Leonard Mlodinow is a theoretical physicist and author, recognized for groundbreaking discoveries in physics, and as the author of five best-selling books. His book The Grand Design, co-authored with Stephen Hawking, reached #1 on the New York Times best-seller list; his book Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior, won the 2013 PEN/E.O.

Wilson award for literary science writing; and his book The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives was chosen as a New York Times notable book, and short-listed for the Royal Society book award. Dr. Mlodinow is also known through his many public lectures and media appearances on programs such ranging from Morning Joe, to Through the Wormhole, and for debating Deepak Chopra on ABC's Nightline.

It is commonly believed that rational thought is threatened by emotion, but contemporary understandings of the brain paint a more complicated picture. Today’s guest is Leonard Mlodinow and he joins us to talk about why. As a mathematician and theoretical physicist, Leonard might seem like an odd fit for this topic at first glance. However, when Leonard’s desire to discover the secrets of the universe spilled over into a curiosity about the brain, he started publishing books on the subject, his most recent being Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking. In today’s show, Leonard argues that the brain is essentially an information processing organ and that emotions play an integral role in feeding it data. As such, there is no way to separate emotions from thinking, and in fact, they often aid the decision-making process, as well as play a vital role in motivating us. However, our emotions evolved in a different world to the one we live in today, meaning that there are situations where a certain emotion might be influencing a decision in a way we don’t want, and this is where the cultivation of emotional intelligence becomes a beneficial practice. So for all of this, as well as perspectives on its ramifications for sensible investing, be sure to tune in today!

Key Points From This Episode:

• Introducing Leonard Mlodinow and his book, Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking. [0:00:19]

• The role of emotions in rational decision-making. [0:01:04]

• How the brain processes data and the role of emotions in this process. [0:04:09]

• Whether emotions are detrimental to decision making. [0:06:50]

• The situations our emotions evolved in and how our world has changed. [0:09:05]

• Whether it is wise or possible to separate emotions from rational thinking. [0:11:50]

• New findings from affective neuroscience about emotion. [0:13:36]

• Why simplistic categorizations of emotions and beliefs that they are associated with certain organs are wrong. [0:14:51]

• What ‘core affect’ is, its relationship to emotion, and how it affects decision making. [0:18:36]

• How to gauge when to make certain kinds of decisions. [0:22:12]

• What Leonard’s findings on emotion mean for evaluating risk tolerance in investment. [0:24:00]

• What role emotions play in theoretical physics and mathematics. [0:26:28]

• Wanting, liking, and determination: Where the feeling of motivation comes from. [0:30:45]

• How to develop emotional intelligence by cultivating awareness of how emotions affect decision-making. [0:34:21]

• Whether some emotions are more influential than others. [0:37:57]

• What causes people to have different emotional profiles. [0:39:41]

• How other people’s emotions affect us. [0:42:14]

• Considerations about the impact of a financial advisor’s emotional profile on their clients.[0:44:24]

• When and how to control emotions versus embrace them. [0:45:43]

• Why Leonard wrote Emotional when he is a theoretical physicist and mathematician. [0:50:24]

• How Leonard defines success in his life. [0:52:14]

Read the Transcript:

It's great to see you again and congratulations on your most recent book. Ben and I both think it's terrific. And I must say it seems rather odd to have a theoretical physicist and a mathematician come on the Rational Reminder to talk about the most recent book, Emotional. So let's start at the basics. What is an emotion?

Well, an emotion is a functional state of your brain. And that requires a little unpacking. So let me say what we mean by that. Your brain is an information major processor. It's not really like a digital computer. It's very different. It has more in common with the recent neural network machines and programming that people are doing with deep learning. But let's just say it's an information processor without thinking that it's the usual type of computer. What that means is it takes data in and it puts out output. And what's it putting out? Well, it's putting out decisions, thoughts, intentions. And what's it taking in? The data that it's taking in are sensory data from your eyes, your ears, et cetera, it's taking in or considering memories that you have, it's sorting through memories and pulling out what might be relevant. Also, your knowledge base, your beliefs.

And all this comes together as your brain processes it in order to answer or to produce the behavior or the thoughts or the decisions. And the processing, which is based on logical, rational processing that happens in your brain cannot be separated from all these other things that are feeding into it. You don't have a processor in a vacuum. You have a processor that's working on data. There's data selection that has to be made. Data has to be valued in terms of its reliability or its weight. How important is it? Memories have to be pulled out. Knowledge has to be sorted through with regard to what's relevant. All those parts of the processing that happen are very heavily influenced by your emotion state. The logic is logic and it's not changing, but it's processing something and all this happens together. It can't be separated.

So what an emotion is, it's a state of this mental processing. Each emotion is a different state of mental processing. So when you're under the influence of an emotion, the way that you select memories, associations, the way you value and assess data will be different than when you're in a different emotion. And these emotions have evolved in a way to theoretically give us the optimal mental state of choosing all these other things that are being processed with respect to the situation that you're in. So if you're in a fearful situation where you're being threatened, your processing will work in a certain way that's tailored to that. If you're in a situation where you're disgusted by something, it'll be tailored that. If you're in a happy emotion, then the processing will be tailored to that. And given the same situation or the same input, the answers that you get, decisions that you make could be quite different depending on the emotion state that you're in.

