Thoughts on Emotions and Knowledge

Emotional intelligence is a critical skill. We live in a world of humans and emotions are the basis of communication. Emotions can hinder knowledge and truth but when they are handled right they drive us to new levels. Although emotions are not necessarily knowledge, I believe emotional intelligence is definitely a gateway to knowledge. Unlike IQ, EQ can be developed at any point in life and no matter the level of someone’s IQ EQ is absolutely distinct from the other.

Supposedly, we have 400 emotional experiences everyday. We are completely emotional beings…unless you’re a psychopath. And there are direct correlations with someone’s EQ and how successful they are later on in their lives. 

It’s understandable that some believe that  emotions are not useful in terms of assessing situations and they can cause us to be biased and cause us to make illogical mistakes. But to remove emotions in order to become more efficient is wrong. As long as you are human emotions should be embraced and used to drive us, to seek and question. Emotional signals drive your brain, without them we will be so much lazier.

In situations where emotions do become to sway us from the truth is when there is a lack of emotional intelligence. We have all done it before where stress gets the better of us and we let our thoughts feed our illogical, emotional driven beliefs. A big part of emotional intelligence is ‘knowing our own emotions’ as written in the TOK book. By being able to detangle our own emotions, understand and recognise them we are less likely to make impulsive, dangerous choices.

This might be an extravagant claim to make but I do believe that without emotions we might not of had knowledge – or at least not as much knowledge as we have now. Emotions have been the driving force of our discoveries. The happiness and emotional reward we gain from finding out and learning something new inspires us as beings to do more. Our human feelings like empathy and humility make us strive and invent not only for our sake but for others as well. So on the basis on being human emotions are fundamental to our development as a society.

Concluding Science

I’ve learnt a lot. It’s very easy to fall into submission and except that science is truth. The majority of us follow science blindly without properly looking at the methods used or make extravagant assumptions making trusted, valid science disregarded. 

The TOK book emphasises that although science is incredible it doesn’t hold the full answer. It is an amazing tool for understanding things but that understanding is constantly changing and evolving. I used to think that once something was discovered and proofed that that was then solidified in our knowledge. But instead of that, discoveries are used as stepping stones for other possible, future discoveries. It makes science less boring. It makes me view it more as a living, growing thing that never stops. And for some reason it’s more comfortable to know that once something is discovered it can’t be concluded with  “that’s that” but in truth it never concludes. Leaving us future generations with infinite bounds of curiosity and creation. 

Although science in itself is a beautiful movement, as people who are studying the theory of knowledge it’s also important to recognise that, sadly, bribery, lies, biases and manipulation have very much become part of science. I think it’s easier perfecting scientific methods and thinking of how to verify things in the most accurate way then dealing with the side of science that has grown and developed with corruption and power. We need to encourage scientific discoveries to embrace the love of people rather than competition and money. 

It’s also important for young people to rise up to old science and question it. It might be viewed as us being problematic but I see it more as us honouring what has been discovered before us and building on it. What use is a scientific discovery if you can’t build on it and learn from it? There is an idea that older people are more conservative and more suspicious of new ideas than younger people. I think it’s all about balance. As I talked about earlier it’s not about following the movement of science without questioning it. Just because it uses the latest technology doesn’t mean it was correctly carried out. But just because it uses the latest technology and not the “good old stuff” doesn’t mean it’s invalid. For me, I believe not a single peace of data, no matter the massive organisation that is funding it or the independent scientist who is carrying it out, shouldn’t be disregarded. However, it should always be questioned. Always.

The thing that has been lost over the years is the freedom that science used to offer. It’s now dangerous to question anything. And scientists are labouring rather than discovering. The problems of science haven’t really occurred in the scientific methods but in the pressures of society. In the years to come I think it would be nice to see more independent studies being freely published and read. We need to get rid of the feeling of threat that some people and organisations feel with new discoveries. It might be to much to ask and too ambitious but this hippie message of “spreading love and peace” is definitely something that the scientific world needs to adopt.

Do the languages you speak have an impact on the way you empathise with others?

As a person that speaks three languages, or at least used to, I want to know: would I be a different person if I didn’t speak one of those languages? Would I view the world and connect with people differently? It’s hard to differentiate culture from language and whether it is the culture that shapes us or does the structure of the language have any effect on how we think. 

There’s a Czech proverb that says, “As many languages you know, as many times you are a human being.” 

Different connotations of life are embedded in different languages and we label different personalities to different languages. The theory that multilingualism increases empathy was tested in 2015 by a team of researchers at the University of Chicago. The results from that study suggest multilingual children are better at understanding other people, even when the words they use are imprecise. The researchers presented kids ages 4 to 6 with three toy cars–a small, medium, and large one. Some of the children spoke just one language, others were bilingual, and a third group had been “exposed” to a second language but weren’t yet fluent.

At one point in the experiment, the researchers presented the cars so that the smallest one was hidden from their own view, while the children could see all three–then said, “I see a small car” and asked the child to move it. The bilingual and language-“exposed” children, knowing which cars the experimenter could see, moved the medium-sized car–the smallest one from the point of view of the adult giving them the instructions–three out of four times. Their monolingual counterparts did so only half the time. In other words, the children who were familiar with more languages were better at inferring the researchers’ intentions, even when their words came up short.

