192: The Neuroscience of Risk: Why Your Emotions Make You a Better Decision Maker

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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 and decision making
• Lerner, J.S. et al. — research on emotion and decision making at Harvard, including the finding that fact-saturation is not an effective strategy against fear-driven decisions
• Knutson, B. (Stanford) — research on anticipatory affect and its operation across brain regions from brainstem to prefrontal cortex
• 2005 neuroeconomics meta-analysis (Caltech-affiliated authors) summarizing the field's foundational findings on emotion and economic decision making
• Shull, D. "Freud's Path to Profits" — Denise's original 1994 article
• Shull, D. Market Mind Games (McGraw Hill, 2012)
• Timeshifter app — jet lag tool referenced for light, food, and caffeine timing protocols

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