That's pretty intuitive when you say it. It's a part of human survival and the species success over time, but it's also, I think, different from the way that emotions are perceived. Are emotions detrimental to decision making?

Well, that's one of the big revelations of the last 10, 20 years is that's definitely not true. That's been the idea all the way back to Plato with his chariot and the idea that you had certain drives, passions that had to be put under control by irrational mind. In the modern world, in modern science, it was Darwin who really created the modern theory of emotion, scientific theory of emotion. And Darwin wanted to know why we have emotions with respect to his theory of evolution. Why did they evolve? What role do they play? And he studied cultures all over the world and also all sorts of other animals, mammals, to understand what kind of emotional experiences they have. And he concluded that emotions play a role in the animal world, mainly of communication. So that if one member of a species approaches or attacks another, and that one looks angry, that the first one might back off, or if there's a predator in sight and one looks scared, the other ones would notice that and they would all take action.

And since humans have language, and since we have rational processing, Darwin concluded that this was outmoded. It was a vestige like the appendix. And we really didn't need it. And that when emotions played a role, they would interfere with our rational processing and they were a lower kind of processing. Well, now we know that that's all wrong that, first of all, as I said, your brain is a processor, but it cannot work in a vacuum. Like all computers, it needs to know what questions it has to answer, it needs to know what data to consider and how to value that data, et cetera. And all this is governed by your emotions. So, first of all, without emotions, you wouldn't even get off the chair because what motivates you to do things, if not feelings? So emotions are not just productive and a useful part of our processing, they're inseparable. There's no such separate thing as an emotional mind and a rational mind. Those two minds work together always.

So why do you think emotions get such a bad reputation in decision making?

Well, and I have to say that in my book I may contribute to that a little bit because even though... I mean, the point of my book is that emotions are productive, but I have to say that when they go wrong, there can be some spectacular and very interesting things happen. So let's look at your eyes, for example, they're optical illusions where your sight goes wrong or mirages. And nobody says eyes are useless and vision is something to be shunned. We accept that there are places where it goes wrong. And this is true of emotions as well. Don't forget that emotions evolved when we are living in the wild, in a much different life than we have now. Our situation, for example, day-to-day change much more slowly. Today you might be in a meeting on one thing, and an hour later in a meeting at something totally different or in a different place, or talking to completely different people with other issues coming up.

When we lived in the wild, that didn't happen. It was much smoother transitions, we didn't communicate or interact with so many people, we lived in bands of 20, 30, 40 people. So it was a much different lifestyle. And sometimes emotions in today's world can get out of hand. Or for example, emotions have something called persistence. Persistence is a good thing. That means that the emotion doesn't go away immediately. Let's say you're walking through the woods and you see a bear ahead, you get scared and you take action. The bear ducks into the bushes. If your emotion immediately dissolved, you would just keep marching ahead as if nothing had happened. But because the fear stays in you, you remain wary for the next half hour or whatever, and you're on your toes. That's a good thing. However, if you're in a meeting and someone angers you and then look, it's 10 o'clock, the meeting's over, now you're in another meeting, you don't want that emotion and to carry over in the same way. But because we live in a world where that happens, that could happen.

So sometimes emotions have these... They're the equivalent of the optical illusions, where they don't work just right. And because of that, there are spectacular stories of emotions gone awry. I have a story in the book about a guy who's in love, his girlfriend breaks up with him and he hires some guys to shoot him thinking that that sympathy will get her back. Those are funny stories or sometimes tragic stories, but you can use them to illustrate what emotions are about. And people often focus too much on the optical illusions of emotion than on the real function of emotion, which is there almost every moment of your life you're being driven by and you're being influenced by your emotions constantly. And it's just the exceptional cases where they really go off the rails.

That was one of many very good stories in your book to illustrate a lot of the stuff that we're going to talk about. Do you think it's either realistic or wise or some combination of those two words for people to try and separate their emotions from their rational thought?

Well, you can't do that. I have a quote from a famous neuroscience, Ralph Adolf in the book who says that even when you think you're exercising cold, rational judgment, you're not. So you'd just be fooling yourself to think you're taking your emotion away. And I want to remind you of a study in the book by a fellow named [inaudible] and some associates in England who went to a stock trading firm, and I actually took more than one, at different banks. And at different banks and talked to traders in the stock market. And they interviewed, I think 120 or so of them. And they studied their beliefs and their philosophy and also their results, especially with respect to emotion. And what they found was that the least successful of them tried to separate emotion from rationality and denied that emotion even had a role in their decisions. They claimed that they were able to successfully suppress those emotions and behave in a purely rational way.

The ones who were the most successful really had the opposite attitude. They embraced their emotions. They recognized that they couldn't separate them, that they were an aid, and they also exercised certain regulatory motion regulation techniques when they felt that they were getting out of hand, which they can do sometimes. So this separation doesn't work. If you try to do it, it's not possible. And it's, in fact, it's detrimental. In the emotion research, they call it suppression. And in our Western society, men in general are raised often to suppress emotions. They're taught that crying is bad, don't show your feelings. Well, what the research shows is that people who do that as a habit, suppress their emotions, first of all, they don't succeed in suppressing the emotions. All they do is raise their stress levels, their cortisol, and they actually have a shorter lifespan than people who don't do that. So it's a bad thing to try to suppress your emotion.