This experiment that I found does show a correlation between the more languages you speak the possibly better you are at interpreting imprecise or ambiguous situations but it didn’t come with an explanation or conclusion to why?

What I think is that, different languages use the same adjectives for different situations, or at least they may hold a different tone. When you are exposed to multiple languages you grasp more connotations of the same word because the culture and the different interpretation of life that comes with that new language enables you to attune and become more aware of the complexity of the feeling or description. But it can also be argued that the different intentions that words are used in different languages do not come from the language itself but the historical context and culture the language has.

It’s hard to look at language separately from everything that has inspired it and made it evolve: culture, history and religion. I think as you learn a new language it’s impossible to strip away the culture and history from it. Would language exist in the same way if the culture to it didn’t exist? So then we need to ask the question can we ever tell if it’s the culture or the language that has shaped the person? Or do they just come hand in hand? Frustratingly the more you think about something the more questions you have. 

This is not incredibly related to the question of language itself but I think that the process of learning a new language also helps with the levels of humanity and empathy for others. Usually, children that are brought up with more than one language start to talk later on. There is a prolonged area of time of ambiguity due to a longer learning and understanding process. This may help multinational and multilingual people empathise more. Just an idea.

But ultimately, it’s nice to think that, empathy and humility is language-blind.

Pseudo Science in the Clinical World

Pseudo science is the misuse or lack of data supporting a claim. It is different from bad science though. Bad science is when people try and be scientific but they have made an error in the way they have carried out something. But pseudo science ,I think, is the intentional manipulation of science. There are also times when you have manipulated science to achieve the objectives of large organisations such as pharmaceutical companies. 


The clinical world has always interested me since it holds such weight in all governments and is incredibly profitable. When something is extremely profitable I start to ask questions especially when it uses lives to make this profit. 


Pharmaceutical companies suppress data that show bad side effects to their drugs that they distribute. There have been examples when new drugs in development had extremely bad side effects but these trials where never published and the pharmaceutical company went on to use these drugs on children. A substantial amount of those children died. 


An other example of manipulated science would be statins. There are significant doubts about the quality of the science behind the use of them. Independent scientist have reviewed milestone research and have found that most of the recommendation conclusions are simply false. It would seem that this is not the first of many drugs that has been put on the market for profit rather than efficacy. A recent review by independent researchers of all independent, drugs in use concluded that more than 70% of them had no therapeutic or clinical benefit.


Just a disclaimer – not all drugs are bad and lives are saved but there is a lot of pseudo science particularly where you wished it existed least. I think the best way to overcome pseudo science is to just ask questions. On the surface it looks all right, especially when a highly qualified person like a doctor is trying to sell it to you, but once you get into the nitty gritty of it all you start to see it differently. The best way to overcome pseudo science and not become a victim to it is, in some ways, to just be a bit annoying – be persistent and don’t accept things as they are told. 

Shared knowledge,energy fields and apathy. ( But mostly about apathy.)

What is shared knowledge? Knowledge is information that is useful and that we share in many ways. We share knowledge through language, such as books, films, podcasts. We also share knowledge through body language. We share it on a cellular level, through our DNA and increasingly physicists believe we share knowledge through cellular and bodily fields. 
Every cell, every body has an electric magnetic, energy field. And in this field there is information. Indeed, physicists are now claiming that a lot of our cellular information is not in the nucleus of a cell but in its field. And memory is not just a series of neurone patterns that come into existence with new learning but information and memory may be held in these fields as well. This idea of energy fields opens up explanations and possibilities for things such as “why can we sense someone looking at us from behind?” to “how can healers and intuition be explained?” When we meet someone we may not just be observing them but sensing their information in the fields around them. 
All knowledge is dependent and limited by our senses and some people have heightened awareness and some people even claim to have a sixth sense.
One obstacle of shared knowledge that interested me the most was apathy. Apathy is the reluctance to explore new things and to stay in the familiar. It comes from the Greek origins of “a-“ which means without and “pathos” which means suffering. Without suffering. This then evolved into the Greek word apathēs which also means without feeling. So, apathy is a way of avoiding some form of emotional discomfort or challenge. It is an emotional motivation seeking the safety and stability. It is not an intellectual, logical or rational process but emotionally led. Unfortunately, to be without feeling may mean we loose the qualities of curiosity and vitality.
How did you feel when you were reading about the concept about information being held in fields? Did you feel curios and excited or did you feel dismissive and sceptical – “ I haven’t got time to rethink everything that I knew about biology.”
They say science progresses at the rate of the death of a scientist. If this is so, then new ideas and concepts are only excepted as senior scientists leave their field, and this is an area where logic and empirical data should prevail, we can understand how powerful and insidious apathy truly is. Apathy is ubiquitous.
Apathy isn’t a passive activity – it can be extremely active depending in which field people are working in and even in our daily lives. The first phase of being apathetic is to ignore. People who are introducing a new way of thinking are usually and firstly ignored, only when those people carry on to speak up the people with the authority in the situation carry out the second phase of engaging in dismissing the arguments and then finally ridiculing the person or the group of people. It is quite extraordinary how much energy and time we will commit to being apathetic and preserve our emotional comfort in our belief systems. We are all guilty of judging a person when they believe in something different from what we believe is right. I believe a great measure of emotional wisdom is how a person can embrace others no matter what they think and feel about something.
But, apathy has served us. I just think it’s a bit overrated now. We all have it because we are ,essentially, human. If someone did not have any apathy we would view them as ruthless and self-sabotaging and it is always nice to be comfortable and cosy in what we know and feel. But as we move to a more modern age where taking risks doesn’t always lead to inevitable death I think as a society we can move further away from our emotional safety nets and embrace new things with a little more confidence. Just an idea. 

