Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

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SOME SCIENTIFIC INSIGHTS arise in powerful, fleeting experiences—a startling observation, a dream, a gut feeling, a sudden realization. My own thinking about human emotion has taken a longer course, reflecting the intersection of the long arc of life and the scientific data I have gathered.

I have been led to the idea that emotion is the source of the meaningful life. My mother, an English professor and student of Romanticism, and my father, an artist guided by Lao Tzu and Zen, cultivated in me the conviction that our best attempts at the good life are found in bursts of passion captured in plot turns in the prose on a page or oil layered on a canvas. This idea proved to have the deepest scientific promise in the hands of Charles Darwin, who believed that brief emotional expressions offer clues to the deep origins of our design, and Paul Ekman, who figured out how to bring quantifiable order to the thousands of movements of the face.

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