“You’re letting your emotions get the better of you. Stop, don’t do it, use your head.” These are phrases we use every day, as if emotions and cognition - high level reasoning, attention, memory - were separate things.
So now I’ll show you that they’re not separate at all. There’s no dividing line. We often think that our lowest instincts, tied to emotion and survival - fear, attacking, fleeing, love, hate - live in a different room of us than thinking, reflecting and using logic.
Cognition serves emotion
I want to start from something a professor said in the cognitive psychology faculty. Her name is Olivetti Belardinelli, a genius. This woman once changed my life by saying something like: “Look, kids, it’s not that you have to use reasoning and thought to stop your emotions. In reality, given how the brain and the human mind work, and how evolution went, cognition is at the service of emotions, and emotions are at the service of instincts.”
Three layers of the brain
Our brain is structured around a stem that runs up the spinal cord and sits at the center of the skull. That brainstem carries the evolution tied to the most basic survival instincts: attack, flight, eating, sleeping, mating.
Around this system is the so-called limbic system, which developed with mammals. It wraps around the upper part of the brainstem and lets us have more sophisticated emotions. That’s where the wide range of our emotions lives: fear mixed with curiosity, or waiting a bit longer before doing something because you know it isn’t gratifying right now but will be more so if you wait. Managing pleasure, managing pain.
The limbic system is intimately connected with memory. You can look at memory as an emotional archive. Memory is what lets us feel less pain in the future, because it reminds us what we learned, where we went wrong, where we did well. It helps us understand what’s good for us and what isn’t.
So there’s the brainstem, the ancient reptilian system, pure survival. Around it is the limbic system, mammalian emotion, sociality, memory. Here cognition and emotion are not separate.
If you widen out even further you find the cerebral cortex, and that’s where our higher cognition resides: language, attention, complex spatial and motor coordination, where we identify objects and know how to plan our relationship with those objects over time. Here everything becomes more logical - especially the language areas.
Language splits what the brain joins
It’s easy to make the distinction, because the language we use - which out of necessity has to be terse and communicate a lot with as few sounds as possible - presents these things to us as two separate traits, two separate spheres. But they’re not separate at all. The whole apparatus works together for survival, for your wellbeing, for your life.
In this sense, and here I go back to that professor, cognition is at the service of emotions. It’s not that emotions are an obstacle to thought and you must repress them. In reality it’s all a continuum, and there’s no sharp line.
You can see this very clearly in neural networks and artificial intelligence, because these neural networks - these simulations of nervous tissue - escape our mental and linguistic categories. Inside them everything is mixed, everything is distributed. So I don’t fall for it, and I invite you to do the same, especially when you find yourself pitting reason against feeling, favoring one or the other depending on the period of your life.
The rudder and the sails
I’d like to remind you of a reflection by Kahlil Gibran in The Prophet: reason and passion are like the rudder and the sails of the boat you use to sail the sea.
If you have reason - the rudder - but no passion, no feeling, you can turn it as much as you like to steer the boat, but there’s no push. The boat doesn’t move, you stay still. You can’t use only your head.
When instead you have passion, feeling, emotions, you sail with full sails: the wind blows, the boat moves. But without a rudder you can’t steer, you can’t govern your boat and send it in the right direction, you can’t leverage your feelings in a positive way. With no rudder, you’re a boat at the mercy of the sea, going wherever the wind blows.
So what is the best, healthiest way to live? The one where you have both the rudder and the wind filling your sails.
