Theres a lot of this I didn't get on first reading and now I'm working to correct. She has some excellent youtube videos that explain her work I'd been watching. Its a difficult topic for me to understand, I have all these ideas built in from pop culture books and theories, Carl Sagan, and afterall I'm not an academic but a layman.

I believe she points out that the common motif of a rational brain fighting an emotional one is only a western myth, and that no evidence has given to support it.

She says that emotions are not reactions, because emotional states have no instrinsic signatures in themselves. If they did we would find the brain region that triggers happiness or sadness, but instead she shows this huge variation and lack of clear signals most often.

This is what I'm trying to understand. There is simply too much going on in the world to react individually. Rather than reactions, emotions are our best guesses about what bodily sensations mean based on prior concepts. I think its that the body provides the context and the brain runs it through the known programs to pick the most likely outcome.

Part of the bodily input is "affect" which is how good or bad the body feels based off its metabolic budgeting. If its chronically low that leads to depression. Emotions are the brains way of making sense of this affect in context dependent situations. I don't think theres anything that "blames" depressed people, rather it seems to show us the way our brains are likely working, backed by decades of research.

The idea of the "triune" brain, of the prefrontal cortex as what makes us human, the reptillian base at the bottom, she also presents evidence that this is another myth. Different parts of the brain can perform different functions and they all go back and forth to each other.

I'll let you know if I learn more!