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The bestselling and revolutionary book that serves as a “landmark in our understanding of the mind-body connection” (Deepak Chopra, MD).Why do we feel the way we feel? How do our thoughts and emotions affect our health? In her groundbreaking book Molecules of Emotion, Candace Pert—an extraordinary neuroscientist who played a pivotal role in the discovery of the opiate receptor—provides startling and decisive answers to these and other challenging questions that scientists and philosophers have pondered for centuries. Pert’s pioneering research on how the chemicals inside our bodies form a dynamic information network, linking mind and body, is not only provocative, it is revolutionary. By establishing the biomolecular basis for our emotions and explaining these scientific developments in a clear and accessible way, Pert empowers us to understand ourselves, our feelings, and the connection between our minds and our bodies—or bodyminds—in ways we could never possibly have imagined before. From explaining the scientific basis of popular wisdom about phenomena such as "gut feelings" to making comprehensible recent breakthroughs in cancer and AIDS research, Pert provides us with an intellectual adventure of the highest order. Molecules of Emotion is a landmark work, full of insight and wisdom and possessing that rare power to change the way we see the world and ourselves.
I came to know about Candace B. Pert through the mind-boggling film 'What the Bleep Do We Know!?' I found her presence markedly impressive and right away ordered her book. Molecules of Emotion is not only an extraordinary scientific study, but it also comes with much autobiographic content. Candace Pert has the courage to reveal many details from her life as a female scientist.Since the 1970s, the late Candace Pert has persisted in her vision of finding molecular evidence for the functionality of our emotions, and our sexuality, and more generally for mindbody medicine, within the boundaries of modern science. The book, if all that additional information was taken out, would be a research paper, too thin to fill a book. And it would probably miss its goal entirely. It’s this holistic and empathic approach, and needless to add that it’s an artistic approach as well, that makes this book so unique. And it shows that this scientist is actually a great human. Actually Pert, together with the brilliant animations in the Bleep movie, made transparent how human sexuality works, and that it is not a mechanical abstract function, that it is not, an instinct or ‘drive’ as Sigmund Freud called it, but a direct outflow from our emotional predilections.To give an example, how she explains this rather complex matter in a very readable, comprehensive way, let me put this quote:—If receptors are the first components of the molecules of emotion, then ligands are the second. The word ligand comes from the Latin ligare, ‘that which binds’, sharing its origin with the word religion. Ligand is the term used for any natural or manmade substance that binds selectively to its own specific receptor on the surface of a cell. The ligand bumps onto the receptor and slips off, bumps back on, slips back off again. The ligand bumping on is what we call the binding, and in the process, the ligand transfers a message via its molecular properties to the receptor. Though a key fitting into a lock is the standard image, a more dynamic description of this process might be two voices—ligand and receptor— striking the same note and producing a vibration that rings a doorbell to open the doorway to the cell./24Candace Pert’s project was since its humble beginnings in the 1970s very daring, as until now mainstream psychology treats emotions as ‘floating parameters’ that are hard to grasp by our reigning mechanistic science paradigm.But in her own words, her vision even went beyond. She did not just want to succeed in her personal research project, but desired to help bring about this huge paradigm shift to many scientists who are currently working on it. And she wanted this paradigm shift to expand also into medical science, so that the psychosomatic unity of body and mind are definitely recognized in medicine.It is known from the Bleep movie how brilliantly Pert explained her research, how she can convey complex matters in a simple comprehensive way. And here is how she explains emotions under the particular angle of her research:—When I use the term emotion, I am speaking in the broadest of terms, to include not only the familiar human experiences of anger, fear, and sadness, as well as joy, contentment, and courage, but also basic sensations such as pleasure and pain, as well as the ‘drive states’ studied by the experimental psychologists, such as hunger and thirst. In addition to measurable and observable emotions and states, I also refer to an / assortment of other intangible, subjective experiences that are probably unique to humans, such as spiritual inspiration, awe, bliss, and other states of consciousness that we all have experienced but that have been, up until now, physiologically explained./131-132To summarize, this highly readable book from an amazing scientist may scramble you up a bit, but this is a good thing to happen. The book is not a dry research report, but in the contrary reads like an adventure novel—the novel of a daring woman who has achieved much in her life. She has won the hearts of many people and through touching their hearts she has been able to put new seeds in their minds.