Can you describe the field of affective neuroscience?

So effective neuroscience is the study of this. It's the study of the neuroscience of emotion and feelings. And it's a relatively new science, like all the neuroscience fields, it really wasn't even possible till the late nineties and advances in neuroscience technology and imaging technology, especially such as functional magnetic resonance imaging. And in the case of emotion, it really took off in the early 2000s, 2003, 2004, 2005. And I have a graph in the book showing what happened after that. There's just an exponential growth and it's really been booming. And there's been an explosion of research in the past just 10, 20 years. And that's revolutionized our thinking. That's what pushed the Darwinian way of looking at it out and brought in a whole new perspective.

Can you talk more about that? What is the new information that we've learned about emotions in the last 10 or 20 years?

Well, the headline is what I've already said, which is that emotion is an aid to good decision making and not get in the way, but in the details, there's a lot of details. Darwin, for example, believed that there were six basic emotions and the others were far less important. Today, we don't look at it that way. Some people do talk about basic emotions, fear, anger, happiness, sadness, surprise and disgust, but we don't make such a differentiation with the other emotions. And we have a much broader embrace of what are emotions, social emotions like awe, embarrassment, jealousy, even what they call homeostatic emotions, which used to be considered drive such as hunger. So we have a bigger view of what emotions are, but we also have a different view of each emotion. We now know that the terms we use for emotions are really categories, but that in fact, there are many different flavors of each emotion category or of each emotion within an emotion category.

So when you say fear and you talk about that emotion, that's not just one emotion. It was wrong for Darwin to think that these were very unitary, well-defined things. The fear of, for example, a scorpion crawling up your arm is much different than the fear of suffocation. If you're not getting enough oxygen. And not only is that we can all, if we imagine it, perhaps understand that subjectively that would be different, but even in the brain, we've done experiments to show that they have different pathways. The fear of suffocation doesn't go through the amygdala, whereas the fear of the scorpion does go through the amygdalas. It's totally different mental pathways for those two things that we both call fear. Another thing that we found is that emotions are not centralized in certain organs, as we used to think.

So you might remember in the 1990s, especially people talked about amygdalas being the fear organ. Well, as that example illustrates, it's not even involved in all types of fear. And furthermore, the amygdala is involved in many other emotions other than fear. And in fact, we now know through better structural analysis and microscopic analysis that the amygdala itself is not really a unitary organ. It itself is made of about a dozen or more, maybe a few more sub organs that are actually distinct from each other. And this kind of situation that I've just described with respect to fear is true of all emotions. It's much more complicated than people initially thought, that they're not centralized in the brain and they're not even unitary things.

Another one, a fought fallacy is that this line between different emotions is a sharp one. So take, for example, fear and anxiety. Fear is what you feel or the state your brain goes into when there's an immediate threat here and now, and a specific concrete threat. Anxiety is when there's something possible in the future, not immediate, not here and now, and it doesn't even have to be specific. It can be a more general thing. So that's the difference between fear and anxiety. But suppose we go back to that example that I used, where you're walking through the woods, and if you see a bear 20 feet in front of you, that's fear, right? If you don't see a bear and you're afraid of bears, that's anxiety, right? A possible bear sometime in the future. But what if you see some rustling in the leaves? Is that fear or anxiety? What if behind the rustling of the leaves you see some fur? Is that fear or anxiety? Maybe that's not a bear, it's something else.

So at what point does it become from anxiety to fear? Again, that's just one illustration, but it shows that the line between one emotion and the other is often blurred. So this whole Darwinian picture that we had, that was very neat and simple to work with just doesn't hold water.

So interesting. Can you explain the concept of core affect?

Core affect is a kind of proto emotion that Darwin didn't even know about. Core affect has only two dimensions to it. It's not specific like emotions are, so emotion of disgust or fear, love. Core affect only has two dimensions, positive and negative. So it's either a positive feeling or a negative feeling and it has a strength. It can be weak or strong. And as opposed to emotion, core affect is something that you have constantly, your body is always experiencing core affect. You're not always experiencing emotion, emotion comes and goes depending on a situation, but core affect is always there. And its connection to emotion is very subtle and very important, but scientists believe that core affect is one of the pieces of data that your brain uses to create emotion. So it looks at your core affect as it decides whether, or as it creates either the emotion of fear, love, disgust. Part of the ingredients to that experience is your core affect.

And the reason we have a core affect is due to the mind body connection. It's something that our bodies, our minds have developed in order to monitor our physical wellbeing. So what core affect is always doing is it's looking at your temperature, looking at your hunger level, looking whether you're cold or not, whether you're tired or not. And it's a monitoring system that tells your body what shape it's in and whether action has to be taken to change things. And what's interesting is that it not only feeds into your emotions, but be through that, it also feeds into your decisions. So you have to be careful when you're making a decision sometimes to be in touch with your core affect, because you could be making a decision that is not optimal if your body is not in the right state. Just like emotions, it's kind of like I say, a proto emotions, a more primitive form of emotion that affects your emotional experience, but it also affects your decision making.

