charles darwin embarked on his journey on the beagle.by the time he got back, many thought he was afflicted by acute anxiety. it is unclear. to be focused on working on this book. not just these famous people. you read back in the can to see galen orcrates or george john, the most prominent british physician of the 1700's. they are contending with dozens if not hundreds of patients. this is woven into the human condition. maybe not a source for shame. today, a stigma attached to mental illness has diminished. if not gone. particularly for men. there was a striking quote i came across. posted on gun sights during world war ii. man him a you will have self-respect not to allow yourself to display anxiety or show fear. sidle -- a basic societal norm. to some degree i agree with that. know aboute, we now the narrow science of this. it is not so different from diabetes. he don't judge someone as a moral failure for suffering for diabetes or parkinson's disease. >> which has genetic and environmental influences. as does anxiety. how many peopl

the aflexion has affected everyone from charles darwin and emily dickinson to bill russell and barbraeisand. anxiety's prevalence is matched by its tendency to be misunderstood. journalist and author scott stossel has struggled with anxiety for most of his life. his new book tells his personal story and offers a history of anxiety from medical, cultural, philosophical and experiential perspectives. it's called "my age of anxiety: fear, hope, dread and the search for peace of mind." i'm pleased to have scott stossel at this table. welcome. >> thank you for having me. >> rose: here's what david brooks said about you, because you were one of the recipients of the sidney award which he gives every year to the best magazine pieces that he sees. does that describe you? >> in some ways i think it does. a lot of my colleagues -- i'm 44 years old. so for most of my life i've endeavored with great intensity to try to hide my anxiety because i thought it was either shameful or that somehow admitting it would compromise my professional standing and one of the things i wrestled with in the book an

his essay was written in answer to charles darwin who had presented this marvelous theory, of course, which we accept now as beyond a theory of evolution and natural selection and how this applies to the world of organisms. and what samuel butler did was sort of take darwin's theory and apply it to the world of technology, of machines. machines would likewise evolve through a process of selection and mutation and that no one could say where the world of machines would go except that it was going much faster than biological evolution. and that's true. and, of course, now it's faster and faster yet because now we have not only evolution of machines which was something that samuel butler clearly envisioned, but we have evolution of software, of codes which is something that samuel butler did not quite imagine. so it's a good story. it starts in the 17th century, in the 1600s, with people like thomas hobbs and godfried -- [inaudible] a german sort of philosopher mathematician. he imagined building a digital computer that ran purely on digital -- he didn't imagine it without electronics, h

charles darwin and what clinical anxiety is, the impulse gone a wry. fire. in the state of nature, if you are being attacked, that's the fight or flight response. that is very much an adaptive response because it enhances your odds of survival. when you are worrying about suspicious-looking letter that your girlfriend or boyfriend got from their ex-or when you are worried about what your boss thinks of you, you end up marinating in the stew of stress hormones that is not constructively. if there were no such thing as anxiety, we would all die. we would be extinct. we would do stupid things and end up winning darwin awards for extinguishing ourselves for lack of anxiety. there was a study that is cited in 1908 by a couple of harvard psychologists that talk about the bell curve. if over here is not very anxious and here is severely anxious, if you are here, you won't be able to perform because you are so severe. over here you don't have the activation, you will also not thrive. you want to be at the optimum point on the curve. you want to be a little bit