Neuroscienze delle emozioni. Alla scoperta del cervello emotivo nell'era digitale

[Autom. eng. transl.] Emotions pervade every aspect of our existence. But what do we really know about emotions? How do they influence our behaviors? How do they communicate and spread on social networks? Are they only specific to human species? Is a human-robot emotional relationship possible? A fascinating journey through the discoveries of neuroscience. This book aims to help us understand emotions from a specifically neuroscientific perspective, which highlights the role of physiological systems involved in the emotional universe. But not only. An essential starting point when studying emotions is that emotion is an experience even before a process. An experience in which we are involved throughout our entire life. Faced with the many questions neuroscientists have asked themselves - how do emotions evolve, how do they originate "in" and "with" our bodies, how they "get sick" - one remains crucial: why do emotions continue to exist? The answers that neuroscience provide us speak of empathy, intentionality, "mirroring" as the main objects with which to read them, discovering how, alongside our most intimate experiences, emotions are also an eminently social and shared fact. But the emotional universes also reserve paradoxes for us: emotions "depend" on the mind and rationality, rather than being opposed to it. Priority and indispensable, as the studies of comparative neuroscience also tell us, to the point that emotional behaviors can be identified in many species, in addition to the human one. The power of a construct is measured, in fact, in its ability to penetrate contexts that are not directly familiar to it. We will discover how this penetration of emotions also affects robotics, new technologies and, in a more general sense, the digital world.