Is Truth Objective?

In theory truth should be objective. Truth wants to be objective. But it’s hard to say if it’s actually objective. 

We all have our limitation and depending on our cultures and backgrounds we have different truths. As humans we are biased and selective and in some ways not knowing is as important as knowing. But when it comes to believing in something’s truth it is usually out of personal preference. We may be under the impression something is true because hopefully we are using the best information that is available to us and we are reflecting back on it and coming to a conclusion. But a lot of cultural and emotional factors come to play in our own personal truths. Truth is very important to us (unless you are Donald Trump – then truth has nothing to do with anything.) But without truth we can not trust the knowledge we are being given. 

In the world of science almost everything is a scientific theory, there are barely any scientific facts. Scientific theories become facts once no one has enough evidence to challenge it. So we just begin to assume that it is the truth, once it’s true it also becomes fact. For example the Earth is a globe. Before it was just a theory but after the collection of information and evidence it was then an established truth. 

So a theory and testing a theory brings us closer to the truth. You need to try and explain the empirical. We are constantly  nudging closer to so many truths but I guess it all depends if we can truly reach and finalise those truths. 

I think only now our view of the Earth, that it is true that it is a globe, is objective but it has taken 2000 years to get there. It takes longer than it should to reach an objective truth.

Truth can also only be influenced by the person’s own experience. Because too believe something is true you would of needed to of imagined it. If it was out of the persons comprehension it can not be true. Truth is limited by our own comprehension and reality. 

Also, if truths can change we can only believe that there is truth. It’s contradictory. But we think that’s something is true then we find out that it’s not true so… it’s contradictory. There is a belief element in truth. There may be more evidence behind something when we believe that it is true but we are still believing. The book says “ If you know something, then what you claim to know must be true, but if you merely believe it, then it may be true or it may be false.” But knowing something involves believing that it is true. So you can not know something if you don’t believe in it or it’s truth. 

Why is TOK so important?

I don’t really try and understand the world. I am much more of the type of person that just goes with the flow and watches life revolve around me. This is probably not healthy – constantly being in a dream like state. After years of mainstream education I think all kids’ brains may go a little floppy because we don’t really get to use them. Well at least not the whole of it. We sit there absorbing information that may not always align with our interests and without really questioning or understanding the essence of what we are being told. 

So, even when Theory of Knowledge is such a small aspect to the IB course, yet so important, I find myself a bit lost sometimes since I have to think so much. Through the several lessons I have had in it I kind of view the subject as ‘the rediscovery of how much fun it is to ask questions and seek answers to those questions and then ask some more questions.’ As people we rely on knowledge, it makes up our whole world and we are all born with the need to know. We all go through that really annoying stage of “why?why?why?” when we are younger and annoy the hell out of the adults around us who in some ways have lost the spark of wanting to know. We slowly, overtime, become quieter when it comes to wanting to know the unknown and we lock away the thing that makes us so special – our curiosity. 

Theory of Knowledge also makes you realise how complicated everything is. A lot of the time, the years prior and especially in GCSEs, as student we were very much talked at. And unless you did philosophy or phycology, which I did not, you didn’t actually have an idea of why people think and view things a certain way. We were just told things and we believed them. We were only conscious that there was only us, in that one second of time, in that one room being told by that one teacher of what we had to know for that one exam. I have had a revelation that there maybe a bit more to the world then just me and the next exam I’m going to take. It is a thought that is liberating but also terrifying. There is so much more in the world that none of us actually know. 

So. How do we know what we know? And, how do we know that we know what we know? My brain hurts already. Most of the time people think things are true because they are tangible or physical. But I believe that there is so much more to life then the dimensional and material world we live. There is so more to a human than what they look like because they are able to feel, sense and respond to their surroundings. Their response relies on more than what cells they are made up of and what colour hair they have. In Theory of Knowledge you realise how much we actually don’t know. Can we actually be sure of anything? Information and knowledge is never stagnant and we as a society are constantly changing so in some ways knowledge is a fluid movement that in its self is never completely certain. 

Probably, for the first time in my life rather then looking at what I know I am seeing how I know. 

Introduce Yourself (Example Post)

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

Why do this?

  • Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
  • Because it will help you focus you own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.

The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.

To help you get started, here are a few questions:

  • Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
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  • If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?

You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.

Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.

When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.

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