Name: This is why emotions are important
Uploaded: 2020-06-08T03:41:41.000Z
Duration: 5 min 14 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The superlative

Emotions are responsible for our best moments and our worst moments.

They're what makes love so good and heartbreak so bad.

Basic quantifiers

Have a few too many drinks, and reason seems to take the backseat while emotion grabs the

This often leads to some of our worst and most impulsive decisions.

At times, we've all wished that we could be less emotional, or we've told someone

else to keep their emotions under control.

We admire people who are cool, calm, and rational; we look down on people who are too emotional.

It's time to go down the rabbit hole and answer the question: what if we had no emotions?

In his book Descartes' Error, Antonio Damasio tells us of a patient he had named Elliot

As is typical in this sort of case, the damaged part of Elliot's frontal lobe also had to

After the surgery, Elliot's abilities to make decisions effectively and plan for the

Lots of tests were performed, and Elliot was found to be mentally average or even superior

“…Elliot emerged as a man with a normal intellect who was unable to decide properly,

especially when the decision involved personal or social matters.”

In terms of language, learning, memory, and attention, Elliot seemed fine [1].

There was, however, one thing that struck Damasio as odd.

In all his time with Elliot, he never noticed a single emotion arise out of the man [1].

Could this play a role in his impaired decision-making?

Elliot confirmed that things that had once made him emotional ceased to do so [1].

He could reason just fine, and, in fact, he could reason for hours.

Elliot's problem was that he could not, and would not, make a final decision [1].

“…the cold-bloodedness of Elliot's reasoning prevented him from assigning different values

to different options, and made his decision-making landscape hopelessly flat.”

The landscape was flat: I think that's a brilliant way to put it.

Without emotion, it's hard to act [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6].

Emotions make some actions more salient or favourable than others.

They help prescribe the action that is the most meaningful or useful at the time [2,

Without emotion, we can deliberate for hours, weighing the pros and cons, but we'd be

Anger may be a prescription to act aggressively; sadness may be a prescription to seek comfort

You don't think randomly; we're always thinking towards some end.

Because of this, goals often need some value or weight attached to them so we know how

Some goals have to be more important than others.

Otherwise, we'd do everything and nothing.

Depending on the scientist, the value of a goal comes from affect or emotion (a distinction

It's important to realize the false divide between thinking and emotion for several reasons.

First, all of your actions are affected by emotion.

Emotions need to be respected and understood: they often indicate what an individual values

Second, if emotion prescribes action, we can change our actions by understanding and altering

Third, if we can change the emotions another individual feels, we can change their behaviour

And, lastly, if they are linked, we can probably change emotions through changed thinking,

or we can change thinking through changed emotions.

I've went over what most scientists agree upon: emotion is important for action and

can't be separated from thinking [1, 2, 4, 5, 6].

What I didn't go over is how emotions are made and whether we can control them.

This is because there are many competing theories of emotion.

Some scientists believe that emotions are things that happen to us while others believe

The theory you adopt will decide how you understand and learn to manage your emotions.

The different theories are something that we'll have to explore in a future video.