Houston Southard

Leonard Mlodinow - Emotional

Emotions aren't a Darwinian artifact of adaptivity or a separate, Platonist brain region alongside rational thought. Emotions are evolution's solution to both indecision and reflexive responses. Emotion is the next level up in our mind's emotional processing, aiding against the rigidity of the old mind.

Physicist Leonard Mlodninow not only breaks down the misunderstanding of emotion as it's been doled out by armchair parrots like Danny Goleman via the triune model of emotion under the standard of "Emotional Intelligence," he also debunks the myth that emotions are counterproductive.

The emotion revolution of the past 20 years has spurred recent technologies that have allowed scientists to trace neural connections to form a brain diagram called the connectome. Another, Optogenetics, lets them take control of individual neurons in mammalian brains to show emotion isn't at war with rational thought but rather a tool of it. Affective neuroscience delivers a picture of emotion as a gift, not a hindrance to be smoked out. Reflexive reactions are followed by fixed responses, but emotion allows a wide swath of circumstantial reactions.

An emotion is just a functional state of the mind. Senses give the brain environmental input. Memory provides information about the past. Knowledge and belief ground you with how the world works. Faced with a challenge or threat, we employ all these resources to flexibly calculate an emotional response.

Sadness signals something is wrong and puts us in an analytical frame of mind to better solve problems. Happiness expands our thinking and boosts creativity. Anxiety alerts us to danger. Anger strengthens resolve. Doctors prescribe more medication at the end of the day than at the beginning. Parole is granted more after lunch than before.

Those emotional gut instincts said to be better ignored in favor of logical thinking are physically tied to our guts, since 95% of our serotonin lives in the GI tract and not the brain. It's why in the presence of danger your core affect will turn negative, stimulate arousal and give you that sinking feeling in your stomach. Proof that having emotions has never equated to knowing shit about them.