Good communication conventional wisdom suggests is calm logical rational. Emotions we re
told just get in the way. But what if this is backwards? What if those emotional overtones are
the main messages we re sending to one another and all that logical language is just window
dressing? Over billions of years of evolution animals have become increasingly sophisticated
and increasingly sentient. In the process they evolved emotions which helped improve their
odds of survival in complex situations. These emotions were at first purely internal. But at
some point social animals began expressing their emotions in increasingly dramatic ways.
These emotional expressions could accurately reflect internal emotions (smiling to express
happiness) or they could be quite different (smiling to cover up that you re actually furious
but can t tell your boss that). Why did once-stone-faced animals evolve to be so emotionally
expressive to be us? The answer as evolutionary neurobiologist Mark Changizi and mathematician
Tim Barber reveal is that emotional expressions are our first and most important language one
that allows us as social animals to engage in highly sophisticated communications and
negotiations. Expressly Human introduces an original theory that explains from first
principles how the broad range of emotional expressions evolved and provides a Rosetta Stone
for human communication. It will revolutionize the way you see every social interaction from
deciding who gets the last slice of pizza to multimillion-dollar business negotiations and
change your definition of what makes us human.