Can we keep going on that? How does core affect affect decision making?

Well, one interesting experiment I had to do with people coming up for a parole. So when you're in prison and you serve a certain amount of time, you can be let free if the board decides that you've learned your lesson or you're no longer a dangerous to society. However, if you are a danger to society, it's very important not to let you go. So these are very important decisions. And unfortunately they get made in a factory kind of situation with the judges hearing case after case after. And that's a very taxing position to be in and a huge responsibility. And an amazing study was done on one of these courts. And they found that the beginning of the morning when the judges were fresh, they were letting a certain percentage of people, they were granting parole to them. And reliably that percentage dwindled pretty regularly all the way until lunchtime when they were tired and exhausted and hungry.

And in that state, they were letting, at the very end, almost 0% chance of getting granted parole. And what's interesting is that the researchers brought this data to the attention of the judges. They said, "You're crazy. That's not the way it worked." They didn't even realize it. But what was happening is just like your real emotions, the core affect feeds into the way your brain processes information. So they have the same data, the same guy, the same history at 9:00 AM versus noon, you get a different decision coming out the other end.

Such a perfect illustration of core affect. So how can we moderate the influence of core affect on our decisions?

Core affect, even though... You have a constant, you're not usually aware of it, but you can check in on yourself. So all it takes is stop, maybe close your eyes and go, "How do I feel? Am I positive, negative, tired, energetic?" And then realize that when you're in a bad core affect, maybe you don't want to make those decisions. Or even when you're in a good one, because you could go the other way. You want to be in a steady, normal state of core affect when you make your decisions. And same thing is true by the way of emotion. So emotion, the fear will help you make the right decision when you're in the situation that triggered the fear. But if you're in a situation that triggered fear, and now you're out of that situation and you're in a new situation and someone says, "Pick a stock." You don't necessarily want to pick the stock under the influence of the fear from the last situation, right?

So this is one of the things that I say in modern society we have to be careful of. Be aware of your emotions and the effect that they'll have. When you're angry, for example, you tend to make much riskier decisions, you're more focused on your goals and on action than you would be if you're not in an angry situation. And that's very useful in the situations such as trigger anger. But if you're no longer in that situation, then you don't want to be in that state, you don't want to make that decision. And one other thing. And so I've been talking a lot about how persistence can be a problem in your emotional life, but the other thing is some of us due to our upbringing or to our genetic makeup have tendency to feel certain emotions too soon, too easily or too strongly. So those are also cases where emotions can get in the way. And I have a chapter on emotion regulation, which tells you how to handle those situations.

You gave a couple scenarios there. I want to flip the order of events around. If an investor is in a state of calm, say they're sitting at their kitchen table or they're with their financial advisor in a nice calm office. How do you think they should think about evaluating their risk tolerance, knowing that when it's going to matter, they're not going to be in that state of calm?

So you mean that if you buy a risky stock, when you're in a state of calm, what happens when the markets tanks?

Yeah. Like, you should evaluate your risk tolerance based on how you're going to react in a state of fear, but people tend to do that when they're in a state of calm. Is there a better way to approach that?

Well, I think that you should evaluate your risk tolerance when you're in a state of calm. I don't think you need to be in the fearful state. You just need to know what that effect that has on you and how much tolerance you have. So that's part of this mindfulness that I'm preaching of knowing your emotions. So I should say, "Leonard, you know that when the market goes down, you freak out. So act accordingly in terms of the risk that you tell your advisor." Or in my case, I don't even do that, because I like to say, I find an advisor I trust and then I don't want to be involved. I just want it to happen. And I don't want to think about it because that's not me, but to that advisor, himself or herself, fear and anxiety are very important.

If my advisor has no fear and no anxiety, she might just make all kinds of wild, risky bets because who cares? Right? There's no fear. I don't have any fear of the downside. So not having fear, not having anxiety is bad. And in life, it's true too. I mean, people who have exaggerated anxiety have lower life span, but so do people who have unusually little anxiety, they have lower lifespans too, because anxiety plays a role that can be a life saving role. If I look at a mole, for example, and I go, "That one looks a little weird," and I have no anxiety, then I'm just going to let it go. And it could be cancerous. But if I have the right amount of anxiety, I'm going to go in and get it checked out. If I have too much anxiety, I'm going in everyday with moles and the dermatologist doesn't even look at me. So there's a balance of where you want to be, for each emotion really.

So on the risk tolerances question, it's kind of less about simulating a state of fear when you're making that decision and more about being in tune with how you feel when you are in states of fear.

Right. You want to know how it's going to feel to you. And then when the market does tank and you start to feel the fear, it's about having regulation methods to control that if you have overly abundant amount of fear.

So Leonard, you're a theoretical physicist and a mathematician. So I'm curious, what role do emotions play in the always fields of study?

The traditional theory of emotion and the way most people thought to a few decades ago was that, oh, that those are divorced from emotion. That emotion must be bad. And those are of course the purely objective mathematical fields. I used to write for a TV show called Star Trek: The Next Generation at one point. I wrote for TV for a few years.

