Next Big Idea Transcripts: Leonard Mlodinow & Annie Murphy Paul

The transcript to Annie Murphy Paul's conversation with Leonard Mlodinow about his new book?Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking, follows ... You can listen to their conversation below, on?Apple Podcasts or Spotify .

Speaker 1: LinkedIn presents.

Rufus Griscom: I'm Rufus Griscom, and this is The Next Big Idea. Today, do your emotions make you smarter?

Speaker 3: Do you know a lot about emotions and feelings? Great. Then you are ready to play name that emotion.

Rufus Griscom: This is clip from a 2015 episode of Sesame Street.

Speaker 3: Bring in the first contestant.

Mr. Grouch: Contestant? I'm not playing a game.

Speaker 3: Seems to be a grouch. Oh, let's see. Mr. Grouch, can you tell us a little bit about how you're feeling?

Mr. Grouch: I'm not telling you nothing.

Speaker 3: Well, don't you want to play our game?

Mr. Grouch: No, I don't want to play your game.

Speaker 3: Seems like he's cranky and a little bit grumpy. How do you think this grouch is feeling? Grouchy? You think the grouch is grouchy? Let's find out. Mr. Grouch, are you grouchy?

Mr. Grouch: Of course, I'm grouchy. I'm a grouch.

Speaker 3: We did it. We named that emotion. Thank you for playing, Mr. Grouch.

Rufus Griscom: This clip is silly, of course. But it's also kind of remarkable. The average Sesame Street viewer is three years old. They can't read. They can't ride a bike. They can't do their taxes. But they can recognize and name their own feelings and correctly label the emotions of other people or puppets. We are highly sensitive, emotional beings, for better and for worse. Yet, almost as soon as we learn to identify our feelings, we're told we need to learn to manage them, lest they get the best of us or cloud our judgment. Our emotions are a problem to be solved.

This line of thinking, that emotions are inconvenient, a pebble in the shoe of rationality, extends from the 21st century, all the way back to Darwin and Plato. But what if our emotions aren't a problem to be solved? What if they exist to help us solve problems? That's the striking conclusion scientists have come to in the last decade. Emotions as they now understand them don't hinder rational thought. They enhance it. Think of scouts in the army. They go out in front of the other troops, scope out what's up ahead, and then run back to camp to share what they've found. Our emotions do something similar. They race out in front of our rational thinking and they bring back intel that fuels our thought processes. Every emotion, whether it's fear or disgust, anger or surprise, sharpens a particular set of beliefs and memories and senses while simultaneously downplaying others. That's why it's impossible to separate emotion and logic.

This new understanding of the relationship between thinking and feeling came to my attention when we had the brilliant science writer, Annie Murphy Paul on the show to talk about her book, The Extended Mind. Annie shared some incredible research that shows stockbrokers who follow their guts make smarter trades. It's because your unconscious mind can do all sorts of complex mental calculations that your conscious mind can't keep up with.

I encountered that research again in an exciting new book by theoretical physicist, Leonard Mlodinow. It's called Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking. And so I thought given their shared interests, why not get Annie to interview Len about his book? That's what you're about to hear. But you're still going to hear from me too. Annie and Len's conversation was so interesting that as my producer, Caleb and I listened back to it, we kept pausing to talk about other anecdotes from the book and geek out on some of the science. We had such a blast that we thought we'd try incorporating some of our back and forth into the episode itself, kind of like the director's commentary on a DVD. Remember those? Anyway, I'm so grateful to Annie and Len for having this conversation and for completely changing my understanding of where emotions come from, what purpose they serve, and how they enhance our thinking.

Caleb Bissinger: Okay, Rufus. Before we get to Annie and Len's conversation, I'm going to ask you some questions, and I want you to answer them on a scale from one to six. One means you strongly disagree. Six means you strongly agree.

Rufus Griscom: Okay.

Caleb Bissinger: First question. Do you think you look attractive?

Rufus Griscom: Caleb, attractive to whom? We're talking to passers by on the street, to my wife?

Caleb Bissinger: To Uber drivers. I think to yourself. I think to yourself, when you look in the mirror in the morning.

Rufus Griscom: Well, I'm really highly attracted to myself. But I would say to my wife, I'm going to say a four out of six.

