 If you're ever wondering if one of your ideas is crazy try writing it as a ratio of whole numbers if you can't it's probably irrational Okay, so I may have said some things last week that alienated several viewers and I just like to issue a formal apology I'm very sorry if you're a Kirk fan. You have every right to be a Kirk fan However, even if you're a hardcore TOS fan if you're anything like me You've wondered why a guy like Spock is taking orders from anybody Especially someone like Kirk Spock is basically a superhero. He's got three times normal human strength he can take out just about anybody in a straight fight with that neck pinch he can read people's minds and Apparently he knows practically everything and in the face of impending peril when Kirk gets them into some grim situation He's always as cool as a cucumber in the Star Trek universe Volkens like Spock are all about logic to the point that they have ceremonies to purge themselves of all emotion This is a pretty common idea outside of Star Trek 2 that reason and emotion are Antithetical that your brain pulls you in one direction and your heart pulls you in another There are decent examples of this principle in practice the appeal to emotion fallacy is a relatively common problem where instead of trying to Convince you using rational arguments Someone will try to make you feel an emotion whether it's fear pride or righteousness And then hitch their idea to the momentum of that emotion for example Many animal rights campaigns don't depend solely on logical arguments like how a mostly vegetarian diet is healthier or more Environmentally friendly or cheaper than a diet with lots of meat in it Instead they appeal to emotions of sympathy and disgust saying look at this cow. It is sad Don't you feel bad about this sad cow stop eating meat that doesn't mean that animal rights campaigns don't have a point It just means that they're not appealing to logic to make you a vegetarian They're appealing to how sad cows make you feel emotion can also directly bias us against logic We're much more likely to believe ideas that make us feel good regardless of how little evidence exists for them or Sometimes how much evidence exists against them if you've ever known someone in an abusive relationship You've probably seen how just a little bit of emotion can make them totally oblivious to the reality of their situation People will actually say things like they only hit me because they love me so much Because it feels so good to believe that they're loved and it would feel so bad to acknowledge that they're a victim and living a lie Both the appeal to emotion fallacy and emotional bias suggests that if someone's trying to stir up your emotions to convince you of something Whether they're a politician a spouse or an advertiser It might be because they can't depend upon a totally rational person to agree with them You should probably try to be extra critical if you feel your blood boiling or your heart fluttering So emotion bad logic good like you'd expect anything else from a show called thunk, but actually that's not true There's a twist to this Emotions are actually beneficial for rational decision-making in 2007 Young Gu Siu and Lisa Feldman Barrett published the results of an experiment designed to measure how emotions affected the capacity for logical analysis They gave test subjects a fake stock portfolio and asked them to make daily decisions over the course of a few weeks about What stocks to buy or sell as well as filling out a daily evaluation of what they were feeling while they were trading and how Intensively the results were very interesting whenever somebody reported very intense emotions while they were trading they performed Significantly better than they did normally by itself This wouldn't be especially convincing But similar results have been reported in all sorts of different studies being emotional Especially angry allows people to analyze things quicker and more accurately from poker hands to persuasive essays So what the hell is going on here? Well the CEO Barrett study actually suggests an answer and I think that it makes a lot of sense We like to think of emotion as being diametrically opposed to logic that more of one means less of the other But it's more likely that they both exist in our heads all the time Even when we're harnessing our so-called cold calculating logical brain to crunch a math problem or solve a puzzle our emotions Don't go away. We just pay less attention to them You might feel pressure to prove your intelligence or feel rushed or feel a little bit hungry all those things are still happening But because you're focusing on the problem You might not recognize when those feelings are influencing your judgment or dragging your attention away from it The test subjects who were trading under the influence of intense sadness or anger weren't just swept away by torrents of unchecked emotion They were encouraged to reflect on and consider how they were feeling in places where emotional bias might make somebody who wasn't paying Really close attention leap to an irrational conclusion being consciously emotional fills that space and eliminate some of the noise that makes thinking harder As well as giving us a little bit of a clue as a potential bias that might come from that part of the brain Okay, I'm angry right now every people sometimes judge things too severely I'm gonna finish this and then I'm gonna go back and check to make sure that me being angry Is it making me too judgmental or affecting my reasoning in any way? That might be the answer to the paradox feeling emotions doesn't impair thinking It's actually helpful for focus the only problems arise when we lack awareness about what we're feeling and why and Fail to use that mental check to override whatever bias that might cause Maybe Vulcan's work better without any emotions at all But the science shows that humans think better when they're mindfully emotional and to ignore the science would be illogical Have you ever gotten laser focus from being angry? Have you ever been emotionally biased about something and realize that after the fact? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah blah subscribe blah share and I'll see you next week