I didn't know that. That's cool.

Yeah. It was fun. And we had a character named Data who was the epitome of what you're talking about, no emotions. And when I wrote for that show, if I had known what I know now, I would've had a hard time writing for Data because I know that that wouldn't work at all, that Data would just sit on his butt and not do anything unless you asked him to and would have no initiative and wouldn't care about anything, right? Because there's no feelings there. So in physics, is that true? It's not true. That it's purely rational reason because if you... What a physicist does, just like I said, the human brain processes information, but what's it processing? Why? What's its goal? What's its input? Is all governed by emotion. That's true in physics too.

Unfortunately in physics, it's not what people think. People think that it's totally cut and dried, pure rigorous mathematics. I'll tell you right now, we can't solve anything. We can't solve any problem in physics. Almost no problem. Let's take atoms, okay? The simplest atom is hydrogen. It's got a proton and its nucleus is made of a proton and it has an electron that orbits it, a positive charge orbited by a negative charge. Then the next complicated one is helium. So there's a couple protons in the helium nucleus. And there's a couple electrons that orbit it, right? And then lithium and so on, all the way up to a hundred and, well, I don't know what we have now, 16 or, yeah. So all those nice elements and they're all described by something called the shortening your equation. It's a little bit different for each one because of the extra charge in the nucleus and the extra electrons.

And guess how many of those systems of atoms or chemical elements, how many of them can we solve the equations for? Which ones would you guess? Do you have any idea? What would you think? Well, the first one, hydrogen, we can do. None of the others. We cannot solve the equations for... With all our fancy mathematics and everything we've developed since quantum, in a hundred years of quantum theory, we can't solve those equations. Look at Newton's laws and look at the sun as the center of the solar system. And if you have one planet, you can solve those equations for the motion of that planet. You have two planets or three or nine or whatever, you can't solve it. We can't solve hardly anything in physics. So what do we do? We make approximations. We make assumptions. We say, "Oh, this part of the problem isn't important. That part is important. So let's ignore this part. Now I can solve it with that part. Let's make arguments about what the effect of the part that we ignored is and so on."

So everything's based on different assumptions and different approximations. Guess what? What's involved in that emotion? We have our hunches, we have our feelings, we don't prove that throwing this piece out is not important. We feel it. Even when you hit a dead end and you're trying to do your equations and you hit a dead end, how do you decide whether to keep pushing or whether to give up? It's your feelings. So all this is intricately just as it is in everybody's everyday processing, for a physicist, it's intricately tied to your everyday work. And my favorite reflection of that has to do with a quote by Paul Dirac, who is one of the smartest, most creative and most influential physicist of the 20th century. And one of the inventors of quantum theory and what came from quantum theory called quantum field theory that describes elementary particles. And everyone understood that he was a genius and he was someone who's known to be relatively or very unemotional, that he was almost like the closest we can get to a human computer, right?

And when someone asks him late in life, what's his advice to young physicists for the most important thing for success in physics, he said, "Most of all, listen to your emotions." So if he says so, what could I say? There's nowhere to go from that.

You mentioned feeling. So where does the feeling of motivation come from?

So I mentioned earlier that if you were just a computer, think of a computer or a robot like data, you have a certain programming, that means if something happens, your program tells you what to do. So data presumably could have a whole encyclopedia of things that could possibly happen and then he would react to them. And if none of those triggers happened, he wouldn't move at all. That's not a very nuanced or sophisticated way to behave. And humans, we have a much more flexible and sophisticated way of motivating our actions. So what we have in our brain, first of all, is a center of wanting. That's really the key. And that's something that all animals have. It drives you toward the object of your wanting. So if you're hungry, the wanting drives you toward the food. And that's a trigger and a response in most animals that's fixed and unbreakable. So if they see the food, they go after it.

Now, humans is more complicated. In addition to wanting, we have liking. And so liking is a feeling of pleasure you get when you do that action or go after that food. So the wanting that we want something and that we like are kind of independent and they interact with each other. And what that allows you to do is to use your conscious mind and your mental processing to hold you back sometimes from wanting something that you like. For example, the piece of cheesecake, because I know that I have high cholesterol, I'm trying to lose weight. Having these extra layer's allowing us to have a more sophisticated apparatus for actually taking action. And beyond that, there's another system that determine our determination. How strongly are we going to go after these things?

And what's fascinating is in the last 20 years or so, we've found all these different mental circuits for these things, and we know where they're located and how they operate. In some rare occasions, we can stimulate them. For example, if you're an epileptic with severe epilepsy, sometimes you need to have electrodes put into your brain to relieve that. And if the electrodes happen to need to be put in your brain by one of these circuits, we can see what happens when those circuits are stimulated. And one amazing case, a guy with epilepsy had that happen. And the electrode went to his determination circuit. And when they put it in and they stimulated, he reported an amazing feeling of determination that he wanted to get this thing done, but this thing was not defined. So it was not attached to a goal. It was just one of those feelings of can do it? Without having any goal of what you're going to do. You're going to touch score, touchdown, climb the mountain. There was nothing like that. There was just that feeling.