Caleb Bissinger: Okay. Okay. Here's another one. Would you say that you are intensely interested in other people?

Rufus Griscom: That's an easy one, a six out of six. People are fascinating.

Caleb Bissinger: Yeah. I feel like if you hosted an interview podcast and you were not interested in other people, that would be kind of a problem.

Rufus Griscom: It would make the job a lot less fun, for sure.

Caleb Bissinger: Okay. Let me give you one more. Is there a gap between what you would like to do and what you have done?

Rufus Griscom: Interesting. There is a gap. I'm going to go with a three out of six on this because I would like there to be a gap, in that there's a lot more I'd like to do. So three out of six.

Caleb Bissinger: Yeah. That makes sense. Okay. Those questions come from a survey that Len includes in his book, Emotional. And the survey is to help you better understand your emotional disposition. It's one of the things I think is great about this book and about the conversation that we're about to play with Len and Annie, that yes, they get into all the fascinating science of where emotions come from and how they work and stuff like that, but they also talk about emotions on a really practical and personal level. And so I thought it would be fun to have you take the rest of that survey offline, and then we can come back at the end of the episode. We can talk about your results, and we can connect them to some of the insights and tools that Annie and Len are about to share.

Rufus Griscom: Fantastic. I'm game. Let's get into Annie and Len's conversation. They began by discussing our futile efforts to separate thinking and feeling.

Annie Murphy Paul: Len, it was really interesting reading this book as someone who fairly recently finished this book on the extended mind, which is pushing back against the way that we tend to separate the mind from the body, the mind from our physical surroundings, the mind from relationships with other people. And another big division in our culture obviously is the way we tend to separate mental life, intellectual life from emotions. And I felt like your book was a really strong statement saying, "That's not right." We know that's not correct, and there is all this new science that is showing us how misguided that notion is. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, about why it is or how it came to be that we separate thinking from feeling and why that separation really is not sustainable.

Leonard Mlodinow: Well, it dates back at least to Plato and ancient Greeks, who thought that you have a rational mind for logical thought that makes good decisions and guides you, and then you have these drives and passions that you need to fulfill, but that overtake your reason sometimes. The Christian philosophers after Plato put an element of morality into it. And as the idea proceeded through the ages, it became embedded in Western culture that there is a split, that there is a rational mind and there's an emotional mind and that the rational mind is good. It makes good decisions. And the emotional mind leads you astray, and the rational mind has to control it.

We now know that is way not true. First of all, we may use the term rational mind and emotional mind figuratively, but there is no rational mind and emotional mind. Not only in the brain is that all mixed up and interconnected, but in fact, in the operation of our rational and emotional apparatus and our rational thought, it's inextricable. They are tied together in a way that cannot be separated. So there is no separation. And an important point about that, the most important point, is that the role that the emotions play is constructive and not a destructive role. Without our emotions, we not only wouldn't make generally good decisions, we wouldn't make any decisions. We would hardly do anything because motivation comes from your feelings. Without any feelings, without any desires, any joy, any happiness, or any sadness or threat of sadness or anxiety, we would just sit there doing nothing, waiting for some stimulus to respond to. But that's the way people view it in culture. They think that you can separate pure rational, logical, computer-like processing from emotion, and it's just not true.

Annie Murphy Paul: You have a chapter in your book titled, The Purpose of Emotion. I wonder if you could speak a little bit to that because I think people might wonder, why do we have these emotions that sort of buffet us in one direction or another? Why can't we just sort of think like computers in this completely clearheaded logical way? Why do emotions exist? What are they for?

Leonard Mlodinow: Emotions have developed like the rest of us when we were living in the wild in nomadic groups of 20, 30, 40, 50 individuals. And they evolved as a way to help us efficiently respond to threats in the environment or potential gains in the environment, food or whatever. To appreciate the role of emotion, you have to think about what would thinking be like if there was no emotion.

