Instant Genius - Emotions, with Dr Dean Burnett

Episode Date: January 16, 2023

Ever wondered what is happening in your body and brain when you feel an emotion? How to better cope with negatives ones? Or why we even have them in the first place? We speak to neuroscientist and author Dr Dean Burnett about the surprising discoveries he made when writing his new book: Emotional Ignorance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. Hello, welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at her BBC Science Focus magazine. Have you ever wondered what's happening in your body and brain when you feel in emotion? Or how about how to better cope with negative ones?

Or why we even have them in the first place? It turns out the answers to these questions aren't as straightforward as they might first seem. In this episode, I speak to neuroscientist and author Dr. Dean Burnett. He tells me about the surprising discoveries underpinning emotions that he made when writing his new book, Emotional Intelligence. Okay, so we're talking about emotions. And in the first chapter of the book, you encounter the problem that there isn't really an agreed definition of exactly what an emotion is. Why is it so hard to pin down with definition? Yeah, it's a really, again, it was a big issue when I first started writing the book, the first draft.

I mean, the book was originally meant to be a breezy and fun overview of the science of emotions. which I had been led to believe was well established and understood, which is not the case at all. Yeah, there's lots of different factors which play into this. And it sort of relates to how, like, I'm a behavioral neuroscientist by training. That's why I've got my PhD in at the Behavioral Neuroscience Lab in Cardiff. And although it surprised a lot of people, that sort of discipline, you essentially, although you're trying to study the brain, you ignore the mind.

Because although it's like the most important part by most people's perspectives, it's really hard to study, and impossible because, you know, it's got no objective parameters. We don't have any way to assess it or analyze or measure it or weigh it or, you know, it's not tangible in that respect. And the same thing applies to emotions too. Like, we all recognize them and we also appreciate them and are aware of them.

But it's really hard to write down what exactly they are. You know, it's almost like art in that respect. Yeah, that's art. but where does the art and junk end? What's the parameters? What's the boundary? It's all very subjective. So it's a big part of that.

The emotions are variable and intangible in many ways. So being able to assess them and find a robust definition is tricky. And in terms of how the brain works, emotions don't really have one thing. I think it's a very common question we get asked a lot lately is where in the brain do emotions come from? and I've realised that's tiny about the same where on earth there's air come from. So, well, it comes from lots of places, you know, it's not one thing.

Like there's lots of different factors, and it's a huge elaborate process. And it's very similar here. Some parts produce more than others, like the oceans and the rainforests, they produce more oxygen, but that doesn't mean, nothing else does and other parts are involved.

So when you experience an emotion, is there just like one raw neurological aspect, which is the pure emotion, or should the expression of emotion be taken into account? Should the reaction to it? Should the sensory aspect which led to it? Should the physical reactions which stem from it? Are they part of the emotion? Are they not? And that's all sort of a big part of the discussion. And it's because they've been so fundamental to our very existence for so long, I think people don't realize that just because something is familiar, it doesn't mean it's easy or simple. And I fell into that trap really early on. So yeah, there's lots of different definitions

to it. Like, like in the book, I say like saying emotions, like saying farm animals, everyone knows what is and they know what is and isn't one, but you have to define a farm animal in the technical sense, like you have to dissect a pig. You'd struggle just by going with farm animal. And yeah, so it's because they have so many different properties and like where they begin and end is still hotly debated. So defining them is hard to do. So with that said, then, how do we actually go about studying emotions? You know, what do all these neuroscientists and psychologists actually do. Yeah, well, the study of emotions, neuroscientifically, is usually labeled affective neuroscience,

affect. So scientists have this term called affect, which is basically a way of describing the experience of having an emotion. You know, something is happening when we experience an emotion, and affect is the label we attach to that something. Now there is a school of thought now, which suggests that affect is like the raw building block of emotional experience. And our brains take this affect like a pot of wood clay

and shape it into something which we would recognize as an emotion as as when we need. So this is the constructivist view of emotions. So some people argue, for a while, for a very long time, and still in many cases, it was believed that there are basic emotions. Like the bedrock of emotion is the fundamental emotional keys on a piano. Like, you can, these are the ones which are,

at the baseline and everything's built up around these. So fear, anger, surprise, discussed, these were considered to be basic emotions. But now there's a rival school of thought, rival model, which says that, no, no, what we have is affect. The brain produces an emotional reaction to whatever happens to us.

