Evolution and Emotions: Frequency dependence

Climbing out of the rabbit hole

After a long hiatus I have decided to add to this little blog some more. I stopped for so long because my previous posts sent me down an unexpected rabbit hole. What was supposed to be a simple question, “what are emotions?” which I was asking simply to lay the foundation for a different question, put me onto a mission to find and explore what I believe to be a better answer than what was available. I stopped blogging because I was initially hoping to publish these ideas and, for some academic journals, blogging constitutes publishing in another venue. Since then, though, my life plans have moved away from academia and racking up publications is no longer that important. I have other goals for my work so I am not ready to spell everything out (the model has come a long way since the previous posts on this blog) but thinking and learning about emotions has led me to enough tangential ideas that I think I can justify taking another crack at blogging. So, let me tell you about my adventures in Wonderland…

Saturday, 2 November 2013

Many fish in the sea: what biodiversity theory tells us about finding love

How do we find love?

It may feel like I am jumping the gun a bit, coming back after two years and jumping straight to such a big question, but those two years have been spent doing the experiments for my PhD thesis on the evolution and ecology of species coexistence. While I generally consider my thesis work and my emotions work as two separate bodies, this series of posts on romantic love is the most natural launching point as it represents the overlap of the two. It is a great transition from my pure science to thinking about more applied questions.

And anyways, people don’t really want to know what love is. What they really want is to know how to find it! People’s drive to find love (I will focus on romantic love as that is the most complete case) is a huge industry. Actually, multiple industries, fueling match-making websites and consulting services, countless books and talk shows, therapists, speed-dating events, and billions of man-hours of gossip and conversation.

Tuesday, 23 August 2011

3a. Personalities - programmed for a cave and a spear or suburbia and a credit card?

Emotions act to simplify the world, summarizing our experiences into a few metrics. So, for example, when you are trying to decide whether or not to eat an apple you don’t have to first recall every past experience involving apples. Instead your emotions have already summarized each event and the results have been pooled into one value characterizing your past experiences as somewhere between very rewarding or very detrimental on average. The general rules, such as both joy and pleasure increase trust, will remain fixed among individuals and species. What will change are the parameters of those rules: how much weight is placed on pleasure versus trust, old versus recent experiences. These parameters constitute our personality and while they will change overtime due to learning they must have an initial condition: our base personality, the component of our emotions most susceptible to evolution.