One kind of thinking is reflexive thinking, which most animals exercise most of the time, which is there's a certain stimulus that causes a certain response. And that's very rigid. Your brain would have an encyclopedia of different stimuli to react to and what you should do if that happens called reflexive thinking or fixed action patterns. And that works quite well because as the animal evolves, it evolves very intelligent responses to certain stimuli. But if you encounter new stimuli or altered stimuli, it doesn't work so well. So we've evolved also logical, rational thinking whereby you analyze a situation. But that's rather slow. And as you know, because I know it's in your book, our consciousness can only handle a certain amount of data per second. And it's not really the most efficient way to think. So we involve these emotions to help us do that.

And what emotions are, are a functional state of your brain that envelopes or puts a context around the logical processing. Let me give you an example. A brain is an information processor. It gets data in. It has goals or programs that it wants to achieve. It asks certain questions. It brings up certain memories. It makes associations. It evaluates the data according to how reliable it is and how probable certain things are or certain risks are. And all these things are happening before your logical part of your mind can start processing the information. And in all these things, other than the processing of the information, emotions are key in deciding what questions you're going to answer, formulating your goals, choosing the data that you're going to consider, bringing up whatever memories. In all these different ways, your emotions are very important.

What the emotions are is a kind of a context for that logical thinking that chooses all these parameters, that sets all the parameters of your thinking. For example, if you're walking down the street, a dark street in Los Angeles, downtown Los Angeles, and it's maybe a little seedy, and a twig breaks a couple blocks from you, you might hear that if you're in a state of fear, because when you're in fear, your senses are heightened. You're much more goal oriented, and you're much more focused on the environment. Your hearing acuity actually goes up. So you're in a mental state where a sound that normally would've not even registered with you does register. If you were hungry on your way to where you were going, say you were going to a restaurant, that suddenly disappears. You won't feel the hunger. It's not that you ignore the hunger. You won't feel the hunger because this fear state adjust the parameters around which your brain is focusing.

Rufus Griscom: Let's pause for a second here because I love this idea. Emotions adjust the parameters around which your brain is focusing. Sometimes that can be beneficial, but I have to think that sometimes that refocusing can actually undermine our ability to think clearly.

Caleb Bissinger: Yes, totally. In the book, Len sites really interesting research that Jonathan Haidt did about the ways the emotion of disgust can screw with your decision making. Jonathan did one study where he gathered a bunch of college students and he sent them into a room, gave them a questionnaire to fill out about various moral issues like, is it okay for first cousins to get married. But right before they went into that room, Jonathan and his colleagues doused it with fart spray, which is exactly what it sounds like. They've got farts in a can. And what he found is that the disgust of being in that stinky room caused participants to make harsher moral judgements in the questionnaire.

Rufus Griscom: This is helping me understand a lot of my last decade, living with three boys. And I'm glad these three boys do not have access to this product. But that is fascinating. So emotions can be an aid, but they can also be a hindrance.

Caleb Bissinger: Yes, exactly. And let's get back to the interview because Annie is actually about to make that same point.

Annie Murphy Paul: That's very interesting, Len, because that suggests that our emotional state creates a kind of context for our thinking and that we think differently depending on what emotion we're experiencing. The question that raises for me is, can we always trust our emotions to lead us in the right direction? Can we rely on them? They do seem like this finely tuned system, and yet we can all think of moments when our emotions led us to do things that we later regretted, for example.

Leonard Mlodinow: We feel emotions many times during the day. When you think back, you tend to only remember the time where you won the lottery or you got tenure or some big thing happened, or you broke up with someone, a very strong emotion. But at a lower level, we feel emotions all through the day, and they really do help us process information and react to our environment. But we have to recognize, of course, that those emotions developed when we were, as I said, living in the wild, and we had a much different environment. And so they're not always appropriate to today's civilization, and especially over the last 20 years with the internet and the huge connectivity in social media and the number of humans that we come into contact with every day has just exponentially risen.

So the emotions sometimes get out of hand. They have a property for example, called persistence, which is very important. It means it doesn't go away right away when an emotion is triggered. So if you see a bear and the bear steps off into the bushes and is no longer in sight, that emotion doesn't go away. But sometimes in modern society, situations change so quickly that persistence can carry over an emotion to a place where it's not appropriate, or we might feel an emotion that's too strong for our civilization or so forth.

