What are emotions? Are they something that happen to you? Or are they bodily signals that we interpret?

Does everyone show emotions in the same way? Are there particular markers of the face or body that always mean anger or sadness or joy.

And what does this have to do with Charles Darwin or the truth about facial expressions

or the movie Inside Out?

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman.

I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford,

and in these episodes, we sail deeply into our three-pound universe to understand why and how our

lives look the way they do.

Today's episode is about emotions.

Now, to set this up, let's think about emotion versus cognition.

In the past half century, neuroscience has been buzzing with discoveries about cognition,

like how we perceive information, how we decide, that sort of thing.

And this has all been enhanced by all the recent advances in artificial intelligence.

So cognition is all about acquiring and using knowledge, recognizing patterns, storing and retrieving information, creating mental representations.

But real neural networks, the ones living inside organisms, they operate in a

very different context. Organisms are driven by needs and motives and pain and emotions. Without these

driving forces, all the cognitive processes like learning and representing

and taking action, these would lack purpose or direction.

In other words, if nothing matters to an organism, there's no reason for it to learn or do

anything.

This is why understanding the brain requires us to include

emotion, not just cognition. And this consideration has given rise to a field that we call

...