Interesting that you should bring up vulcan. It is perhaps worth noting that Vulcans opted to give up emotion because they felt them too strongly rather than not at all.

Sometimes to this day I do wonder what all this talking has done for me. With reflection, it appears as though talking about things tends to have a normalizing, diffusing effect on the emotion for me.

We modern humans *are* odd among the animal kingdom for sure. When something untoward happens to us, we tend to hold onto the feelings associated with it for a long long time.

Contrast our reaction with that of, say, a zebra, who can experience moments of sheer terror when a predator approaches, and then later, once the danger has abated, they go back to baseline grass eating and, well, whatever else zebras do.

As long as the herd is calm, so are the members it would seem.

Perhaps as humans lost their tribal nature, the ability of the "herd" to calm us and normalize events must have gotten lost as well.

Clearly, I think, there is an advantage to belonging to a herd.

So I guess in the absence of such a group, we must find other ways to normalize our experience. I guess we just talk now.

I've heard it speculated that there really are only two human emotions: fear and love. The rest are variations and combinations of those two. I will admit, both are very motivating and evocative.