It's like optical illusions. Your eyes developed to bring in information about the environment, and yet they can be fooled. And we have optical illusions. We have mirages. But no one says because there are optical illusions, we should try and not see at all. And that's similar with emotions. There are times where emotions get in the way. It's a minority of the times, but there are times when they get in the way. But that doesn't mean that we should say emotions are bad. They're still productive and constructive. And what we need to do, and I have a chapter on that, is learn how to regulate emotions. So for cases where an emotion is inappropriate, or perhaps people have a disorder where they tend to feel exaggerated emotions, maybe because of events in their childhood or events even in their adulthood that have done that to them or because of their genetics, then there are ways of handling that as well.

Annie Murphy Paul: Was part of the reason that you thought this was the book to write right now because science is telling us some new things about emotion that we didn't know before? And what might those be?

Leonard Mlodinow: Yeah. There's been a great revolution in emotion research over the past 10, 20 years. It's been very exciting. And I have a graph in the book showing a number of papers that mention affective neuroscience. And it just goes like that. It was stimulated, I think in large part by new technologies, technologies to study the connectivity of the brain called the connectome, of course, functional magnetic resonance imaging, FMRI, optogenetics, where scientists can now go into an animal brain, because it's not ... It's somewhat invasive, but they can stimulate specific neurons to fire and see what they do.

And there's just been an amazing explosion in research, which totally debunked the old, what they call the traditional theory of emotion, which in modern times, dates back to Darwin really is the first scientist who did that. We can talk about the specifics if you want, but that was a theory that came up that he published in the 1860s and really dominated thought for over 150 years, really. And we now know that almost every element of that was wrong. It was very intuitive in many ways, just like the Greeks' ideas of atoms were intuitive or Newton's laws are intuitive. But today we know that atoms are far different from what the Greeks thought, and also the fundamental laws of nature are far different than what Newton thought. And so similarly, all the basic tenets of the traditional theory of emotion have more or less be debunked.

One thing is about what emotion actually is. Darwin was interested, of course, as you may guess, in connecting, understanding emotion from the evolutionary point of view. And he studied other animals, mammals, and other civilizations, and came up with the theory that emotions evolved in animals to help them communicate. They don't have language, and so that in order to cooperate or fend off other animals, they have to find ways of showing their fierceness or their invitation or their happiness or their anger or whatever it was. And so they developed vocalizations and facial expressions to get that across to others of their group. And so for humans, Darwin felt that emotions were more or less outmoded because we have language and because we have rational thinking. He thought they were a vestigial, somewhat like the appendix. And now we know that is totally wrong. As I said, they are functional states of your mental processing, and so they are not vestigial. And one purpose is to communicate to others, but that's not the only or the primary purpose.

Darwin concluded that there were six basic emotions. There was happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust. And he did recognize that there were other emotions, but these were the basic ones. And now we don't make that division so much, and we look at a much wider range of emotions, a lot of social emotions, awe, embarrassment, jealousy, what they call homeostatic emotions, hunger, sexual drive, all having this quality in common that they're functional states of the brain.

But even beyond that, it gets even worse because we now know that not only should we look at a bigger spectrum of emotion, but the idea of defining emotion with a name is also a bit fuzzy. So when you say fear, we know today it's not really a single emotion. There are different kinds of fear. Obviously, there are different kinds of pain, burning versus headache. There are different kinds of fear. And we now have technology that's good enough to even look at how the mechanics of that in the brain differs. People used to say that fear was in the amygdala. Remember those days? Like in the nineties. The amygdala is the [inaudible 00:20:25] of fear.

That's the Darwinian kind of idea that there's a certain emotion and it's in a certain place in the brain, and it's indivisible. It's a unitary thing. Well, we know that the amygdala is not only involved in fear, it's involved in most emotions. And we know there are types of fear that don't even involve the amygdala, so that's wrong. So in all of these ways, we've found that the old standard theory doesn't work. But of course the main thing is that emotions are useful and necessary and not counterproductive.

Annie Murphy Paul: Right. Going back to one thing you said about Darwin, when he was arguing that for humans, we're almost beyond emotion. Emotions are a vestige of our animal history, but we don't need those anymore. I think there are remnants of that attitude in our culture today that see emotion as something sort of primitive or not as elevated as human's ability to engage in logic and rational thinking. Do you think some of this research may sort of lead us to have more respect for emotions and for how important they are and how valuable they are?