So we have a pretty good handle on how that works in the brain, which is amazing. But of course, for the everyday person, we want to know how do you translate that into behavioral things that you can do to influence your own wanting, liking, and determination. And so we study how to do that. And by the way, there are people on the other side who study how to use that against us. So I talk a bit about some of the food manufacturers of fast food, processed food manufacturers who are trying to get you to want things, but never be satisfied with them. So they're called super normal stimuli. They're trying to develop by mixing the chemicals in the right way in the salt in the sugar in the fat in order to get you to like something and want it, but never reach the satisfaction level. So these things, a lot of the knowledge that we obtain in this way can be, as all knowledge, it's out there and it can be used for good or for evil.

Brains are super weird. You gave that the story of the electrode in the brain and the feeling of determination, which was artificial and the guy was clearly aware of that feeling. Are people generally speaking aware of their emotions when they feel them?

Generally speaking, people are aware. That varies from person to person. So that's part of what's called emotional intelligence. How in touch are you with your feelings also with other people's feelings? And it's something that I talk about why you should try to develop that. People who are more in touch with their emotions and the emotions of other people tend to be leaders, tend to do better in business, tend to be more successful in their personal relationships, because since our emotions do serve an important purpose, if you're not in touch with them, you're losing some of that, especially with the social emotions. Social emotions have developed so that people living together in societies can cooperate and help each other and accomplish things that they couldn't accomplish individually. If you're totally unaware of those emotions, or if you, for some reason, don't feel them, then you're at a disadvantage.

Yeah. I think you talk in the book about how very successful people tend to have that high emotional intelligence. Can you get better at that? Can you get better at emotional intelligence?

Yeah, you can. So first of all, being more aware and understanding what each emotion is and what effect it has on your thinking. That's one thing. For example, disgust. Disgust, I talked earlier about how an emotion is a functional state of the brain of your mental processing. So one of the aspects of disgust is you have a tendency to dispel things, to get rid of things. Obviously, if you're eating something that's disgusting, you spit it out, but interestingly, you also have other kind to disgust, moral disgust social disgust, disgust over smells. And one of the hallmarks of that emotion in general and its effect on your mental processing is a tendency or a bias towards getting rid of things.

So there's an, for example, there was an experiment where kids were brought into a lab, there was a control group and nothing done to them. And another group that was brought in and they were put in a state of disgust. And the way they did that was they sprayed the room with fart spray before they brought them in. And then they had them do some fake experiments just to make them think that that was the experiment, but then the real experiment was that when it was all over the experimenters asked to buy back a pen from them that they had given them at the beginning. So they could all look at the pen, look at the brand and they were writing with it, they knew what it was like, they all had some assessment of the data and an assessment of the value of this object. But those who were in a state of disgust asked, on average, only about half of the control group asks for the pen.

So one group's asked, the control group asked for about $4.50, the disgust people asked about $2.50. So that just is an illustration of how the emotion of disgust affects your state of mental processing. In this case, you want to get rid of it. If you're in a state of hunger, it's the opposite. You want to obtain things and it's not just food. If you're hungry and you're in a department store, you'll buy more. You'll buy more shirts or whatever you're out there for, because hunger is an acquisition. So one thing that's important is to learn about these emotions, think about what you're feeling, think about the effect that it has, and whether the decisions that you're making now are appropriate when you're in that emotion. And then also again, I keep forgetting the regulation part is also very important for emotional intelligence, to know how to regulate that. And we haven't talked much about that, but that's really important to know like, okay, sometimes the emotion, I don't want that emotion now, how do I get rid of that or overcome that or compensate for it?

And are some emotions more influential in others?

Well, each emotion is meant to be influential in this situation for its appropriate. So fear is very influential when there's a fear situation. I mean, it could be influential when you're in a non-fear situation, but probably not in a good way. Sometimes awe is the emotion that you should feel if you're walking outside and it's a beautiful day and you're looking at nature and maybe the feeling of awe will inspire you to do something that you wouldn't normally have done. And then that will have a great influence on your life.

Is there a set of emotions that are considered to be the most influential for how humans think and act?

Well? I mean, that's what Darwin thought. Those six basic emotions. I think today people believe a lot less that that's true. They value all emotions. There's certainly not a distinct set. And even if there was when we were living in the wild, it's found to be much different today. For example, guilt and shame, very important or social emotions to keep you from harming other people. Guilt is what you feel when you know that you've harmed somebody or broken a social norm. And shame is what you feel when other people think that about, when you notice that other people think that you've done that.

And if you don't have any of that, it could be a pretty scary situation. They're not considered basic emotions, but think about what you might do if you had no feelings for other people. That's what happened with the guy who was in the Mandalay, I think it was the Mandalay Hotel, where he was up 30 something floor and started taking potshots of people at the concert. To him was like playing a video game. He had no guilt. He had no shame. Who's to say that emotion isn't super important? Right? So they're all important with regard to the purpose that they serve.

What causes different people to have different emotional profiles?