And then uses this to say, right, in this case, we need to be experiencing fear. And this is a bad thing, and we want to get away from it. So now the brain generates a fear response. So in this case, this is an injustice. We need to generate an anger response, and it's also tweaked and modified in each case according to what's needed, which is a different approach.

There is no such thing as a fundamental emotion in this regard. It's all just very familiar and constantly used ones. But you can still study the neuralogical activity that's happening in the brain. Given how brain scanners work, so if someone has an emotional experience, you can see what's happening in their brain. So like, oh, when they experience this, like if it's fear, they're clearly scared, they're saying they're scared, we would see activity in the amygdala, which is like obviously one of the emotional hubs in the brain that's evolved a lot of emotional-rated processes. But if someone is experiencing disgust or looking at a disgusting sight, being told and disgusting story, they usually see increased activity in the insular cortex, which is a different part of the brain.

So that does lend credence to the idea that there are neurological fundamental basics of emotions so they've got that sort of discipline there. But again, there's also data which things like happiness. It doesn't seem to have any one particular bit which causes elevated activity in the brain. But also something like anger.

Now, if you tell you someone being angry, you would see elevated activity in the temporal regions of hypothalamus, which is to do with motivation. So, like, the anger makes us more motivated. As anyone who's been angry, probably realizes, we want to do something about it, whether it's, you know,

it also suppresses our risk assessment sometimes. We will, if we especially anger, we'll get stuck into something which we would normally avoid because, like, we just kind of abide, letting this go. So, like, it's very motivational. But that's a different thing. So the part of the brain which handles motivation,

like the hypothalamus and frontal, this is another complex process, that will be elevated when someone's angry, but that's not the part of the brain producing anger, that's being activated by the anger. So, you know, separating those two, is this a cause and effect? That's a big part of it as well.

So, yeah, there's lots of ways to look at it. I mean, a lot of the most influential research was based on faces, like observing people's faces and recognizing the expression they're showing. It's this person happy, is this person sad. And if you can recognize that, as many cultures can, it suggests that there is a direct neurological link between what's happening in the brain, in emotion, and what's happening in your face.

So it's like the footprints of emotions, and you can get a lot of information from that. So there's lots of different things to be studied, and I think the more we study, the more closer we get to a set definition of emotions, but that's obviously, ideally, you'd have the other way around, because then you can have people studying different things if they don't know what to do with what emotion is, but it is a situation we've got, and there's sort of people are working towards resolving as best they can. And I think a lot of people have a tendency to kind of split their way of thinking into one part is emotion and one part is cognition. So thinking and feeling, and these are two independent processes.

But as you explain in the book, they're actually very intimately linked. Yes, I use the terms of motion and cognition in the book a lot to sort of to differentiate between what we would understand as these things. but at the most fundamental levels of the neurological basics, there's a lot of intertwining. They're really interdependent on each other. It's widely agreed that thought, conscious thought, rational thought, evolved out of emotion, much like a mushroom evolves from the stem, evolves, grows out of, and so like obviously emotions are the building blocks of thought in the evolutionary sense. They develop from there.

because you get a lot of primitive creatures which do seem to show what looks like emotion. I say primitive, more simple creatures. Everything obviously is as evolved as we are. So, yeah, even in the evolutionary sense, there's a lot of overlap between the two. And for a while it was believed that there was a neurological separation between thought and feelings, with like the neocortex, the top complex part of the brain, being responsible for rational thought, the human stuff, the thinking, and the limbic system, middle bit above the reptile brain but below the neocortex being the emotional part. It was full, also all memories and reflexes and perceptions and emotions are generated.

