Acknowledgments

[These acknowledgments are reproduced from the print edition of Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain. Copyright © 2020 Lisa Feldman Barrett.]

This book owes its existence to many people, particularly the neuroscientists who educated me in their craft, guided my reading, and patiently answered my unending questions with unwavering generosity and good cheer. First and foremost is the incomparable Barbara Finlay. Barb is a connoisseur of evolutionary and developmental neuroscience. She regularly astounds me with her encyclopedic knowledge as she instructs me in the finer points of embryology and continually exposes me to a smorgasbord of neuroanatomy and neuroscience topics from the perspective of evolution and development. The half-lesson and lesson no. 1 in this book would not exist without Barb, and her fingerprints can be found in other lessons. Barb and I are currently collaborating on an academic book on the evolution and development of motivation and emotion in vertebrates, to be published by MIT Press.

I am also exceedingly grateful to my long-time collaborator and friend, neurologist Brad Dickerson. We’ve collaborated on brain-imaging studies for more than a decade at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and we’ve published more than thirty research papers together. I particularly appreciate his willingness to indulge my sometimes exuberant scientific speculations. Special thanks also to Michael Numan, who was the first neuroscientist to encourage and support me as I began my neuroscience education.

My enduring thanks also go to my merry band of neuroscience collaborators not already mentioned, past and present, from whom I have learned so much. They include (in alphabetical order) Joe Andreano, Shir Atzil, Moshe Bar, Larry Barsalou, Marta Bianciardi, Kevin Bickart, Eliza Bliss-Moreau, Emery Brown, Jamie Bunce, Ciprian Catana, Lorena Chanes, Maximilien Chaumon, Sarah Dubrow, Wim van Duffel, Wei Gao, Talma Hendler, Martijn van den Heuvel, Jacob Hooker, Ben Hutchinson, Yuta Katsumi, Ian Kleckner, Aaron Kucyi, Kestas Kveraga, Phil Kragel, Kristen Lindquist, Dante Mantini, Helen Mayberg, Yoshiya Moriguchi, Suzanne Oosterwijk, Gal Raz, Carl Saab, Ajay Satpute, Lianne Scholtens, Kyle Simmons, Jordan Theriault, Alexandra Touroutoglou, Tor Wager, Larry Wald, Mariann Weierich, Christi Westlin, Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli, Christy Wilson-Mendenhall, and Jiahe Zhang. And I remain deeply grateful to my intrepid engineering and computer scientist collaborators, who continue to teach me about dynamical systems, complexity, and other topics in computation that make me a better neuroscientist, including Dana Brooks, Sarah Brown, Jaume Coll-Font, Jennifer Dy, Deniz Erdogmus, Zulqarnain Khan, Madhur Mangalam, Jan-Willem van de Meent, Sarah Ostadabbas, Misha Pavel, Sumientra Rampersad, Sebastian Ruf, Gene Tunik, Mathew Yarossi, and the rest of the PEN group at Northeastern University. Thanks also to statisticians Tim Johnson and Tom Nichols.

This book also wouldn’t exist were it not for the boundless enthusiasm and expert guidance from my editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Alex Littlefield. I’m particularly grateful for his careful reading and his encouragement to combine complicated observations about the brain with big ideas of what it means to be a human being. In this regard, I’m also indebted to James Ryerson at the New York Times for his guidance as I developed my voice while navigating choppy waters between neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy.

The book also greatly benefited from the artistic skills and inquisitive nature of Van Yang, whose team’s ingenious illustrations bring the science to life; I especially appreciate his deep desire to communicate science to a wide audience. Thanks also to Aaron Scott for his design consultations; his expertise, careful eye, and creativity have helped me translate complex scientific ideas into understandable images for over a decade.

Thank you to the production and marketing teams at HMH, including Olivia Bartz, Chloe Foster, Tracy Roe, Chris Granniss, Emily Snyder, Heather Tamarkin, and especially Michelle Triant, PR maven extraordinaire. Thanks also to my agent, Max Brockman, for his continued enthusiasm and support, and to his crew at Brockman Inc., Thomas Delaney, Evelyn Chavez, Breana Swinehart, and Russell Weinberger.

This book was notably improved by valuable comments, criticisms, and ideas offered by early readers, many of whom are dear friends and extraordinary scientists in their own right. They are (in alphabetical order) Kevin Allison, Vanessa Kane Alves, Eliza Bliss-Moreau, Dana Brooks, Lindsey Drayton, Sarah Dubrow, Peter Farrar, Barb Finlay, Ludger Hartley, Katie Hoemann, Ben Hutchinson, Peggy Kalb, Tsiona Lida, Micah Kessel, Ann Kring, Batja Mesquita, Karen Quigley, Sebastian Ruf, Aaron Scott, Scott Sleek, Annie Temmink, Kelley Van Dilla, and Van Yang. And for close reviews of the science in specific lessons, I give special thanks to Olaf Sporns and Sebastian Ruf for lesson no. 2, Dima Amso for lesson no. 3, and Ben Hutchinson and Sarah Dubrow for lesson no. 4.

I also offer heartfelt thanks to my colleagues and trainees in the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory at Northeastern University and Massachusetts General Hospital. Much of the material in these essays has been the topic of ongoing discussion and research in our community of talented young scientists. All the members (past and present) are listed at affective-science.org. I’m particularly grateful to Sam Lyons for ultra-fast retrieval of a never-ending torrent of research papers on request and to Karen Quigley, who co-directs our lab. Karen has deep expertise in peripheral physiology of the body, interoception, and allostasis. We like to joke that, with her knowledge of the body and my knowledge of the brain, between the two of us, we make up a whole person.

I am also especially grateful to the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at the Massachusetts General Hospital and its director, Bruce Rosen, as well as to the psychology department at Northeastern University, and in particular to our chair, Joanne Miller. Their support and patience make it possible for me to be both a neuroscientist and a psychologist, not to mention a communicator of science to the public.

This book was made possible with a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and a book grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. I am deeply grateful to both for their generous support.

And above all, I offer a stream of continuous thanks and unbounded appreciation to the two brains I love best—my daughter, Sophia, and my husband, Dan—for their inspiration, forbearance, and general balancing of my body budget.

[These acknowledgments are reproduced from the print edition of Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain. Copyright © 2020 Lisa Feldman Barrett.]