Thinking With Our Emotions

We need our feelings to make the right decisions. We use our thoughts to validate our feelings.

Emotions and decision-making. We use our reason to keep our emotions in check. That way we don't do stupid things. We become masters of our domain. Plato believed that. So did the Enlightenment philosophers. So did our Founding Fathers, as did Freud. It stands to reason, right?

Not so fast, says science writer Jonah Lehrer. In his eye-opening (and highly recommended) 2010 book, "How We Decide," Lehrer cites no end of brain science studies that show that emotion is very much involved in not only making decisions, but in making the right decisions. By the same token, the pre-frontal cortices - those parts of the brain associated with higher reasoning - are very easily tricked into making bad choices.

Thinking Guided By Emotion

Lehrer begins his book with the closing seconds of the 2002 Super Bowl. The New England Patriots have the ball on their own 17 yard line, and the Rams defense is expecting quarterback Tom Brady to pass. As Lehrer tells us, "each pass is really a guess, a hypothesis launched into the air." The best quarterbacks make the best guesses.

In the split-seconds he has at his disposal, there is no time for Brady to make a considered decision. Instead, it is his feelings that guide him. Brady starts moving the ball downfield. Then it's now-or-never time. Lehrer picks up on the action:

The primary target, a tight end running a short crossing pattern, is tightly covered. As a result, when Brady glances at the tight end, he automatically feels a slight twinge of fear, the sure sign of a risky pass.

His secondary target is also covered. Again, a negative feeling. Brady needs to get rid of the ball in a hurry. Otherwise, bad things will happen. He proceeds to his third target ...

Troy Brown is sneaking across the center of the field, threading the seam between the linebackers and the cornerbacks. When Brady looks at the target, his usual fear is replaced by a subtle burst of positive emotion, the allure of a receiver without a nearby defender. He has found an open man. He lets the ball fly. ...

As Lehrer explains later in the book, a lot of our decision-making has to do with the dopamine system, most commonly associated with the emotions of pleasure and fear. But dopamine is also involved in the process of anticipation - a lot of it driven by past experience. Thus, in one experiment, in a gambling game if a player drew from a bad deck, the dopamine neurons immediately stopped firing. "The player experienced a negative emotion and learned not to draw from that deck again."

This is a crucial cognitive talent, Lehrer tells us. "Dopamine neurons automatically detect the subtle patterns that we would otherwise fail to notice; they assimilate all the data that we can't consciously comprehend. And then, once they come up with a set of refined predictions about how the world works, they translate these predictions into emotions."

Oddly enough, Lehrer says later on, psychopathic behavior appears to result from lack of emotion rather than a breakdown in reason. Psychopaths tend to have above average intelligence. The problem is they are not guided by their emotions. They never feel bad when others feel bad. As a result, they show no remorse. "This emotional void means psychopaths never learn from their adverse experiences. ... The absence of emotion makes the most basic moral concepts incomprehensible."

Yes, our emotions (or lack of) can lead us astray, but the skilled decision-maker knows when to pay attention:

Brady yells out a snap count, sends a man in motion, then the ball is in his hands. He drops back and notices three defensive linemen are rushing him. The fourth is trying to cut off the short pass. Brady looks to his right. The receiver is covered. He looks to his left. Nobody's open. He looks to the center of the field. Troy Brown, a Patriots wide receiver, is trying to find a plane of unoccupied space ...

Something feels right to Brady. He fires a bullet 14 yards downfield. Brown runs with the ball another nine yards, then steps out of bounds. One more quick pass, then the kicking unit comes onto the field. Adam Vinatieri sends the ball 48 yards through the uprights. Zero seconds on the clock. Game over.

The Politics of Stupid

Is Republicanism the New Stupid? I asked in a blog. Ordinarily, the same question would apply to Democrats, as well, but these are no ordinary times. There is no equivalent of a Tea Party movement in the Democratic Party. If you are uncomfortable with this, you need to keep reading.

In one experiment described by Lehrer in his book, political partisans had their brains scanned as they were read out the outrageous on-the-record inconsistencies of the candidates they supported.

Predictably, the prefrontal cortices - the seat of reason - were recruited, which should have been a good sign, but it was accompanied by a rush of pleasurable emotion. What seemed to be happening was that the thinking regions of the brain were activated - not to dispassionately weigh the facts and formulate some kind of rational response - but to fabricate a favorable interpretation of the facts, no matter how unpleasant those facts happened to be.

Thus, when the thinking brain had successfully arrived at "mission accomplished" - that is, a palpably absurd conclusion - the lower regions of the brain slobbered like a dog gorging on red meat.

Have no fear, this is pretty much what goes on in the brain when we choose a romantic partner.

Meanwhile

A phone is a phone. I have boundaries, and I will never change. I'm adamant about that.

One fine summer day, I popped into an AT&T store to update my cell phone account. Here is my non-negotiable stand on cell phones: I use cell phones to make and receive calls on the road. At home, I use my cell phone as a paper weight. I am not interested in using a phone as a camera or a music player or as a personal planner or storing photos or text messaging or video games or cool ringtones.

"Why don't you show me the iPhone?" I said to the sales clerk. It just popped out of me.

Then: "Never mind. Just sign me up for the thing."

I swear, this is a true account.

I got my iPhone home and downloaded every conceivable app under the sun: Music, photos, games, GPS tracker, restaurant guide, a bubble level, even something called iFart. Then I broke into my iTunes collection and made a great ringtone out of the opening to Louis Armstrong's "West End Blues."

Moral: Anyone who believes we are rational beings governed by rational decisions is sorely delusional. All you need to do is spend a day in a mall to see that the real world behaves far differently that the one imagined by PhD economists.

You may recall in late October 2009, in the wake of the greatest financial-economic collapse since 1929, former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan told Congress that "those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders' equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief."

This came mere months after I entered an AT&T store with the sole purpose of updating my plain vanilla account and leaving with an iPhone. I am in a state of shocked disbelief.

What was going on in Alan Greenspan's mind when he thought that markets could self-regulate forever? What was going on in my mind when I bought an iPhone?

Crazy world we live in. In the final analysis, we're apes with iPhones. I'm cool with that.

First published as a number of blogs 2009, 2010, reworked into an article Jan 15, 2011

Comment to this article.

McMan's Depression and Bipolar Web