What makes us happy? What makes us sad? How do we come to feel a sense of enthusiasm? What fills us with lust, anger, fear, or tenderness? Traditional behavioral and cognitive neuroscience have yet to provide satisfactory answers. The Archaeology of Mind presents an affective neuroscience approach--which takes into consideration basic mental processes, brain functions, and emotional behaviors that all mammals share--to locate the neural mechanisms of emotional expression. It reveals--for the first time--the deep neural sources of our values and basic emotional feelings.

This...