Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking

Two Sons of Survivors

Leonard Mlodinow grew up watching his mother fling herself onto the kitchen floor and wail, "Why didn't Hitler kill me?" Usually because someone had spilled milk. He assumed every mother was like this. His father, who had also survived Buchenwald, responded to the exact same history with relentless cheer and the kind of self-confidence that strangers found magnetic. They went through the same camps, the same losses, the same nightmares. Two completely different humans walked out the other side.

That puzzle is the seed of this book. How could two people who endured something so close emerge so far apart? And what does the answer say about the rest of us, who feel and think our way through every ordinary day without any idea what's actually running the show?

For a hundred years the answer would have started with a familiar division: the cold rational mind, which decides things, and the hot emotional mind, which gets in the way. Plato drew it as a charioteer driving two horses, one noble and one wild. Darwin agreed in his own fashion. Emotions, he thought, were leftovers from our animal past, like the appendix.

Mlodinow's book is a careful argument that this is wrong. Not partly wrong. Fundamentally wrong. Connectome mapping, optogenetics, and transcranial stimulation have handed neuroscientists tools that didn't exist a generation ago, and the picture looks nothing like the chariot. Emotion isn't a separate horse. Emotion is the thing that decides which goals matter, which evidence counts, and how heavily to weight every piece of data you encounter. Without it, you can't decide what to eat for breakfast, never mind whether to leave your marriage. You'd just stand in the kitchen forever.