I’m a big fan of science fiction.* But I’d be the first to admit that, if you consume enough, it can get a bit repetitive, with concepts and ideas that keep reoccurring. ‘Despite having zero shared evolutionary history, alien races look a lot like humans with weird foreheads or ears’ is one example of this. ‘There is nothing so ludicrously dangerous that a shadowy corporation won’t try to profit from it’ is another.

A third is, ‘Humans will always be threatened by, or otherwise inferior to, any intelligence that lacks or is immune to emotions’. The merciless artificial intelligences of the Terminator and Matrix franchises. The coldly efficient cyborgs like Robocop, or Doctor Who’s Cybermen. The intellectually superior Vulcans of Star Trek, for whom the rejection of emotions is the basis of their entire culture.† By accident or design, science fiction is regularly implying that our emotions are a liability, a weakness.

Admittedly, real life isn’t much better. The Stoics and the Buddhists were insisting that emotions obstruct reason and enlightenment millennia ago. And referring to someone as ‘overly emotional’ is never a compliment.

So, the general consensus is that emotions are an obstacle to rational thought. It’s like our brains have evolved beyond emotions, but they’re still hanging around, clogging up the workings of our minds: the psychological equivalent of an inflamed appendix.

I’d never put much stock in this idea before, dismissing it as the reserve of dystopian fiction, or posturing online pseudo-intellectuals. But when my dad fell ill, my inability to articulate or embrace my emotional responses was taking up far more of my headspace than I liked.

The severity of his condition fluctuated wildly from day to day too, so the emotions I was struggling to comprehend, or process, kept changing from morning to night. It was a challenge to get anything done. I really felt that my emotions weren’t doing me any favours, just impeding my ability to think normally, to the point where the prospect of detaching my emotions, removing or shutting them off somehow, and allowing my thinking to progress unencumbered, became increasingly appealing. So much so, I ended up looking into how scientifically realistic it is.

And you know what? That’s not how it works. At all.

It turns out that our emotions play many an intriguing, and vital, role in our thinking abilities, our perception, our minds. They may even be the reason we have those things to begin with. So, it was a good thing I didn’t turn off my emotions. I could have done some serious harm.

Not that I ever really had that option. I’m a regular scientist after all, not a fictional one.

But if you want to know what to think about emotions, it’s important to know the many ways in which the act of thinking pretty much depends on emotions. And that’s what I’ll explore in this chapter.

Emotivation

While trying to work out the emotions I was experiencing because of my father being hospitalised, I found I constantly wanted to do something. Anything! Like, for example, write about my emotions for a book. This one, that you’re reading now.

This was a surprise to me. The traditional portrayals of sadness, anxiety, and grief, at least as far as I’ve noticed, suggest that they’re very debilitating, leaving people bereft, or gripped with worry, unable to do anything useful. This can lead to the belief, or it did with me at least, that people experiencing negative emotions lack motivation. I’d argue that this is a reasonable assumption, given that ‘lack of motivation’ is one of the defining features of depression.1 However, at a time when I should have been at my saddest, I instead experienced a strong urge to be as productive as possible.

Was this another sign that my brain was wired up wrongly in some way? Was I going to start singing show tunes whenever I tried to do maths, next? Or was it that I hadn’t quite accepted the reality of my situation on an emotional level yet? Maybe my rational mind had grasped it, but my emotional processes were still throwing up error messages. Whatever the reasoning, I found myself with a lot of motivation, when I’d have expected to have none.

In truth, despite it being a big part of modern life, with companies and managers forever trying to motivate their workforce, and advertisers whose whole purpose is motivating people to buy certain products, few people appreciate just how complex motivation is.

Scientifically speaking, motivation is the cognitive ‘energy’ that makes us want to perform certain actions or behaviours. This may sound straightforward, but it manifests in countless interesting ways.

The urge to eat when hungry, drink when thirsty, to flee from dangers, to reproduce: these fundamental ‘basic drives’2 guide the actions of practically all species. And they’re types of motivation. But the dedication required to spend years creating a great work of art, or building a successful business from nothing: that’s motivation too. As is everything in between, from basic ‘goal-directed’ behaviours3 where our actions are determined by the objective we want to achieve, to the desire to provide for our family and loved ones, i.e. people who aren’t us.

Motivation is so complex because it’s intrinsically tied both to our emotions and to our rational and logical conscious thinking processes (which, for ease of reading, I’m going to refer to as ‘cognition’ from now on). What we’re ultimately motivated to do seems to depend largely on how emotion and cognition intertwine in our brains.

Looked at one way, it seems like motivation is more closely linked to emotion than to cognition. They’re both derived from the same Latin word, movere, meaning ‘to move’. And scientists have long accepted the link between emotion and motivation. Sigmund Freud himself described ‘hedonic motivation’, a classical approach which argues that we’re motivated to pursue things that cause pleasure, and avoid things that cause pain.4

We are often guilty of doing things which are emotionally pleasurable but logically unwise. We’ve all been having a nice time and had ‘one more drink’ (or several) on a work night. This suggests that emotion is a more powerful motivator than cognition; because however much we may intellectually recognise something is beneficial, like heading home early and clear-headed, if it doesn’t make us feel good, the motivation to do it is often harder to summon.

However, that’s far from the whole story.

In the emotion science literature, the term ‘affect’ crops up repeatedly. When you’re experiencing an emotion, you’re in an ‘affective state’. If you’re researching how emotions work in the brain, you’re doing ‘affective neuroscience’. And so on.

Affect essentially refers to the experience of an emotion: what occurs in your body and mind when an emotion happens. All scientists agree that emotions do something to us. Affect is a way of referring to that ‘something’.

Affect is made up of three distinct elements. One is ‘valence’, which is whether an emotion makes you feel good or bad. Valence can be positive or negative – e.g. happiness has positive valence, fear and disgust have negative valence.

Another element of affect is ‘arousal’: the degree to which an emotion stimulates us, mentally and/or physically. The mild frustration when a vending machine keeps your five pence change: that’s low arousal. The intense fear and panic from nearly crashing your car is a very high arousal experience. Increased arousal usually corresponds to raised activity of the sympathetic nervous system.5

Finally, an affective state has ‘motivational salience’, or ‘motivational intensity’: the desire to act, to respond, that is induced by an emotional experience. Seeing something absolutely disgusting that compels you to look away has high motivational salience. The vending machine swallowing your change has low motivational salience.‡

So, potentially all emotional experiences motivate us, to an extent. This is supported by evidence which suggests that emotion and motivation are processed by numerous overlapping systems in the brain.6

On the other hand, we don’t constantly act on our emotions. We don’t run screaming from everything that scares us, we don’t persistently gorge ourselves on something we’re craving, or lusting after. We may feel the urge to do these things, but we keep ourselves in check. We can do this because motivation, emotion, and cognition intertwine in interesting ways in the human brain.

Part of the brain which many consider to be the ‘hub’ of...