Leonard Mlodinow: That's why I wrote the book. I hope so, but I know that it can be a long battle to change social feelings, views. There's also a huge gender difference. In my generation, males in particular were raised and told that emotion was bad. Don't cry. Don't be a wimp and cry, or don't even feel. Suppress your feelings. Women are allowed more leeway in expressing emotion. But of course, then they're criticized for it. [inaudible 00:22:02] emotional. And so this whole idea of emotion versus rationality is like male versus female, good versus bad. And it's all BS. And we have to try to change it, but it can be an uphill battle.

Annie Murphy Paul: To take a step into the personal here, I noticed that stories about your mother were really a kind of late motif through the book. And I wondered as an author, why you made that choice and what your thinking was in sort of stringing together the pieces of the book on this thread that your mother really connects all the parts of the book.

Leonard Mlodinow: One of the trademarks or qualities of all of my books are that I tell a lot of personal stories, if they're relevant. And my parents were very important, strong forces in my childhood. Of course, they are for everybody. But for me, because they both were Holocaust survivors and had very intense, dramatic experiences, there's a lot of stories, both from the Holocaust. My father was a resistance fighter and then later in a concentration camp, and they both lost their families, siblings, parents. My father lost his wife and child. So there was just so much material there that it's not that I go and I say, "Let's do a mother story," but they just come to me.

The book is called Emotional. And of course, the experiences that my parents had were very much emotion based, or the effects of the experience on them had a huge effect on their emotional life. And so I guess it was just natural that when I tell stories and I want to illustrate points, my parents, and especially my mother, would come up because she had such a, I think, extreme, emotional life based on her unfortunate experiences. Yeah, so she pops up in the book. And at the end, unfortunately, there's the incident at the end that was very emotional for me, as she passed away as I was finishing the book. As a writer, you try to be open and open yourself up to your innermost feelings. And so that's what I did.

Caleb Bissinger: Let's pause and hear a clip from the audio book of Emotional, where Len writes about his parents.

Speaker 8: In some families, when a child's misbehavior passes a certain threshold, they give the child a time out, or they sit down and talk about why it is important to obey or not to act out. In other families, a parent might give a child a paddling on the rear end. My mother, a Holocaust survivor, wouldn't do any of those things. When I made a big mess or tried to flush the transistor radio down the toilet, my mother would work herself into a frenzy, erupt in tears, and start to scream at me. "I can't take it," she'd shout. "I wish I were dead. Why did I survive? Why didn't Hitler kill me?"

My father, a former resistance fighter and Buchenwald death camp survivor, had gone through comparable trauma. He and my mother met as refugees soon after the war had ended, and for the rest of their lives experienced most life events together. And yet, they responded differently, he always being full of optimism and self-confidence. Why did my parents react to events in such varied ways? More generally, what are emotions? Why do we have them, and how do they arise in our brains? How do they affect our thoughts, judgments, motivation, and decisions, and how can we control them?

Rufus Griscom: Wow. That's incredibly powerful and fascinating. We know that different people have different emotional reactions to the same circumstances. I wonder why that is.

Caleb Bissinger: Yeah. And does it suggest that we can manipulate our emotional responses? If you are able to react to a stressful situation without getting stressed, can I figure out how to do the same thing?

Rufus Griscom: Exactly. Are we at the mercy of our emotions, or can we master them somehow? Annie and Len tackle that question right after the break.

Annie Murphy Paul: What would you say to of those readers who feel at the mercy of their emotions? That they can understand on an intellectual level that as you say, emotions are functional states, but in the moment, none of us like to feel bad, sad or angry, or upset or frustrated. What do we do with negative emotions like that, that feel bad to experience, unpleasant to experience? Can we think about them in a new way, given what we're learning about the functionality of emotions?

Leonard Mlodinow: First of all ... Boy, there's a lot to say there. First of all, they are useful. Even when you're feeling sad or angry, fearful, those are useful. Those emotions have developed in order to get you to take actions that will improve your situation. So when you're in a sad state, for example, you are in a state where you are more motivated to change things, to change whatever your circumstances are. Whereas otherwise you might let something that's unoptimal keep going, when you're sad about it, you tend to change it. So part of it is just recognizing that this is useful and this is helping you.

