Exuberance: The Passion for Life Audiobook (Free)

The author of the bestselling An Unquiet Mind-and internationally renowned authority on feeling disorders-now gives us something wonderfully different: an exploration of exuberance and how it fuels our most important creative and technological achievements.

John Muir’s lifelong enthusiasm to save America’s wild places, Wilson Bentley’s legendary obsession to record for posterity the beauty of individual snowflakes, the boundless scientific attention behind Watson and Crick’s finding of DNA, ocean lions about Exuberance: The Passion for Life that browse and porcupines that dance-Kay Redfield Jamison shows how these and so many more examples both human and pet define the nature of exuberance, and how this exuberance pertains to intellectual searching, risk-taking, creativeness, and survival itself. She examines the hereditary predisposition to exuberance; the function of the mind chemical dopamine; the bond between positive moods and psychological resilience; and the variations between exuberance and mania. She delves into some of the phenomena of exuberance-the contagiousness of laughter, the giddiness of new love, the intoxicating effects of music and of religious ecstasy-while also dealing with the dangerous desire to simulate exuberance by using drugs or alcohol. In a fascinating and intimate coda to all of those other book, renowned scientists, writers, and politicians talk about their applying for grants the forms and role of exuberance in their own lives.

Original, inspiring, authoritative, Exuberance brims with the drive and desire it celebrates.