Again, more recent data, more like complex research methods have revealed that that is, once again, an oversimplification. There's a great deal of overlap between the two. Things like executive functioning, the ability to consciously control your actions, your thoughts, your feelings, and to stop yourself from doing things which are emotionally motivated. That is obviously something would suggest that our brain can control emotions with conscious thought, but executive functioning sort of develops as a result of emotions.

So emotions happen and we think, okay, that happened and this was a consequence. Maybe I shouldn't do that again. And you learn from it that way. But also the emotions we end up developing and having are also produced the result of regular feedback and regular assessment of the outcome, appraisal theory it is. So when you have an emotional response to something, and then you consciously say, oh, well, that shouldn't have happened. Or I don't like the fact of this happened. So next time this similar experience occurs, I will have a different emotional experience.

So emotions shape our ability to think and our thinking shapes our ability on our tendency to feel certain emotions. So there's a great deal of, you know, cognitive overlap. Also in the neurological sense, I think there was like the anterior cingulate cortex. it was widely believed a long time, that does have distinct channels or like networks which are one side for emotions, one side for rational thought. But again, more recent data says that,

no, there's overlap there as well, like as in the rational can affect the emotional and the emotional can affect the rational. And I think in the book, one of the analogies I use, it's like people think they were too, you know, cognition and emotion are like two neighbors and share offence and occasionally bicker and don't get on.

But it's more like, a river split into two streams, like at source, they have very similar or the same origins just end up in different places. So it's probably a little more helpful to look at it like that in some respects, because the brain's never as simple as a binary divide, what suggests. So we've talked a lot about the brain there, but actually the brain influences the body and vice versa. So could you tell me a bit about that? Yeah, I mean, in the emotional sense, this is like almost like the origins of emotion study. chapter one, it's the stoics, the ancient Greeks, who realize that emotions are things,

distinct things with a physical presence in the world because when we have an emotion, there's often a physical component to it as well. So like when you're scared, your skin goes white because the blood rushes away. And when you're angry, you tense up and, like, tremble. And when you're happy, like you smile because you can't stop yourself and you turn red and embarrassment, makes me red and passion, all those things. So there is a definite physical component to a lot of familiar emotions. And that suggests that there's a link between what's happening in the brain and the body as well.

But some schools of thought actually push it further. It's just that what's happened in the body is actually plays a bigger role in what emotions we feel than you'd expect. So like the somatic marker hypothesis, which suggests that our brain recognizes our body is doing this combination of things, which means we need to produce the emotion of happiness, anger, fear, whatever you want to call it. I mean, that's not the most widely held model, but there's evidence to just something like that is occurring. And again, just like with emotion and cognition,

in the cognitive sense, in the physical sense, people like myself regularly say brain and body, as if they are, once again, two distinct things, like a pilot in a sort of big meat suit. but it's actually more like, you know, they're far more intertwined than that. There's a lot more overlap. There's normally, you know, it's distinct

because the brain is an organ and needs the body to survive, just like the body needs the brain to function as well. And so things like, you know, the endocrine system, in fact that your brain and other organs secrete hormones into your body, which usually induce an emotional response of some sort, shows that, you know, your body can influence what your brain is thinking. I mean, you're thinking anorexia, the loss of all the fatty artipose tissue

means certain hormones aren't to the blood supply which can further distort how your brain perceives the body and your self-image and stuff. So that's a big part of that as well. And the vagus nerve is something which gets a lot of attention in the modern literature. It's the cranial nerve, like one of the 12 nerves that come from your brain stem and stuff

and link to your head and upper body. But the vagus nerve is one that links to all the other organs is the big one. But it's mostly an interic system, which means it's mostly receiving feedback from all your organs and relaying what's happening in those organs to the brain, like a really powerful broadband cable.

