Here is a short history of our discovery of the emotional brain. Just as the world was already round before we discovered that, the actual history of our emotional selves, which is just human history, is a separate story from our journey of self-discovery. That path traces from our earliest writings through all of our spirituality and philosophy and science and humanism.
This history of our journey to understand ourselves is a work in progress. It is an outline to be filled in over time. Themes and story lines will emerge, threading from the start to our current conversations. They will hopefully emerge from the work itself.
Origins: East and West in parallel.
Like many things in history, things developed earlier in the East with Hindu and yoga philosophy and later The Buddha and Buddhism.
Westerners debated reason vs. passion. Plato, Jefferson, Hume [reference Jonathan Haidt from The Happiness Hypothesis sic]
Ramana Maharshi “offer the jewel of your mind, because the sweetest gift is a mind that has died”
[… a section for intermediate explorers, or just thread these into the late 1800s when 2 giants appeared:]
Freud and Jung and the subconscious.
Mid 20th Century: synthesis and acceleration
[need a much better heading to capture for how all of the above came together and began to deepen]
1970s decision psychology, System 1 and System 2
Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Robert Cialdini and Influence and a generation of MBAs
Descartes Brain (and maybe Descartes himself earlier?)
Daniel Goleman
Blink and its followers bring awareness to the public
John Gottman
Paul Ekman
Daniel Kahneman
Jonathan Haidt
Scott Bristol (and David Bradford and Maryanne Huckabye)
Elephants and Economics 