More than a feeling: why our emotions are crucial to the way we think | Leonard Mlodinow

Contrary to what Charles Darwin once argued, emotions enhance our process of reasoning and aid decision-making

Charles Darwin created the most successful theory in the history of biology: the theory of evolution. He was also responsible for another grand theory: the theory of emotion, which dominated his field for more than a century. That theory was dead wrong.

The most important tenet of his theory was that the mind consists of two competing forces, the rational and the emotional. He believed emotions played a constructive role in the lives of non-human animals, but in humans emotions were a vestige whose usefulness had been largely superseded by the evolution of reason.

Leonard Mlodinow is a physicist and author of EMOTIONAL: The New Thinking about Feelings