Speaker 2
Yeah, man, it's so funny. I'm literally in this moment, I'm doing Starstruck fire-owned minds. So part of me, while I just have a moment. It's incredible though. I'm such a nerd. I'm with you. I'm with you 100%. It's astonishing. It's astonishing what our minds can do. I mean, it should honestly, Maya, it should
Speaker 1
take our breath away. That is when I was reading the neuroscience and the cognitive science, it's like, wow, our brains are awesome. They're a little glitchy in certain circumstances, but it's a pretty good piece of equipment.
Speaker 2
You know, I'm not returning it to the factory. I've said before, I feel like we as humans are so hard on ourselves, but actually, we should just feel like we're crushing it every moment of our existence just by virtue of existing and doing like 99% of the things we do on any given day. So you know, who needs celebrity sightings, Dan, when you've got the human brain? That's what I say.
Speaker 1
You can get equally Starstruck. Just pull up your MRI and you'll see that's your celebrity sighting for the day. That's exactly right. Okay.
Speaker 2
So to summarize the Bob and David study, we see that five-year-olds are able to identify, of course, that Bob and David are both experiencing negative emotions, right? They're probably feeling sad. There might be a little concerned about the bruises they have. Then there's this huge developmental milestone where for the first time we seem to understand intuitively that David would feel more of this thing called regret than Bob would. And so with that in mind, you know, there's lots of negative emotions we feel. And one of the things you do in your book is you differentiate regret from some of these other negative emotions. I'm curious to hear what you see as the necessary ingredients for feeling regret as opposed to another kind of negative emotion.
Speaker 1
What makes you a very different are two things. It's comparison and it is blame, essentially. So with regret, we compare one set of circumstances to another set of circumstances. So regret doesn't exist in absolute terms. It exists in comparative terms. And so we're comparing one set of circumstances and set of facts to another imagined set of facts. Perhaps even more important is blame. Regret is your fault, right? And that makes it different from other kinds of emotions. It makes it different from, say, the emotion of disappointment. I could feel disappointed that it's raining today, but I can't feel regret that it's raining because I don't control the skies. I can feel regret if I leave the house without an umbrella and I know that it's raining because that's on me. But regret and disappointment, the big demarcation is agency. Regret is your fault.