But that means when something's gone wrong with your organs or something's a mess, like a chemical imbalance, like they say, or disruption or kidney stones, something like that, your brain's very aware of it. Before we consciously are, like when I just feeling the pain, you go, all that hurts. It's like your brain's getting updates on a regular basis, from the disruption to the organ and reacts accordingly.

So things like, especially like the digestive system, like the gut brain axis, that's a particularly key one, because obviously as important as all organs are, the digestive system is where stuff enters the body. So it's like the gateway. And therefore, there's a lot of complex neurological systems to help regulate and monitor that. So things that go wrong in the stomach and intestines, you know, the brain's very attuned to that. by the vagus nerve. And so if your stomach is,

if your diet or your gut bacteria causing problems, the brain recognizes that too. Something's wrong. Something's wrong. Something's wrong. And therefore you get anxiety, depression or like general stress.

So like a lot of new therapies for treating mental health problems like depression are focusing on the vagus nerve or the gut, which doesn't know. Objectively, if you first hear that, you're thinking, how does that even work? How does some problem your brain get helped

by, you know, changing your gut bacteria? but that's how because your body, your brain recognizes something's going wrong with your body and at the subconscious emotional level responds to it and it helps you so your cognition is twittering away up top just like oblivious and

you're suddenly developing these feelings and bad moods and stuff so yeah so the body is a huge part to play in both the experience and expression of emotions too so relaying emotional cues to others a lot that is body language as cliche goes like only 10% of communication is

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So you mentioned there about expressing emotions. So you mentioned facial expressions. So what do we know about facial expression? Are they universal facial expressions? Are they universal facial expressions, over the entire human race to express emotions? Well, that was the sort of the assumption, or not the belief even, let's go further than that, throughout much of the emotion research world, thanks to the work of Paul Ekman in the 70s, and it was believed to be definitive.

That was one thing everyone agrees on, that the facial expressions are universal throughout all cultures, and therefore the emotions are too. So it's not like before then, for his work, It was genuinely agreed that people learn facial expressions, like we learn the language we grew up to speak. And we have language processing parts of the brain, like your brokers ARI, your Wernickees and stuff. But those like the hardware, which needs to be programmed. And as we grew up, we surrounded by English, French, German-speaking, parents, family, community.

And that's language you speak. Not born speaking it. And people thought the same thing applied to facial expressions. But then, Paul Ekman's work with, like, Indigenous tribe, and remote cultures feel that they have very similar facial expressions to the wider world, and therefore, well, they haven't learned from anyone else, therefore they must be universal. And that was the dominant belief in the dominant model in emotion research for a very long time, and still is in many respects, in ways of extracts becoming unhelpful.

It's like a later chapter, but a lot of software algorithms, which are programmed to recognize people's emotions from a distance, are based on this, idea that your face, facial expressions are emotional and universal across all cultures and all people. And modern research says that might not be right. That's actually not necessarily the case. There's an element of that, but even amongst the communities which agree that your emotions are effectively portrayed by your face universally and consistently amongst people and cultures, there's debate there as well. Like, for example, and not all emotions are, corresponded, not all emotions have a corresponding facial expression.

Like, what is someone who has experienced in satisfaction of that's an emotion? What's their face look like? I mean, you can speculate, but it's not consistent or pride. What's the expression when it says guilt? There's a powerful emotion, but there's no one expression which everyone goes, oh, that's a guilty person. I know that face. So there are, like, quiet emotions or silent emotions or invisible, whatever you want to call them.

But also, some people run sort of deep analysis of all the different micro-expressions you can have, and found that actually, like, fear and anger have a very similar facial expression in the, sort of, at the fine, granular level. So we should count those as one. So now there's only four expressions, not seven, not six. But yeah, but then later research suggests that although even if people do have, you know, a consistent facial reaction, and it might be consistent across cultures, not everyone shows the exact same expression. There's no one expression that everyone has for happiness. You can recognise it, but you know, you can recognize like a pet, but not every pet is the same.

