her life, which is quite amusing at times, but I didn't buy the book to learn all about her life and her struggle as a female scientist.
I will search for another more interesting and informative book instead. Don't buy this unless you are really interested in her life story.

Pert, will one day be generally regarded at least as highly as Sherrington or Penfield in the archives of neuroscience and probably higher. In her typically atypical style, she breaks all the rules as she wrote this remarkable book. And why not? She broke the nearly three hundred year Cartesian (the mind and body are separate) paradigme, one of the most enduring in all of science! This is not just a clearly written book on the neuroscience of emotion carrying peptides/receptors, but also of the emotional human drama of her journey of scientific discoveries. For the scientist in us, Pert clearly spells out how ligands (substances which specifically bind to selective receptors initiating sometimes dramatic intracellular biochemical changes) and termed "information molecules" or "information substances" communicate across systems which were for the most part traditionally considered separate. The "new neurology" demonstrates ligand communication between the neurological, immune, endocrine, and gastrointestinal systems. The reader may well be astounded to see that the traditional neurotransmitters (ligands such as dopamine, histamine, GABA, etc.) only comprise a tiny fraction of nervous system communication. The peptides, carriers of emotion and other information make up 95% of all ligands. Beyond the science however, Dr. Pert also provides an interesting inside look at the real world of scientific research. Her struggles, defeats and triumphs are told as she describes the dog-eat-dog culture of competitive neuroscience research in the suppressive and male dominated pharmacological, governmental, political realms. Only rarely in history does discovery, high intellect, and raw courage meld in one human being. And when it does, a revolution is born.

At a meeting I went to Candace Pert said she didn't quite understand why complementary practitioners needed her to 'validate' their work, that surely the fact that we (and our clients) know it works (when it does!) is validation enough.

Perhaps she was just being modest here - I have to say that it is precisely the work of Candace Pert and others in the field that gives me, as a practitioner, a way to understand what is happening, and therefore a way of explaining to clients, in a clear way, what they may be experiencing, without it being 'spooky wooky - woo, you must be a healer' - which can be disempowering or frightening to the client, depending on their belief system 'the practitioner healed me' and also places burdens on the practitioner's view of themselves.

Medical science also needed to understand 'what is going on' - and the respectability now of Psycho Neuro Immunology as a concept - due, in very large part, to Pert's work - means that without necessarily having any greater understanding of, or belief in, what 'goes on' in particularly bodywork and healing sessions, there is a greater willingness to suggest patients utilise this as adjuncts to conventional medicine.

The placebo effect is finally achieving respectability in its own right - how the mind and body can affect each other, positively, is being engaged with.

And .........on a slightly more humorous note, I have found it very useful to be able to blind a funding body with 'science' (which they didn't particularly understand) in order to get funding for one particular area where I work. This wasn't unethical, I had been asked to provide validation, and so had decided to ask clients to give subjective feedback of improvements in certain symptoms. A wiser person than myself said 'don't do that - provide some complicated science, they will be far more impressed'. So, to come back to Candace Pert's 'you don't need me to validate your work' - well, actually, we do!

And...........for the non-scientific, this is actually a VERY clear and readable account of neurochemistry. Having struggled hard to wade through some scientific papers, eyes crossed and with wet towel clamped firmly to head, Pert was a breath of fresh air!

Her individual journey is explored, and this is also very valid - there is of course a whole debate around how 'the observer' influences the experiment, so Pert's acknowledgement of WHO the scientist in the equation is utterly pertinent. The 'healer' and the 'client' engage together in a process - of course this does provide some stumbling blocks to the old double blind cross over randomised study, as the 'in the moment, this client, this therapist' is hugely central.

Very powerful book

However - Amazon, you have it wrong, this book 'Molecules of Emotion' is by Candace Pert - not Deepak Chopra - DC just wrote the foreword - there's somehow some sort of synchronicity going on here - often in 'science' the work of a woman scientist in the field gets unacknowledged or sidelines - cf Rosalind Franklyn's role in the 'discovery' of DNA.

Yes, yes, I know Amazon aren't doing this deliberately, its an annoying inputting blip which means that a lot of books with Forewords end up being credited to the foreword writer, rather than the author, due to the foreword writer being listed first.

I just thought it was amusingly illustrative in this case!