The Emotion Machine
With your new book, The Emotion Machine, you try to establish a theory of how emotions get created. But, to you, emotions aren't the same as feelings.
It's about thinking. The main theory is that emotions are nothing special. Each emotional state is a different style of thinking. So it's not a general theory of emotions, because the main idea is that each of the major emotions is quite different. They have different management organisations for how you are thinking you will proceed.
In an adult person, part of the thinking process is being able to manipulate these and turn one on and have it compute something. You can compute some things when you're angry that you can't when you're afraid, and so forth. So finally, the management is able to use these different ways of thinking very quickly as part of ordinary, common-sense thinking.
But I don't think we think in terms of emotions as a thinking process.
Well, thinking is a whole set of complicated processes. Among them, there isn't any process that has a good idea of what the others are doing or how the whole thing works. So people grow up without the theory of thinking itself.
It's interesting - if you look at school, you learn about social science and language, history and arithmetic and things, but there is no course in thinking.
If you go to Harvard, you are taught not so much through books as through case studies. This is so that a lot of the process of going through the case study and developing a plan of attack produces a hard method of thinking. It is about thinking, but it's not presented that way.
The case method is probably very important. One way we learn is . . . when you have an experience, a business experience or any real-life experience, all sorts of things happen. You don't remember what happened, but what you remember is a little story you made up that has a plot, a main character and a problem to solve.
Why is it so hard to develop a decent theory of how the mind works?
I think the main thing is that it's so complicated that our culture has developed wrong theories that get in the way. For example, there is the idea of free will, which is a part of our ethical system, religious systems and philosophical systems, where people grow up to say, 'We're not a machine and what we do can't be explained.'
Now in the last 10 years, there have been bizarre discoveries about memory. Here is an experiment that was done recently: You have your victim, a person who comes in. The experimenter comes out and just meets him. They are talking about something. Then a couple of workmen come. I think they are moving [something] like a piece of wallboard. They are just on the scene. They walk between you and the person you're talking to with this low voice, and what happens is that the first interviewer actually disappears behind the wallboard and the other guy comes out. So originally, you're talking to this fairly tall person with red hair, and while you're talking these people come through. Then you're talking to this guy with a moustache and brown hair and a different jacket.
The person who you are interviewing doesn't notice that this has happened. It's called change blindness. If you're focusing on one thing in a room, while your eyes are there you can change a large amount over here, and when they look back, they won't remember what it looked like.
They won't remember the previous person?
Right. Probably some part of their brain has noticed the change, and the other part says, 'You must be mistaken,' and it gets corrected. Nobody knew this happened until around 1995, when people discovered change blindness.