And you understand the concept of it. But when people are made sort of like look at facial expressions and given a choice of like, is this person happy, sad, depressed, angry, they can get it right like 99% of the time. If you do candid shots, like someone who's not put in an exaggerated expression for the camera, or don't give them options, saying what? what emotions this person experience in, then our ability to recognize it falls through the floor because it's like 25, 30, 40% compared to Nanktiod,

because it's not just the face. Like the face is a big part of it, but more or more now it's become accepted that the context is essential too, because if someone's got a certain expression, like they said, oh, they're happy, like you can see the big smiley face and stuff. And they pan back and they've been given a birthday present,

and they go, yep, I was right. They pan back and someone's got a knife at them. Oh, no, actually they're terrified. and they don't know what to do. And so, yeah, the wider context is way more important than the initial theories about universal facial expressions would have suggested. But nonetheless, a lot of very important influential organizations and systems have adopted this idea that you can tell someone's emotion from their face alone

and integrated it into their operating system or the security system. And that's not great. That's unhelpful. And that's going to cause problems if it hasn't already. So sticking with expressing emotions, probably the most overt expression of emotion is crying. I've never really thought about this before, but when you're sad or you're in pain, water comes out of your eyes. But the more I think about that, the stranger it is. So what do we know about crying and the response to emotion?

Yeah, well, crying is probably the most classic example of emotions have a physical component. It's an actual expulsion from your body. That and laughter, you know, when you've been moved. which you laugh. It's a big, aggressive, over-the-top physical manifestation of an emotional state. But crying is an adult, obviously, another one. And I think, again, it's one of those things. Everyone recognizes it, or babies cry.

Obviously, it's a very fundamental reflex. But it's, again, way more complex than you perhaps anticipate. Because, like, there are three types of tears. Like your basal tears which just keep your eyes wet on a day-to-day basis, minute by minute. Your reflex tears, which you get onion vapor or dust in your eye, like you're just like to flush it out. But psychoemotive tears, the tears we experience when we have an emotional reaction to things,

actually chemically different to the other two. They contain things like oxytocin or certain endorphins or certain hormones, which aren't produced when we cry because of onions or whatever it is. And that suggests, oh, the emotional reaction we're having is causing a chemical response in our body, a chemical change in our physical output. I sort of like, what's the benefit? why would we evolve the ability to leak water from our eyes when in an intense emotional state? Usually sadness, but I know so people who cry because they're angry.

They don't want to cry. They're not sad, but it's just like a reflex. They can't seem to help. Or people cry with laughter or cry because they're overwhelmed by happiness. It's a weirdly broad physical response to an emotional state. And there's arguments that it's actually, it's acute. It's like so other people around us because we are such a social communicative speech. and sharing our emotional state is a big part of just default existence.

Our brains do it all the time, as to our bodies. So when someone's an intense emotional state and they start leaking water from their eyes, that's a sign for those around and say, oh, this person is in an extreme emotional state. I can either, A, help, obviously they're in distress or be joining in. If they're happy tears, and like you want to, obviously, you want to share that happiness. You're saying, oh, what's the big deal? What's going on? Why are you so pleased?

and can I have some happiness, please? And that's a use for emotional trait. But even that doesn't really suggest why the chemical difference is. So there's some arguments that when we cry, we like oxytocin and stuff, which absorbs into our skin. And we become sort of more emotionally open. So other people can help us. And we can share our state with others. Or it's because they might evaporate.