If you feel that it's persisting too long or that it's too strong, then there are ways that you can handle that, where you can try to change your emotion using your conscience, your executive function of your frontal lobe. You can try and alter your emotional experience, which largely comes from unconscious processes. But you can do that. And that's what's called regulation. For example, a simple example is I'm driving down the street and somebody cuts me off. Anger developed as an emotion in order to help motivate you to fix things when somebody gets in the way of you and your goals. In modern life, I would say getting cut off in traffic isn't really getting in the way of your goal in any non-negligible way, but it makes us angry anyway. And there's no action, probably no appropriate action, no action that's appropriate that you should take in that situation, honking or whatever, yelling, giving someone the finger. None of that is really a good thing.

So what do you do? From the point of view of regulation, there's one type of strategy called reappraisal. Reappraisal comes from the word appraisal. Appraisal has to do with how your brain constructs your emotional experience based on the situation and the context. Your brain in this case constructed anger based on this person cutting you off. And there are some assumptions that you are making unconsciously that make it go into anger, which is that the person is a bad person, is disrespecting you, is being an ass or is being nasty to you in some way and is hurting you in some way. And I said earlier, you're not really being hurt by having your car pulled back 20 feet or whatever. And those other aspects of it, about the person being evil, are just a story that you told.

Reappraisal means spinning it differently to have your brain come up with a different appraisal. So you just remind yourself, maybe that person is late. You've all been late, and we've been desperate to get somewhere at some time. Maybe that's what's going on. Maybe then you'll have more sympathy or empathy for the person and you won't be angry. Maybe the person is just an oblivious type. And I know I often am. I'm thinking about something, and then I change lanes and don't realize that I just cut someone off. If you think that, you probably won't be angry or as angry either. So the idea of the reappraisal method is to take whatever the situation is and now consciously try and find another explanation for it.

It has to be one that you buy. You can't just say, "I'm going to choose to think of it this way, even though I don't believe it." Then it won't work. But if you think about other possible explanations, then your mind will automatically diffuse that other emotion and take your feeling in a different direction. So that's one thing you can do is called reappraisal.

Annie Murphy Paul: Yeah. Len, that's making me think of a really interesting idea you raised in your book, which is this emerging model of the brain as a prediction machine. It's always sort of predicting what it thinks will happen and then checking what actually happens against that prediction. I had never thought about that predictive processing model in relation to emotion, but it made sense once I started to think about how people often have emotional scripts drawn from their own experiences that lead them to expect certain kinds of emotional experiences in the future. I wonder if you could talk a bit about how that predictive function of emotion works and whether it would be possible to change those predictions.

Leonard Mlodinow: That's a good question. If you think about what is the brain for, let's just think about how we evolved from single cell organisms. As we became multicellular, we became more sophisticated and started to have sensors that could sense either the chemical environment or the heat around us and eventually sites and sounds. And we began as we became multicellular to have cells or structures that had the function of being able to move us around. That's what legs and wings and so forth are today in more developed animals. So our brain had to have a way of ... In order for this stuff to be useful, we needed a processor, a central processor that takes in the sensory input, understands what's going on, and then orders our limbs or wings or whatever to do something appropriate in that situation based on the sensory input and based on the processing.

So if you think about it, if all we're doing is reacting to the situation at this particular moment, then we have a disadvantage compared to some other being that actually looks ... I'm not talking about looks ahead a year or a month or a week, seconds or a minute ahead. And that is evolutionarily favored because you can prevent a lot of bad things from happening if you just look ahead a little bit. Let's say I'm walking. If I wait until I'm on the cliff and I'm about to take my next step and fall off to react, that's not so good. But if my brain is predicting, if I keep going in this direction, I'm going to fall off the cliff, I can stop that ahead of time. So our brain has evolved to do that. And again, I'm not talking about determining where the stock market's going in a month. I'm talking about determining what will happen to me in the next few seconds if I keep doing what I'm doing. Or if a bear appears, I'm looking into the future. That bear might be hungry and want to eat me.

