Home > Work > Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking
1 " Deep within our brains, as in theirs, our shadowy unconscious mind is continuously applying the lessons of our past experience to predict the consequences of our current circumstances. In fact, one way to characterize a brain is as a prediction machine. "
― Leonard Mlodinow , Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking
2 " With regard to both the physical and the social world, one of the main lessons of neuroscience is that our perception of reality is something we actively construct, not a passive documentation of objective events. "
3 " Whatever its other purposes, positive emotion is strongly correlated with good health and a longer life expectancy. A 2010 review of dozens of studies concluded that there are several pathways through which positive emotion exerts its beneficial effects—your hormonal, immune, and anti-inflammatory systems.[34] In one study health experts in London collected data on the well-being of hundreds of men and women between the ages of forty-five and sixty.[35] They assessed their subjects’ positive emotion using a method designed by the Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman realized that you don’t get a very accurate picture by asking people if they are happy in life. Instead, you tend to get an answer that is reflective of how they feel at that moment, or of whatever event has just happened, or whether the sun is out. What they are reporting is a momentary feeling and not their general state. "
4 " Being social also increases levels of positive emotion—nurturing relationships, interacting and communicating with friends, helping people, engaging in group leisure activities, and both giving and receiving advice and encouragement from others.[38] And then there is exercise, which not only promotes happiness but also lowers stress and provides many physical benefits. Positive emotions might have evolved to give our ancient ancestors a survival advantage, but to experience them still enhances our lives today. "
5 " Altering the course of how your brain makes sense of things is a way of short-circuiting the cycle that leads to an unwanted emotion. Psychologists call that guided thinking “reappraisal. "