And then the other people around us can, there's emotions. There's our emotions in the air. but via the form of oxytocin and other social hormones to people inhale and become more emotionally available, enhances their emotional connection to you. It's a theory. It's a tricky one to sort of prove conclusively, but they have done studies where people have inhaled

their people's tears and have had different emotional responses to certain stimuli. It's unlikely to say, you know, it helps you that much because your tears are full of emotional hormones, and they absorb by your skin. That's a very indirect and inefficient way of doing it, when your brain just produces this stuff anyway. Instantly, it's a lot easier to drop it in their own bloodstream

than go via the outer skin. But yeah, so it could be just a way of bonding and connecting with the people when you're emotionally vulnerable or emotionally stimulated in order to shore up connections with others or maybe get their assistance. So that's one, that's the main theory that I've heard about that. So I'm one of those people that cries quite easily.

So I'll often describe films as like a seven cryer or something. But even though it seems like a negative experience, I'll deliberately watch sad films, I'll deliberately listen to sad music that makes me cry. So what do we know about, you know, I'm not alone in that? What do we know about why people do that? Yeah, that's something which was confusing to me too, because the book was written from my perspective

when my father died from COVID, and I was like struggling with the grief in isolation because of lockdown. So I was exploring a lot of my own emotions and also some of the log jams I had because I wasn't an easy cryer before this happened. I'm far more so now because I'm less emotionally ignorant, hence the title of the book. But I was, because I was dead a head full of confused emotions, I was sort of using sad things, like sad intimates as a sort of emotional nicotine patch to sort of make sure I did cry a bit. I'm a big fan of Pixar films and they're very good at that and sort of finding the particular moment. which just causes you to break down a bit. And that's, but when you're looking for entertainments,

which make you sad or make you cry, you pretty much spoil for choice, which objectively is sort of counterintuitive. Because nobody wants to be sad. We don't like to be sad. It's a negative emotion. We try to avoid it. Same with anger.

Same with fear. But there are loads of entertainments out there which are designed to produce these exact emotional states. And if you have people who act in, sad films, they more likely to do it awards than someone who does a comedy. And that's just, you know, we've, we ascribe a lot of value

to the ability to make people sad or, you know, experience negative emotions. And a lot of that, it turns out is because we are, like I said, as people, we are kind of fixated with being happy. We do things we can to make

ourselves happier, or at least avoid stress and stuff like that. So we avoid negative emotions where we can. But that's not, necessarily the best approach when it comes to healthy brain and well-being. So when you experience a negative emotion, it's novel, which your brain likes anyway, but if it's in a safe context, if it's in a situation where it's not affecting you directly aside from the emotional being experienced. So it's not a situation which, you know, negatively impacts in your life and you have control over it. That means your brain gets to experience an emotion. It doesn't normally get

to, which means your brain becomes better at processing and handling that emotional state for later use. And, you know, it's basically like taking your mind to the gym. I say, right, okay, I don't only get to do fear. So let's watch a scary film. Fire up the fear system. Then it's doing the brain goes, okay, this is how you handle fear. Okay, I've got some good practice with that.

But it's not actually scary in the sense of, it's not happening to me, and I can turn this off or leave the cinema whenever I want to put the book down. I can remain full control. I'm just indulging myself in this emotional state. And you see that. People who listen to sad music or who regularly indulge in sad films, they are better able to handle sad situations when they happen for real. Similar data, which I've always liked is that heavy metal fans,

chronic and persistent heavy metal fans who love it, despite what your appearances and stereotype may suggest, they tend to be the least angry people. They are the hardest to make angry and they handle things a lot more passively and calmly. because the music they listen to and they love induces anger of them on a regular basis. Their brain has the ability to go, right, this is the most to make me angry.

I know what anger is like. I'm just going to, yep, file that away. Don't worry about it. You know, I'm on top of that. And that's what these entertainments do for us. They give us the ability to indulge in a negative emotion at little or no risk to ourselves. So your brain gets to do the work

and reap the benefits with little cost. And therefore, you know, these negative negative quote-unquote, but essential emotional states are experience and make our brain just generally better and healthier. It recognizes that, hence we keep coming back. So it kind of related to that. Sometimes feeling a strong emotion can have an effect on our thinking. So I think most people will have experienced something like this, though, if they get angry and they do something out of character or something silly. So what do we know about what's going on there? Do we know what's happening in the brain when that sort of thing happens?

