New religious cult in rise?

[I_am_not_mafia]

Don't have time to watch it because I'm at work, but there's a paradox with emotions. You need irrational emotional biases in order to act rationally. This is called the framing problem. If you can't arbitrarily decide between two equal choices you'll end up thinking through a myriad of possibilities. The neurosurgeon Antonio Damasio describes a patient with emotional impairment acting like this in his book Descartes Error when the patient is given a choice of two different days for his next appointment.

Ironically emotions are actually quite rational, you just have to understand them in the right context. For example, in a committed relationship with a jealous partner, they may act seemingly irrationally to any hint of infidelity, but in evolutionary terms this would stop any partner from being tempted to be unfaithful and may help them stick around and help raise the child.

It's understood that cognition generally widens the range of choices available to an agent while emotions narrow them. You don't want to be considering how tasty the grass might be if you've just heard the squawk of a predator for example, you want to make fleeing your priority over everything else. Doing otherwise would be quite irrational.

I had the pleasure of meeting him in person. He is a brilliant neurosurgeon/neuroscientist. My sister had epilepsy, he and one of his grad students pinpointed the place where it originated, luckily was in one single point in the brain. They operated and ended the epilepsy. All she had was a bit of cognitive problems while the synapses on the place healed.

Brilliant job.

Glad to hear that your sister recovered well. I can only imagine how scary it must be to have brain surgery. His book is a classic in the field. I would love to meet him myself, although obviously not under those circumstances.