How emotions work

Our emotions provide our brains with important information and guidance.

At first glance, the correlation between Elliott’s flatness of emotion and his diminished practical reasoning abilities seems pretty counterintuitive. After all, we usually think of our emotions as clouding our judgment. Without any pesky emotions getting in the way, shouldn’t Elliott be better at practical reasoning instead of worse?

As it turns out, our emotions have a lot more practical value than we usually give them credit for.

To understand our emotions, we can divide them into two main components. First, you have a collection of changes happening inside your body state. This is basically your body’s overall pattern of activity at any given moment. What’s going on with your organs, muscles, and joints? How are they doing? Your brain is constantly asking these questions, and your body answers them by sending back chemical and electrical signals.

Whenever you feel an emotion, you’re feeling a pattern of changes happening in your body state. For example, if you’re feeling happy, you might feel your skin flush, your facial muscles form a smile, and the rest of your muscles relax. If you’re feeling sad, you might feel them doing the opposite – blanching, frowning, and tightening. If you add up all the sensations of the changes happening in your body state, what you get is the overall feeling of an emotion. It’s essentially the feeling of your body moving from one body state to another, which we can call your emotional body state.

At the same time, you also have a collection of mental images representing something that triggers your emotional body state. These images could be sounds, smells, tastes, or any other perception – not just visual images. They can also be memories of those perceptions. For example, the sound of your friend’s voice, the sight of his face, or simply the memory of his name could trigger the emotional body state of happiness.

Combine this collection of mental images with a body state, and you have an emotion. You also have an important piece of information and a powerful source of guidance. Your positive or negative emotion is basically your brain’s way of telling itself, “Hey, this thing is good or bad for me. Just look at how it’s making me feel!”

If your brain thinks it’s good, you’ll feel a positive emotion, and you’ll want to seek it out, so you can feel more of that emotion. Maybe you’ll go say hi to your friend. If your brain thinks it’s bad, you’ll do the opposite. Perhaps you’ll duck into the bathroom to avoid that guy you hate at the office.

So that’s the basic story of how our emotions work. But to understand how they relate to Elliot’s story, there are a few more details we need to consider.