Hidden Brain

How Feelings Make Us Smarter

We often think of feelings as the enemy of clear thinking — as forces that muddy the waters of rational analysis. But emotions, it turns out, are not the opposite of thought. They are a form of thought.

Hidden Brain

How Feelings Make Us Smarter

Emotions are not just feelings — they're a form of information. When you have a feeling, you're actually getting a signal about what's relevant, what's important, and what you might be missing. Suppressing that information comes at a cognitive cost.

Hidden Brain

How Feelings Make Us Smarter

Most of us have been taught to think of emotions as noise in the system — interference that distorts the signal of pure reason. But what if we've had it exactly backwards? What if emotions aren't obstacles to good thinking, but essential ingredients of it?

Hidden Brain

How Feelings Make Us Smarter

We tend to think that the best decisions are made when we're calm and dispassionate — when we manage to push aside our feelings and focus on the facts. But neuroscientist Antonio Damasio discovered something remarkable: people who lose the ability to feel emotions due to brain damage also lose the ability to make good decisions.

Hidden Brain

How Feelings Make Us Smarter

Emotions are not just feelings — they're information. They tell you what you care about, what matters to you, what you should attend to in the environment. If you strip away your emotions, you don't become a better reasoner; you become a worse one.

Hidden Brain

How Feelings Make Us Smarter

Emotional intelligence is one of the most popular ideas in psychology. It's also a term that's widely misused and misunderstood.

Hidden Brain

You Are Not Ordinary

Most of us intuitively feel that our inner experiences are beyond the reach of others. But psychologists have found that when we actually test this idea, our emotions, thoughts, and feelings are often far more transparent to others than we imagine — and that other people's inner lives are far more similar to our own than we tend to assume.

Daily Stoic

14 Stoic Lessons Marcus Aurelius Learned From His Father

Let the boy be human for once. Says empire doesn't take away natural feeling. And so here is a moment of grace.

CEO Signal

Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol on Leading Through Turnarounds | The CEO Signal

In the customer service business is is tough but in the end you know you can have a real influence on people um on you know the experience you ultimately provide and how you choose to react to the situation.

Fresh Air

Best Of: ‘Hamnet’ star Jessie Buckley / Documentarian Morgan Neville

The thing that this story offered me, that brought me into this next chapter of my life as a mother was tenderness, you know? And that was a word and a feeling that I think I didn't know was what I was looking for.

TED

“Stripped of the emotional component, fear is simply information” @MichelleKhare #TEDTalks

Stripped of the emotional component, fear is simply information. It tells us exactly what we need to know in order to progress.