The strange alchemy

“The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing”, wrote the philosopher Blaise Pascal. People once thought that emotions and rational thought travelled along parallel lines that never converged.
Philosophers and scientists dismissed emotions as being of little interest – they were believed to hamper rational behaviour. But for some time now scientists have begun to reverse this negative prejudice. One example is the Wellcome Trust, which recently gave 1.3 billion euros to London’s University College to study the structures in the brain that make us decide whether we like something or not. Can we really speak of a science of sentiment? We talked about it to Dylan Evans.

Is there a conflict between emotion and rationality?
Emotions affect our decisions much more than our rational thoughts do – and not because we are irrational. In most everyday situations, we do not have enough time to gather all the information we need before deciding. For example, faced with a barking dog, it is “rational” to follow your emotions. Emotions also save us from certain limits of logic: if I like someone, before asking them out, I could write down all the pros and cons on a piece of paper. But that would hardly be appealing to a prospective partner. Emotions and rationality alternate and complement each other all the time – they have a strange kind of alchemy.

Emotions have always been the prerogative of artists and literary types, but not of scientists…
About fifteen years ago, various scientific disciplines began studying emotions all at about the same time. This is because they found it impossible to explain human behaviour without talking about emotions. Above all, there were the neuroscientists, who studied people incapable of feeling emotion due to brain trauma. They saw how our emotional side can really help us to make the right decisions. Excellent results have also been obtained in the field of artificial intelligence, in terms of building robots which incorporate mechanisms that mimic emotions.

Are emotions innate, or are they products of culture?
Joy, fear, anger, suffering, surprise and disgust are primitive emotions, a kind of universal language. They are innate, and we all have them, regardless of our race, age, or level of education. Smiling at people generally triggers a positive response. The same applies to music, which tends to have a positive effect on mood. But different cultures can generate very different ways of thinking and feeling. This is also true of the link with triggering stimuli. Faced with a number, for example, we might be happy because it reminds us of the number that won us the lottery – or we might be sad because it makes us think of someone who’s died.

Is there a hierarchy of emotions?
Higher cognitive emotions, such as love and hate, need more time to how themselves compared to the basic ones such as anger or surprise, which are instinctive responses to a stimulus. Higher emotions tend to resemble a state of mind, rather than an emotion in the truest sense.

Films, commercials and the media subject us to a constant bombardment of stimuli. Does the level of surprise have to keep on rising to excite us?
Nowadays we have become desensitised to stimuli that were once unknown. A child used to listening to hip hop or heavy metal on his iPod is unlikely to be moved by an old piece of classical music. There is an increasing need to be amazed by speed, rhythm or exciting graphics. There is now also an established idea that things aren’t interesting unless they are constantly updated.

You call yourself an evolutionary psychologist…
Emotions have been a fundamental part of our evolution because they have directed our decisions towards things that allow us to survive. Take high-energy foods, for example, a quick way of enabling us to store resources we need to survive periods of hardship. Evolution played its part by making us sensitive to those tastes, urging us to look for them when they were in short supply. Of course, now that all we need to do is open the fridge, things are a little different. The obesity epidemic is proof of that.
The same applies for food that’s harmful to our health, such as food that has gone off: the aversion we feel is due to its smell, unpleasant taste or appearance, which triggers a sense of revulsion in us that has developed over time.

Can we live without emotions?
No. Without emotions we would never have evolved. Dr. Spock, the Vulcan of Star Trek, could not experience emotion. In reality, he could never have existed.

Interview by Mauro Scanu