At the cost of some emotional budget burn sympathising with Dean Burnett, you will get neuroscience musings on a bit wide set of subjects collectively touching on our emotional systems/drivers.

We often see emotions portrayed as the irrational counterpart to clear thinking, as if it were merely a weakness, perhaps even an unfortunate evolutionary relic that renders us helpless in the face of ruthless and conscious AI (maybe I’ve watched too much Scifi). In Emotional Ignorance, Dean takes us on an incredible journey of discovery, stretching from the origins of life to the end of the universe. It tackled the idea of emotions and cognition as being separate entities until, of course, we realize they are inextricably linked and dependent on each other. I also felt that the book seemed to lose structure as the chapters wore on, I thought Chapters 5 and 6 had a tendency to off on one too many random tangents. Home to William Golding, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Max Porter, Ingrid Persaud, Anna Burns and Rachel Cusk, among many others, Faber is proud to publish some of the greatest novelists from the early twentieth century to today.It is a combination of scientific investigation, a journal of grief, and self-discovery that enables Burnett to confront his emotional naivety. Understanding emotions and the broader role they play is crucial to an accurate and scientific understanding of how we think.

It goes on to examine how pleasure and pain tread a fine line (one reason, Burnett suggests, why 50 Shades Of Grey was so popular – and so badly written), in the process expelling various myths around BDSM practises. The author demonstrates his gift for making the complex workings of the human brain engaging and accessible and bravely lays bare his own experience of the powerful emotion of grief and the process of grieving.I found myself dipping into chapters rather than reading through in novel-esque fashion; to that end, the segment I found hardest to swallow concerned emotional relationships.

This comment made me more angry than anything else in this book and took my rating from a two-star to a one-star. The book is specific and wordy but also too general; it is like baking a casserole that comes out simultaneously burnt and raw!Dean Burnett has appeared on NPR's Fresh Air, CBC's The Current, Ireland's NewsTalk and countless platforms and publications in the UK. But the internet also insulates us from dissenting opinions and allows us to find people that agree with us, no matter what it may be. Burnett initially wrote on the topic of Emotional Intelligence (EQ), however, following his father’s demise, he decided to include his personal experiences alongside the science of emotions and their functions in our brain which results in the topic of Emotional Ignorance.