Yeah, I think, I always said, like, you know, emotions and thought aren't necessarily that separate, but there's a degree of, you know, separation that some parts handle the emotional bits and some parts handle the cognitive and rational bits. And the brain has lots of things going at any one time. And there's lots of different things which affect this. But what it boils down to ultimately is that the brain has limited resources. You know, it's a very extremely powerful organ, it's really capable. But it can only do so much within the limits of biology. physics. So, you know, our brain's got like, it can do any number of dozens of things,

but it can't do them all at once. And this is a famous statistic that we only use 10% of our brain, which isn't true because we don't, you know, the brain's such a demanded organ. It uses up like 33% of our body's ready fuel just by existing. So if we didn't need it, we wouldn't have it. All of it's useful. But it's also, like, so we use like 100% of a brain, so 10% is wrong. But also, It's also an overestimate in that we can't activate deliberately actually 10% at once. It's more like we can only like fire up 3% of the brain in terms of different regions at any one time before the available resources get maxed out. So when you are, you know, cognitive thought and rational thinking and logic is a neurologically

demanding process. It's very complex. It's very intricate. It's very, a lot of information has been handled and processed and calculated, which requires resources. So when you're looking in a neutral state, if there is such a thing, it depends on when you ask about that, your brain has the resources available. Like, okay, I'm going to sit there and think calmly about this thing. I'm going to go through that. I'm going to assess the situation and make my decision according to the available data. But when something happens,

put you in a strong emotional state, your brain's resources are being diverted to the parts of the brain, which cause that state to exist. And it might think that's an essential thing to do because of something has happened, like a lot of it's instinctive and reflexive. So you don't have much choice. Emotions happen faster than rational thought because they're a more direct, simple process. But then your brain doesn't have as much resources available to direct to the rational thinking part of your brain, which would normally be used to put a lid on the emotion, so to keep me under control. So it's like, you know, if you think of like the rational part of your brain has got the lead

and the emotion part is a really big dog, sometimes like the dog gets bigger and stronger, and you don't have the physical ability to restrain it. So it goes off or pulls you too far in one direction. And it's got to get tired out before you come back to it. So sometimes you're in emotional state and you can't think clearly. But if you do just enough to separate itself from the situation and you calm down and come back to it, then you can think clearly because your brains work through the powerful emotion.

And now it has resources available again to let rational thought retake control. So a lot of it's based on what our brain is capable of doing at any one time and the fact that emotions happen faster, so they tend to get in there first, they get in the early doors. They grab the good seats before the waiters ready and then you have to make do with what's left. And yeah, so emotions can distort or downplay or suppress rational thinking that way because when they're strong and powerful and instinctive, the brain has less fuel available or less resources to direct irrational thought to counteract it.

So another important role emotions play in our lives is in feelings of empathy. So what's going on when we feel empathy? I mean, why do we even feel it? And is it always a good thing. Yeah, empathy is one of those, I won't say it's uniquely human, but it's an incredibly important part of the human experience. Like so much of our emotional state and emotional experience is, contingent on the feelings of others.

We have emotions and we feel them, but so much of the whole process involved in expressing them, which means we want to share them with others or tell other people how we're feeling. It's like half the whole deal of emotions is put them out there. We're talking about facial expressions. The only reason that would make any sense is if declaring our emotions to the wider world

and those people in it had an evolutionary role. And that's sort of how we work, because we're such a social communicative species. we actually, you know, we communicate on a subconscious level more often than not, if anything, because we do have this need to constantly be in contact with our fellow human. Like isolation, like solitary confinement is a recognized form of torture for a reason. Because it's like being deprived of your senses in some respect. You can't, you don't know what's going on.

