Episode
192: The Neuroscience of Risk: Why Your Emotions Make You a Better Decision Maker
- Published
- Jul 30, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 4062
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Summary
📺 Watch the Video on Spotify , YouTube & Rumble Join our FREE Community For decades, the advice on Wall Street was simple: take the emotion out of it. Denise Shull, founder of The ReThink Group and author of Market Mind Games , spent almost 30 years proving that advice is exactly backwards. Denise's path started in a University of Chicago graduate program studying the biology of the unconscious mind, before a chance conversation with a floor trader pulled her onto a Chicago trading desk in 1994. What she found there, and later confirmed through neuroeconomics research, is that emotion isn't the enemy of good decisions. It's the mechanism behind every decision, from what to eat for lunch to whether to take a six-figure market position. Patients whose brain injuries strip away emotional processing can't even choose a candy bar from a vending machine. In this conversation, Denise and Meredith explore what this means far beyond trading floors: how our relationship to authority, whether that's a doctor, an institution, or a headline, shapes whether we trust our own intuition, why sleep deprivation specifically impairs our ability to perceive risk, and why naming a feeling precisely before you act on it is often the difference between a good decision and a regretted one. If you've ever been told to "stay calm," "think positive," or "don't let your emotions get in the way," this episode makes the case that the opposite approach, feeling what you feel and asking why, is the actual skill worth building. Connect with Denise K. Shull Social Media: @denisekshull Website: therethinkgroup.net Book: Market Mind Games (McGraw Hill, 2012) Resources Mentioned Damasio, A. Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (1994) — foundational research on emotion-damaged patients…