If instances of emotion are like cookies, then the brain is like a kitchen, stocked with common ingredients such as flour, water, sugar, and salt. Beginning with these ingredients, we can create diverse foods such as cookies, bread, cake, muffins, biscuits, and scones. Likewise, your brain has core “ingredients,” which we called core systems in chapter 1. They combine in complex ways, roughly analogous to recipes, to produce diverse instances of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and so on. The ingredients themselves are multipurpose, not dedicated to emotions but participating in their
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