240. Leonard Mlodinow — Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking
The Michael Shermer Show
Michael Shermer
4.4 • 921 Ratings
🗓️ 11 January 2022
⏱️ 113 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
xtraordinary advances in psychology and neuroscience have proven that emotions are as critical to our well-being as thinking. In this conversation, Shermer and Mlodinow explore the new science of feelings.
Journeying from the labs of pioneering scientists to real-world scenarios that have flirted with disaster, Mlodinow shows us how our emotions can help, why they sometimes hurt, and what we can learn in both instances.
Shermer and Mlodinow discuss: the difference between emotions and feelings/moods/drives/passions; how the scientific understanding of emotions has changed; thought vs. feeling; system 1 vs. system 2 cognition; mind-body connection: how does our physical state influence what we think & feel?; the neuroscience of emotions: how the brain constructs emotions; Lisa Feldman Barrett challenge to Paul Ekman’s theory of universal emotions; Schachter-Singer theory of emotion; the effects of social context on emotions; and more…
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to the Michael Sherman Show. |
| 0:11.6 | Welcome to the... The Michael Sherman Shower Show. |
| 0:19.0 | Welcome to the Michael Sherman Show. I'm your host Michael Sherman. My guest today is Leonard Moladnau. Third time on the show, he's our returning champion. |
| 0:22.0 | Let's see, I had him on for his book |
| 0:23.7 | subliminal and then his next book after that was the memoir of Stephen Hawking |
| 0:27.7 | as Len has worked with Hawking on several books and and also kind of a theory of everything. This new book is emotional, how feelings |
| 0:37.2 | shape our thinking. Leonard has received his PhD in theoretical physics from the University of California Berkeley, |
| 0:44.0 | was an Alexander Van Humboldt fellow at the Max Plunk Institute, and was on the faculty of the |
| 0:50.8 | California Institute of Technology Caltech. His previous books include |
| 0:55.0 | the bestsellers The Grand Design in a briefer history of time, both with Stephen Hawking, |
| 1:01.0 | Subliminal, which I mentioned, and the drunkards walk, which I use in my skepticism |
| 1:05.9 | 101 course because it's a great work on the role of probability and chance and randomness |
| 1:12.3 | in life, of which we impose |
| 1:14.8 | patternicity all over that randomness and infer agency behind it, what often turns |
| 1:20.9 | out to just be randomness. His book on elastic was on creative thinking |
| 1:25.2 | and history of creativity and the new book is on emotions. That is what are |
| 1:31.3 | emotions? How do we define them? How do they differ from feelings, moods, drives, passions, and so on? |
| 1:37.0 | What do we mean by these different words? A little bit of the history of that, the influence of culture on emotions, context on emotions, |
| 1:46.7 | the interaction of physiological changes in the body associated with emotions and the context in which those emotions occur. |
| 1:55.0 | A lot of interesting research on that that Len reviews in our conversation, |
| 2:00.0 | the difference between wanting and liking something, which is important for understanding |
| 2:05.5 | drug addiction, for example. Drug addicts don't necessarily like the drugs, but they want them. |
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