Projections: A Story of Human Emotions
Karl Deisseroth is a practicing psychiatrist and a professor of bioengineering and psychiatry at Stanford, where his lab developed optogenetics, a technique that uses light to control specific neurons in living tissue. Projections moves between long-form clinical portraits of his patients and accounts of the experiments his lab has run to probe fear, aggression, dissociation, eating, and bonding at the level of brain circuits. Deisseroth writes in a literary register that is unusual for a working scientist, drawing on poetry, history, and his own night shifts on the psychiatric ward. The book asks what it means for emotions to have a circuit-level explanation while still being lived from the inside by suffering people. It won wide critical praise and was a finalist for several major nonfiction awards in 2021. Deisseroth is also a longtime colleague of Andrew Huberman at Stanford.
What you might want to know about Projections: A Story of Human Emotions
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Stanford psychiatrist and bioengineer Karl Deisseroth weaves patient stories with the science of optogenetics to ask where human emotions come from and how the brain produces them.
Huberman has recommended Projections on Facebook and on his podcast, describing Karl Deisseroth as a Stanford colleague and the book as a rare combination of literary writing and frontier neuroscience by one of the field's leading figures.
No. Deisseroth introduces the neuroscience he uses, and the patient chapters are written as literary case studies, so a general reader can follow the book closely.
Projections: A Story of Human Emotions was written by Karl Deisseroth, published in 2021 by Random House.
Projections: A Story of Human Emotions is 256 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Projections: A Story of Human Emotions takes most readers 4 to 6 hours to finish.
Projections: A Story of Human Emotions is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
