Elliot is walking proof we've had that backwards.

Elliot — a pseudonym — was a successful businessman, a good father, a good husband. Then doctors found a brain tumor in his frontal lobe, and the surgery that removed it damaged part of his brain. Afterward, his IQ was still in the 97th percentile. Memory, fine. Logic, fully intact. The only thing Elliot lost was his ability to feel emotion.

By everything we believe about decision-making, that should have made him better — Mr. Spock in a business suit. Instead, he couldn't hold a job. His marriage collapsed. His life unraveled.

The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, who worked with him, was stumped. Elliot tested brilliantly on everything. Damasio couldn't find the deficit — until one day he saw it.

Elliot couldn't decide anything. Sorting a single stack of papers in his office could consume an entire day. He knew the options — chronological, by topic, by priority — and he got lost in the details of each page instead of seeing the larger task that needed to get done. He was paralyzed. He couldn't make the call to move on.

Here's what Damasio figured out: without emotion, every option weighs exactly the same. Nothing matters more than anything else. The whole landscape of the decision goes flat.

Because emotion is the thing that tells you what matters. It's not the noise in the system — it is the system, working alongside your rational brain. Damasio put it in a line I love: feelings are not just the shady side of reason, but that they help us reach decisions as well.

Your feelings are data. They're your values, your history, your conscience — guilt, shame, joy, longing — all of it encoded and delivered to you in the moment you need to choose. Take that away, and logic doesn't get purer. It gets paralyzed.

Here's why this matters right now: all of us are carrying an Elliot around in our pocket.

AI is extraordinary at logic. It can process more information than you or I ever could. But it doesn't feel anything — no skin in the game. So when it makes a decision for you, the "what matters" part is secondhand. Borrowed. Guessed at. It's playing with half a deck.

In the 3rd episode of What Does It Mean to Be Human, Maria Ross and I explore the role that feelings play in making us human. And yes, I actually sing in this episode!

In part of the episode, we discuss how emotions and logic/reasoning work together to make decisions and where AI comes up short…

Say you let AI do your grocery shopping. Logically: store-brand mac and cheese — cheaper, basically the same, and it knows you're saving for a summer vacation. Perfectly rational. But as Maria pointed out on the episode, if your kid only eats the blue box, and it's not in the pantry? There's going to be hell to pay. That attachment isn't logical. It's emotional. And it's real.

It happened at my house, too. Charles and I were picking something to watch — we'd just seen The Rocky Horror Show on Broadway and found Strange Journey, a documentary about the making of the original. It was $5.99 to rent instead of free, and Charles said, "Do we really need to pay for it?" A rational point. I started to move us along… and a minute later he said, "You know what? Let's watch it. It's only $5.99." What happened in that minute? Nostalgia for a great night together. Curiosity about the origins of a show we love. The emotion came in, balanced the logic, and that became the right decision.

When AI tells you "I hear you," or "that's a great question," or "that's brilliant" — that's performative emotions. It's Elliot in reverse: he had intellect without feeling; AI uses the language of feeling with nothing underneath it.

I'm not telling you to stop using AI. I use it, Maria uses it. I'm telling you to know which half of the decision it can't do for you. The logic half? Go for it with AI. The what-actually-matters half is still yours. That's the human part. (It's probably why AI writing so often comes out a little soulless. AI doesn't feel the essence it's trying to put on the page.)

In the end, I think humans collaborating with AI is what’s going to create the breakthroughs. Taking the best of both ‘worlds’.

Emotions are a lot. They can be volatile. But the skill isn't suppressing them — it's reading them. Understanding what they are and where they're coming from.

This is where the Curious Breath comes in. When you feel a reaction rising — heat in your face, blood pressure climbing — take that big inhale, the one that pushes your lungs out against your rib cage, hold it, exhale…

The Curious Breath relaxes your parasympathetic nervous system and quiets the fight-flight-freeze-fawn response, which gives you the space to actually find the emotion and name it. Is it anger? Or fear underneath it? Disappointment? Embarrassment?

The neuropsychiatrist Dan Siegel has a phrase for why this works: name it to tame it. A named emotion is information you can use. An unnamed one is a driver with its hands on the wheel of your car. (The feelings wheel — linked below — is a great tool for navigating from the core emotion into the nuance and back again.)

The Curious Breath helps you Dismantle Judgment and Ask Good Questions, pointed at yourself. What am I feeling? What is it telling me?

Then, decide what you're going to do about it.

None of this means emotion should run the whole show. The psychologist Paul Bloom wrote a whole book on this, Against Empathy — and he's not actually against empathy; he's for balancing emotion with rational thinking. Elliot proves you can't decide without feeling. But you also can't decide well on feeling alone.

So if you're someone who gets overwhelmed by emotion: be a colander, not a pot. When you drain the pasta, you don't pour it into another pot — you pour it into a colander. Keep the information the emotion is giving you, and let the excess drain away.

Emotion plus reason. That's not a design flaw. That's the feature. It might be one of the most human things about us.

One more thing. So many of the hardest conversations in our lives — especially with our aging parents, or with our adult children about our own aging — stall out because we lead with logic when the real subject is feeling. That's what my next project is about, and I'm looking for people to talk to: adult children, aging parents, and the professionals who work with them. If that's you, please sign up — I'd love to have a conversation.

🎧 Listen to Episode 3 of What Does It Mean to Be Human? with Maria Ross →

Spotify (below), also available on Apple Podcasts

Stay curious. Ask good questions. Let empathy follow.

— Rob