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Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus
Original language
English

HEARTWARMING

Hans IJzerman

How Our Inner Thermostat Made Us Human

A charming investigation of core body temperature regulation and its powerful effect on human civilization.

A hot cup of tea, coffee, or cocoa is calming and comforting?but how can holding a warm mug affect our emotions? In Heartwarming, social psychologist Hans Rocha IJzerman explores temperature through the long lens of evolution. Besides breathing, regulating body temperature is one of the fundamental tasks for any animal. Like huddling penguins, we humans have long relied on each other to maintain our temperatures; over millennia, this instinct for thermoregulation has shaped our lives and culture.
As IJzerman illuminates how temperature affects human sociality, he examines fascinating new questions: How will climate change impact society? Why are some chronically cold, and others overheated? Can thermoregulation keep relationships closer, even across distance? The answers offer new insights for all of us who want to better understand our bodies, our minds, and each other. Heartwarming takes readers on an engaging journey through the world, seen from the perspective of coldness and warmth.

Hans IJzerman is the world's foremost expert on social thermoregulation in humans. He has published over 30 academic articles in the top journals of his field.His research has been prominently featured in Scientific American Mind, the Daily Mail, and has contacts with many journalists in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Belgium.
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Published 2021-02-01 by Norton

Comments

HEARTWARMING is on the exact subject (about how humans feel heat) which just won this year's Nobel Prize in Medicine 2021. Read more...

[...] Instructive and amusing as it depicts the different ways animals cope with temperature, from huddling penguins to sun-basking lizards, to tree-trunk-hugging koalas. Behavioral psychology, culture, language, metaphor, and physiology are enlisted in this unconventional consideration of temperature. -- Booklist

Hans Rocha IJzerman sticks a thermometer into every human and animal behavior to show us how much depends on outside and inside temperature. It is a surprising take that illuminates far more than you might think. -- Frans de Waal, New York Times best-selling author of Mama's Last Hug

Chinese Simplified: Gingko; Chinese Complex: China Times; Korea: The Must Read Books Publishing; Russian: Portal Publishing

Thermal regulation is one of the most obvious aspects of life governance. Why would we have invented central heating and air conditioning if it were not? Still, it always takes a back seat to eating and drinking. Hans Rocha IJzerman's informative book will change your mind. ? Antonio Damasio, author of The Strange Order of Things From huddling penguins to the benefits of living where it's warm, Hans Rocha IJzerman's Heartwarming takes us on a smart and fascinating tour of body temperature?how we control it and how it controls us. It turns out that thermoregulation connects to most everything you care about: your health, your social life, and your ability to sell your house. Best enjoyed?you'll see why?with a hot beverage. ? Lydia Denworth, author of Friendship Hot tea, central heating, iced coffee, snuggling: physical warmth and cold deeply affect how we think and make decisions, even how we love?due to ancient brain wiring. This book on 'social thermoregulation' will improve the way you live, even explain the hidden payoffs of your zoom calls with friends, your nostalgia for home and your hours spent in cozy cafes. It's hard science, original ideas, animal tales and revealing insights about humanity. It's fascinating! ? Helen Fisher, author of Why We Love