So our brains are constantly trying to predict the future. And so what do you suppose they would use as the basis of their predictions? Well, what else does the brain have? It has its memories, your knowledge of the world. It also has your belief system, and that can vary from person to person in the same environment. They have different beliefs. And it takes into account your goals as well. So your brain is using all that information to predict what's going to happen next, and this is very closely connected to your feelings about what happens. So whatever becomes the most amplified of your memories or of your experiences or of your beliefs depends on your emotional state and your past emotional experiences when you were experiencing those memories.

This means that our past can greatly affect how we assess present situations. And again, here's where my mother comes in, for example, as a very good illustration. She was 16 when World War II broke out, and as I said, lost everything, including her older sister, whom she was very close to. And what that did to her was put her in a kind of a frozen, pessimistic state, where whatever happens, she would interpret it in a scary, bad way. She was living in constant anxiety.

Anxiety is an emotion that is connected to a pessimistic, they call it a pessimistic cognitive bias. What that means is anxious people tend to interpret events in a bad way. If I see a mole on my skin and I'm an anxious person, I might immediately think, that must be cancer. If I'm very low anxiety, I might just ignore it. Anxiety is a useful emotion because sometimes it is cancer, and if you go get it checked out, that's good. And if you have no anxiety, that's not good. When they study the lifespans of anxious people, people with very high anxiety have shorter lifespans, but so do people with low anxiety.

But my mother was in a constant state where she really needed to exercise regulation of anxiety, to the point where, when I was in graduate school, I had a roommate, and I talked to my mother at 8:00 every Thursday night. And one night, I went out with this woman on a date, and so I didn't call. I forgot that it was time to call. And so she calls my roommate and says, "Where's Len?" My roommate says, "Oh, he's out. He's out on a date somewhere." And then my mother calls back in a half hour. "Is he home yet?" And then she says, "No, he's not home yet. It's not unusual, so why wouldn't he have called me to tell me?" And then she would call back in 10 more minutes and go, "Come on. I know something happened. He would've called me by now. He wouldn't just forget." And then she started calling time after time and eventually said, "Okay." She called me Lenny, by the way. So she said, "Hey, I know Lenny died. You can't hide it from me. I'm going to find out. Just tell me what happened to him." And my roommate went, whoa, and whatever, took the phone off the hook. And when I got home that night, he said, "Whoa, what's with your mother?"

The thing about my mother was that is an extreme pessimistic, cognitive bias. She has the same data that your mother would've had and maybe accepted that I forgot to call. But she reads the data differently because in her life, guess what? This stuff did happen. This is not beyond the pale. This is not absurd. You might be thinking, oh my God. What a nut. She wasn't a nut at all. This was her previous experience of what happened in the world.

Caleb Bissinger: Welcome back to the show. I've always wanted to say that. One of the questions that's coming up from me, Rufus, as we listen back to this is on this idea that our brains are kind of predicting what's going to happen to us, and that can trigger emotion. So if we get some sensory data that tells us we should be afraid, we very quickly transition to that fear-based state. What I don't get is why every single time it needs to feel so scary.

Rufus Griscom: So interesting. I had the same question in my mind. I think Len would say, as would Antonio Damasio, I think, with whom we had a great conversation a few months back ... His work on the evolution of feelings overlaps quite a bit here. They would say that fear needs to increase your pulse and sharpen your attention to prepare you for a threat, and that feeling may be less pleasant than your previously happily oblivious state.

I think Len would also point out that while the spectrum of our emotions is incredibly nuanced ... Think, for example, about the difference between the fear of getting rained on and the fear of drowning. The mind, body connection through which we experience those emotions isn't nuanced at all. He writes about something called core affect. It's older and more primitive than emotion. Len describes it as kind of like a thermometer, but for our general wellbeing. And core affect is pretty crude. It only has two aspects. One of them is valence, how pleasant or unpleasant is what you're experiencing right now. And the other is arousal, how intense is that pleasantness or unpleasantness. Because core affect is tied to your physical wellbeing, it could be a kind of binary trigger. For instance, if you win the lottery and then five minutes later, you stub your toe, your core affect is going to say, "Who cares about winning the lottery? My big toe hurts."

Caleb Bissinger: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And also, you're probably better off having an outsized emotional response that could potentially save your life. If that stubbing of the big toe was actually something, potentially a fatal wound, you'd probably rather overreact to that because all the money you just won from the lottery doesn't really mean anything if you're going to bleed out to death or whatever.