As a species, we all have the same emotion apparatus. So we are different than chimpanzees or bonobos. We're different than dogs and cats. And today we even have identified emotions and animals as simple as fruit flies. And it's amazing what the similarities are between us and fruit flies in certain emotions. That's another story, but we have, as humans, a common emotion apparatus that's different from those other species. And yet there's variation. There's individual variation amongst us. Just like we have a common body type if you're a male, let's say, but there's taller, shorter, thicker, there's different hair colors and so forth, different muscle tensions. And the same is true of emotion. So we all have our own individual differences. And in the book, I talk about something called an emotional profile. And the emotional profile is some way where you can examine yourself with respect to different emotions. I think I have seven or eight of them. And you can compare your propensity for that emotion to that of other people, because scientists have tested these on hundreds or thousands of people.

So what they are, are questionnaires that you take and you answer some questions and you get a score and you see where you fit on guilt and shame and anger and so forth. It helps you see, do you have a certain propensity, a hair trigger for something, or maybe the opposite? You tend not to feel that, or if you feel that, do you feel it more strongly than other people? How does that work for you? And I think those are good questionnaires to fill out. They're not developed by self-help people, they're developed by scientists trying to understand that emotion. If you just read the questions, you'll get a good idea of what the scientists, how they define that emotion. So I can tell you what shame is, but if you read the shame questions, you really get a concrete idea of what we mean by shame. And if you take the test, you get a closer connection, I think to some of the concepts I'm talking about in the book. So I really recommend that. But that's something that explores these individual differences amongst us.

As a component of your book, it was neat to have those questionnaires in there. I thought that was cool. I haven't done them yet, I've read the book, but I haven't done the questions, but I will.

You know what's also interesting? You could have your, if you have a significant other, have he or she do it about you and you do it about him or her.

Oh, that is a cool idea.

Yeah. I've had a lot of fun with it.

Speaking of that, on that same line of thinking, how do the emotions of the people around us affect us?

Again, this is due to us being a social species where the individuals couldn't really historically have survived on their own in the wild, but we banded together. And that's why we developed the social emotions to help us work together and help each other, but we also develop something called emotional contagion, which is, so to say, I feel your pain, right? Or I feel your laughter or your joy. We as humans tend to have that. In fact, during COVID, I found that really strong illustration of that. I used to watch the late night show like Stephen Colbert, for example, and I'd laugh and think that was funny, then COVID started and there was no audience anymore, and there was no laughter, just me in the room watching this thing, or my wife and I. And it wasn't funny anymore, and I needed that contagion of other people finding it funny and having the laughter. And that's why they bring people in and they have warm up comedians and they're constantly imploring them to laugh, laugh, laugh because of that.

So we affect each other with our emotions. So if I see you in pain, I feel the pain. So maybe I'll go help you. If you have excitement over something, then I embrace that goal and get excited by it. And it's really important for us. But again, that can go wrong too as many things. And I think one of the problems with that today is the fear mongering really in social media, in the traditional media that in the past, if we lived in a community of 30 or 40 people, that's the number we'd have in contact at any given day or maybe just a handful of people.

And today, even if you sit at home, you can be in contact with dozens or hundreds of people or thousands of people through social media. And just by one-way contact by watching cable TV, two-way contact through social media. And things spread a lot faster. And I've noticed that with fear, especially that fear contagion, that it just goes through the population like that. And it takes on people with conspiracy theories or horror stories. And pretty soon it's being passed around on the internet and people are jumping in and up. People who run those websites, social media sites, or the media sites, they take advantage of that to get the eyeballs, to get the money.

So I want to ask you the impact of emotional profile in our profession. So are there considerations here for the impact that a financial advisor's emotional profile may have on their clients?

There are studies that people with lower, I think it was fear or anxiety don't make good investments. But people with high also don't. So I think you need to be somewhere in the middle. And I think you need to reflect on that and where you are, and whether that's helping you or not. And I don't know, I've not done that myself. So I can't speak from personal experience, but you don't want to be totally fearless because if you're totally fearless, you don't care about walking off the cliff and you don't want to be hiding under a rock either. It's good to recognize that we shouldn't try to suppress that. And if it's too strong, we should try to manage it, but recognize that it's not something to totally get rid of.

That's interesting. I saw one study where they used high performance, luxury vehicles as a proxy for risky behavior with hedge fund managers. And they did find that those who drove the most high performing vehicles tended to take more risks that they didn't end up getting paid for. It's just interesting.

Yeah.

We've talked about emotion, we've talked about controlling emotion to an extent, or being able to stay in tune with it and moderate it. Are there cases where it makes sense to try and control emotion and other cases where it makes sense to embrace it?

Yeah, of course. The only time you don't want to embrace it is if, as I said, for example, it might be persisting from a prior situation, you might have an anger management. If you have some problem with an emotion that you should be aware of, that you feel it too strongly or in some cases, just simply that you recognize that it's inappropriate. I mean, it's not rocket science, but it's something that I think if you understand what emotions are and how they work, and then you commit yourself to being mindful of what's going on, you can figure it out. One example I like to use is, since I live in Los Angeles is the traffic. And people are kind of aggressive and sometimes they cut you off, not infrequently. And you get angry sometimes, right? Some people get very angry.