The brain doesn't handle complete isolation very well at all, which is why arguably why, like, I'm locked down on such a big, heavy mental, burden for so many people because they're deprived of sort of one thing all humans tend to need, or all 90%. There are obviously exceptions to that role as always the case. But yeah, so empathy allows us to connect with other people and form a group of community far more effectively and far more rapidly than conscious speaking, like they're talking to each other and trying to convince that someone else that you're, this is what I think, or this is what I think. And no, that's a lot more long-winded process just by recognizing someone's emotional state. And, you're

and sharing it, forms his bonds much faster and communicates things a lot more efficiently and quickly than logical speech or, like, text-based conversations. So it's really good in that respect. And it helps us understand things a lot more. You know, if someone, caught people run around the corner, like running, like in a sort of apocalypse film, you think, oh, a lot of scared people. That's really bad. I'm scared too.

Then you're joined in and run. And again, it's an obvious survival trait to endure, just to share that. feelings that it was around you. And obviously it's a good thing in that it's got us to this point. It kept us alive and made us the most dominant species. Our ability to connect and interact is heavily empathy-based. But also, there are downsides, now, particularly in the more common modern world. So, like I say, there are times when you experience emotion, it impinges in your ability to think rationally. And if you're around other people who are all experiencing a strong emotion, you're all likely to experience it too, thanks to empathy. And that'll color or cloud.

your own ability to think normally. That's where you get things like mob mentality. You're in a middle of a highly aroused, angry crowd, and they start doing things which are emotionally charged. If you're in amongst that, you usually can't help it. Empathy, your empathy systems kick in. You detect what everyone else is angry. I don't want to stand out, so I'm going to get angry as well

about the external thing which you're all angry at. And I'm going to behave in ways which I wouldn't normally. So that's where you get people who are in the middle of riot. will cause property damage or do things that are really dangerous or damage and get arrested. And they wouldn't normally ever do that. But when they're surrounded by other people who are doing that, their brains work differently. It's a process called de-individuation.

And we lose our sense of self to a certain extent because the empathy or the emotional contagion, is what it's called if you can't pin it on one specific person, that overwhelms us and becomes something which dominates our actions. and oftentimes not for the best. So we've covered an awful lot there. I just think, sort of by way of closing, what have you learned about dealing with your own emotions and regulating your own emotions, etc?

And while you were writing and researching the book, just as a way of summing up. Yeah, I think I've learned that emotions are really important, way more important than I ever give them credit for. Even like in most of the scientific field, like they are oftentimes just an afterthought. or just acknowledge that they're there, but you don't focus on them.

But they affect so much of who we are, what we do. Everything we think and do and feel is influenced or least impacted on or caused directly by our emotional state. And so we need suppress them. There are obviously instances where you should, I mean, not suppress completely, but to keep them under control or not act on them. But the whole bottling up thing,

and I don't just mean, you know, the masculine, stoic, must not show emotions thing, even things like, you know, the positivity movement, like you must be happy at all times. You can choose to be happy, choose your attitude. Those are just another way bottling up. As in saying, you have a negative emotion, that's wrong, don't do that,

force yourself to have a different emotion. That's just as unhelpful as saying, you know, must not suppress, must not show emotion. Just show, if anything, something in my research says that's showing a different emotion than when you're feeling,

can be more stressful. You may cause more damage overall, none than just not showing anything because obviously you're activating more part of your brain which don't want to be activated at this particular point. And that's unhelpful. So I would say what I've learned mostly is don't try and suppress your emotions

if you don't have to. Let them happen. They are valid and they are essential. There'll be times when you don't have a choice, but try and get around to it later. But yeah, I think the idea that you have to be rational and logical at all times. It's not only impractical, it's incorrect. And then also, I would say it's impossible because emotions influence way too much of our thoughts. They are,

like the cement which holds the bricks of our mind together. And the idea that you can just suppress them or get rid of them is both wrong and unhelpful. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius. That was Dr. Dean Burnett. To read more about the fascinating neuroscience of emotions, check out his book. emotional ignorance. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or visit ScienceFocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth.

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