15 January 2022 | New Scientist | 35Feel your way
Emotions don’t have to be the Achilles’ heel of rational thought.
They are a key tool in our intellectual arsenal, finds Gege Li
Book
Emotional: The new
thinking about feelings
Leonard Mlodinow
Allen LaneHAVE you ever become angry about
something that, in hindsight, had
more to do with the fact that you
were having a bad day? Most of us
have had moments like this, where
we let our emotions get the better
of us or allow them to influence our
decisions. It isn’t necessarily ideal,
and we often assume that the
involvement of emotions – intended
or otherwise – is always detrimental
to our ability to make good choices.
Not so, says physicist and author
Leonard Mlodinow in his book
Emotional: The new thinking about
feelings. He argues that while it
might seem like getting emotional
is a bad idea, our feelings actually
play an essential role in shaping our
thoughts and decisions, helping us
to react flexibly to situations and
motivating us to pursue our goals.
Drawing on the latest research,
Mlodinow guides us through the
ways in which neuroscientists are
changing their understanding of
human feelings – what he calls
“the emotion revolution”.
One of the breakthroughs
in the science of emotion is the
finding that rational thought
alone isn’t enough to process
the masses of information that we
are exposed to in our environment.
To think effectively, we also need
to feel. “Emotion is not at war with
rational thought but rather a tool
of it,” writes Mlodinow.
This challenges two well-worn
assumptions laid out long ago by
some of history’s greatest thinkers,
such as Plato: that the human
mind can be split into rational and
non-rational parts, reason and
emotion, and that harnessing theformer while taming the latter
holds the key to success and
making good decisions.
But now that we have the
technology to probe the human
brain more deeply than ever before,
modern science is uncovering the
complex neural dynamics that
are involved in generating our
emotions, and in turn reshaping
our knowledge of their importance.
Mlodinow explores how
and why feelings evolved in the
first place, arising initially from
purely reflexive behaviours to
environmental stimuli before the
“upgrade” of emotion occurred,
which provided a more flexible and
effective way for organisms to react
to the challenges they encountered.
The research also illustrates
the universality of emotion and
its benefits – scientists have seen
emotion-guided behaviours at
play in not only humans, but
also rodents, fruit flies and bees.
Towards the end of the book,
readers are given the chance to
determine and reflect on their own
emotional profile, using various
questionnaires that were developedfor research into specific feelings
like happiness and anxiety. This
is one of the more provocative
elements of the book: the idea
that we can gain power over our
emotions by learning to understand
and navigate them better. It is a
tantalising concept that Mlodinow
backs up with numerous studies
and anecdotes. He also gives advice
on how we can better manage our
own emotions and gain more
control over our lives.
Though the message of
controlling your feelings to
ultimately improve your well-being
is an important one, it did get
repetitive at times. What’s more,
regular readers of New Scientist or
of popular neuroscience in general
may find the research and the
solutions Mlodinow offers, such
as meditation and exercise, to be
a little predictable.
Emotional may occasionally
seem like a self-help book, but it
is nevertheless an illuminating read
that deals well with the complexity
of emotion, the emerging science
behind it and the fascinating
workings of the brain itself. It
might just help you remain calm
and collected, even on a bad day. ❚Gege Li is a writer based in LondonThere is no need to fight your
emotions; they are every bit as
important as cold, hard reasonSHUT
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