RoboCop’s visor; you can see him digitally tagging only the bad guys for further processing, leaving everyone else alone. Aim, fire: He blows away only the bad guys. This kind of filtering is exactly what emotions do in the brain. You’re probably used to thinking of emotions as the same thing as feelings, but to the brain, they’re not. In the textbook definition, emotions are simply the activation of neurological circuits that prioritize our perceptual world into two categories: things we should pay attention to and things we can safely ignore. Feelings are the subjective psychological
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