Let's get back to the conversation because they're about to do something really interesting. They're going to zoom out a little bit. We're talking about sort of emotions on the individual level, but emotions can be felt socially. So let's hear what they have to say about that.

Annie Murphy Paul: Len, I realize we've been talking about emotions as if they're purely sort of individual phenomena. But really, our emotions are experienced socially. We often share them with other people. Other people are affected by our emotions. Do you have any thoughts about that social element?

Leonard Mlodinow: Right. That's another huge area to talk about. Social emotions developed because human beings living in the wild were really not viable. We became viable when we banded together. So maybe five of us together could run down the mastodon or whatever, or fend off the lion, or build a shelter, but not individuals. So we lived in these groups. And in order for the groups to have smooth interactions, we needed to be able to have certain emotions, certain social cooperative emotions. You have emotions like awe, excitement. You have negative emotions like jealousy, shame and guilt. What are they for? They're all to help us work together. You feel guilt when you violated the social norms and injured somebody. That developed to encourage people to work together. You have shame when other people say that about you. You've done this that violated social norms, and you hurt people. Then you feel shame. And these are all there to help us work together. And so of course, those kinds of emotions are things that we tend to share and that happen in social situations. And they're very important.

I talk in the book about what happens when you don't have any of that. Some people are fine, and they learn consciously to behave and how they're supposed to act toward people. Other people don't learn that or don't care about that, and they do horrible things. And they can do horrible things like mass murders because they don't feel empathy. They feel no shame. They feel no guilt. If you don't feel any of these emotions, then why treat a human as a human? So that's why we need to have those social emotions.

Annie Murphy Paul: Right. Yeah. That's another way in which emotions are really so important and sometimes overlooked. I think we're getting to our time here, Len, so thank you so much for talking with me about your book. It's really a wonderful book, and I recommend it to anyone.

Leonard Mlodinow: Thanks, Annie. Thanks for a great conversation, and I like your books too.

Annie Murphy Paul: Thanks.

Caleb Bissinger: All right, Rufus. Are you ready to hear your questionnaire results?

Rufus Griscom: I'm a little apprehensive, but yes. Go ahead, Caleb.

Caleb Bissinger: Okay. I should say ... I don't think I said this at the top, that this is a survey that was designed at the University of Oxford, so it's very sophisticated. The average score is 115. You scored 135, which means you're "highly susceptible to happiness." I think that means, from the things Len was talking about, you're actually at low risk for road rage. I'm not sure how often you need to be applying reappraisal because you're ... Maybe you should reappraise things because you're approaching them with too much glee.

Rufus Griscom: Caleb, full disclosure. I do sometimes get frustrated behind the wheel. But I'm a little concerned that Susan [Kane 00:41:51], who was just on the show, would not approve of my high susceptibility to happiness. I worry a little bit that excessive happiness might be a sign that I'm simply not discerning enough about everything that's wrong with the world. Is that possible?

Caleb Bissinger: Yeah, it's true. Maybe you need to have a little more judgment and a little more taste.

Rufus Griscom: Yeah. I'm missing some of the clear evidence that the world is really messed up and inadequate.

I encourage anyone who wants to better understand how they're feeling, shape their thinking, to pick up a copy of Emotional. And why not grab a copy of The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul, while you're at it? You could also download The Next Big Idea app and hear Annie and Len summarize both of their books in 12 minutes flat. You will also find there Antonio Damasio summarizing his recent book, Feeling and Knowing. If you're a visual learner, check out the terrific e-course Annie also made based on The Extended Mind, which you can only find in our app. Go to your app store and search for Next Big Idea. What better time than now? We'd love to welcome you into our community of lifelong learners.

If you liked this show, please tell your friends, in-laws, Uber drivers, cashiers at Starbucks, and leave us a rating and a review. It really does help us get the word out. Follow us on Apple Podcast, Spotify, The Next Big Idea app, or wherever you're listening right now. Our executive producers are Caleb Bissinger and Michael Kovnat. Sound designed by Woodland Audio. Working with LinkedIn makes us feel all the feelings. I'm your host, Rufus Griscom. See you next week.