You and Your Emotional Brain

You and Your Emotional Brain

Before we can even begin to learn or understand the concept of emotional intelligence, we must first explore the two components that make up the word – emotions and intelligence.

Over the last three centuries, psychologists have been able to define three distinct parts of the human mind: thoughts, emotions, and motivations. Thoughts, also known as cognition, include regular functions such as memory, judgment, and reasoning. This is where intelligence comes in because it is used to measure your cognitive functions.

Emotions, on the other hand, include things like moods, feelings, and evaluations. Motivations refer to behaviors that you learn or biological urges. They are not relevant in the scope of this blog so we shall not go into them for now. In order to explore the links between your emotions and your thoughts, it is important to fully understand emotions and how they affect your life.

What are Emotions?

Emotions are simply mental reactions characterized by strong feeling and corresponding physical effects. They can also be described as powerful social signals that send us messages to spur us to respond to our environment. Emotions help us communicate either in a voluntary or non-voluntary manner, thus facilitating our social interactions.

Significance of Emotions

So what is the significance or purpose of having emotions?

As human beings, we have developed a specific number of emotional reactions that are triggered by conditions or situations. If you are facing a particular problem, your emotions can help you galvanize your thoughts and figure out a solution. So one of the most significant purposes of emotions is to identify dependable cues, then activate reactions that you may have relied on in the past to solve similar problems.

Let’s take the example of fear as an emotion. If you are walking the streets at night and fear that you might get mugged /attacked at a particular spot, your emotion will trigger a specific routine. First of all, your sight and hearing will instantly become more attentive. Then all your other body systems, for example, hunger and thirst, will be suppressed in exchange for physical safety.

Your brain will start focusing on specific bits of information gathered from your environment. You start to analyze options in form of safe versus dangerous rather than easy versus hard. You start remembering previous situations you have faced similar to the one you are in now. If you see someone step out of a dark alley and start running toward you, fear may either force you to shout for help or paralyze you completely.

You then try to determine current as well as future actions that both you and the assailant might take. Finally, your physiological system will kick in and you either fight or flee. From the example above, you can quickly see that emotions help to mobilize entire systems to influence your goals, priorities, focus, perceptions, and physiology.

Emotions also inform you of how the people around you are experiencing a certain situation. They tell you the perspective that you and others have concerning the meaning of things. Most emotions are attached to some kind of automatic signal, but some are more complex and do not exhibit any unique signals, for example, envy or guilt.