I find that to be an unfortunate emotion in that case, because anger is there to solve a problem for you when someone is standing in the way of your goal. But in this case, you can't do anything about it. There's nothing you should do. I mean, what are you going to... Cussing at, yelling at the person, blowing your horn, shooting at them or if they do... I mean, none of that matters. Plus what goal did they take from you? I mean, maybe somehow your ego is hurt, but you just drop back 20 feet and everything's fine. So I don't think anger is appropriate, but a lot of people do feel the anger. So I think it's important to recognize that you're feeling it and it's inappropriate. And there are a lot of... Like, you can use a regulation method to deflect it. In this case, I would use what's called reappraisal.

So appraisal is the process by which the anger or any emotion arises in the first place. Your brain is observing the situation. You're driving and all the data about that and the car moving in there and where you're going and if you're in a hurry or whatever, your brain is looking at all that. And when a person cuts you off, it creates this emotion that's called appraisal. It appraises the situation creating the emotion. Reappraisal's a way of redoing that to get a different emotion or to get rid of that emotion. So in this case, what it really means is spinning the situation in a different way, using your conscious mind and your executive control of your prefrontal cortex can exercise. So I say to myself, when I see that and I feel myself getting angry, I just remember that that person might just be in a hurry.

I've probably done certain similar things, if I was in a big hurry. If, I don't know, I'm really late for an important meeting or I got to pee, or I don't know, what... And you just start driving like that, or maybe the person is just oblivious thinking about something completely different, his kids, problems at school or something, and then changes lanes and doesn't notice that you're there. And either of those two kinds of stories don't lead to anger. What leads to anger is thinking the person's evil, disrespecting you, taking something of yours, et cetera, et cetera. If you can change that and think in those other ways, then you've changed your emotion. And it really works. There has to be stories that you believe. So you can't say, "Maybe he's a Martian. Maybe he's appointed by the president to do that and he has the power and right to do that." You can't come up with BS stories, but if you come up with plausible stories that you believe and then you focus on them, you'll defuse your emotion.

That's really interesting. As you were talking, it made me think of when markets were crashing, when the COVID pandemic was really starting. We had some clients that wanted to talk, and they said that they were feeling extremely anxious and we talk to them, kind of explain what was going on. And they usually just say, "Wow, okay. Well, I feel better having just talked about it." It sounds like that might just be a reappraisal.

Yeah. That might be depending on what you told them. Also, there's a method called expression that just talking about it, diffuses it. So if I got you to tell my wife, "You wouldn't believe this guy," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And she goes, "Yeah. What the (beep)?" And then I feel better. Or, I had a couple years in the corporate world. Yes I did. And I was a vice president in the company and people would sometimes really piss me off.

And I would write a flame email just totally about what (beep) it did and (beep) both perhaps that they were and so forth. And then I was smart enough to say, "I'll look at it in the morning and maybe I'll revise it before I send it or something." And then the morning, I would never send it. Thank God. But I found it just writing it totally made me... Then I write it. I go, "Okay, put that in the drafts." I go home. I don't care about it anymore. And it's yesterday's news and it's gone. And just the expression that helped to last. So that's another way of doing that.

Cameron mentioned earlier that you are a theoretical physicist and a mathematician. How did you decide to write a book about emotion?

Well, so as a physicist, I got into physics because I want to know, well really the Stephen Hawking questions. And I wrote a couple books with him. And what his life was focused on was understanding where did the universe come from and why is it the way it is? And that's really the questions at the heart of physics. If it's not applied physics it's, what is it all about? So I was on a faculty of Cal Tech and a good friend of mine was a famous neuroscientist, Christof Koch. And he studied the brain and I would learn about what he was doing. And I realized that I was also interested in those same questions about me, about my brain, my mind, where did it come from? How did it evolve? In other words, how does it work and what makes it the way it is?

So I started studying that, almost I would consider it like another PhD. I moved into his lab, I attended all his research seminars, I read hundreds of papers, I took classes and all of that came a book, which was the best seller, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior. And that was about hidden forces that are working, that you're not aware of that are really having great influence on your thoughts and your decisions. So it might sound a lot like this book because it is. So this is my third book now on that topic. I decide I really am interested in the brain and how it works. And so this it's my third psych/neuroscience book. And it's very similar to the other one, but instead of your unconscious mind being the hidden influence, it's your emotions. You don't realize how much your emotions influence your thinking, your decision making and in a positive way. And so I wanted to write a book exploring that.

Amazing. So Leonard, our final question, how do you define success in your life?

I find success in my life if I'm happy and those around me that I love are also happy. And that I do no harm to others to get that way. So if I can, without injuring other people feel happy and satisfied with the everyday, wake up and look forward to getting up and I can help my family and good friends to be that way, then what could be better than that? And that's, to me, that's the goal.

That's a great answer. Well, I can say you've certainly made us happy today with lots of amazing information to help us and our listeners make better decisions. So Leonard, thanks so much.

Well, thank you. It's been and fun, you guys. It's been great questions and I appreciate this conversation.

Books From Today’s Episode:

Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking — https://amzn.to/3HANxvx

Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior — https://amzn.to/3IDLBnk

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