Conventional wisdom tells us that rational thinking forms the basis for optimal decision-making. It tells us that emotions get in the way of rational thought and are a sign of weakness. According to the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, conventional wisdom is wrong. Instead, he argues that emotions are essential ingredients for optimal decision-making.
Damasio’s book, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, revolutionized the way psychologists and neuroscientists look at emotions today. Even though Damasio shared his findings over 20 years ago–his book was published in 1995–conventional wisdom has been slow to catch up.
Let’s go over a high-level summary of Damasio’s findings and figure out how to apply them to our lives.
Prefrontal Cortex
Damasio studied patients who had significant injuries to their prefrontal cortex–the brain’s mission control. As a result, these patients had diminished emotional ranges or couldn’t manage their emotions at all.
Phineas Gage was a healthy, tall, and athletic railroad worker. In a freak accident, an explosion drove an iron bar through the top of Gage’s skull. He somehow survived, but his prefrontal cortex had been severely damaged and–according to his friends–his entire personality had changed. He had extreme difficulty in planning and making decisions. He couldn’t function at his job anymore, lost it, and became a vagabond.
Damasio worked with patients who couldn’t decide where to go for dinner or when to schedule a follow-up appointment. In some cases, patients would spend over thirty minutes trying to make a simple decision using a traditional “rational” approach.
How the Brain Makes Decisions
To understand what happened to these patients, let’s examine how the brain makes decisions. First, it collects information about the problem. Then, it forms available options and prioritizes them. This process is similar to a search algorithm in computer science when a program attempts to find the best solution in a search tree.
Even the simplest of tasks can have an incredibly complex number of options–the search tree can be enormous. When a program attempts to solve a problem with a large search tree, it can take an incredibly long time. As a result, computer scientists create heuristics, which are essentially shortcuts that sacrifice optimality for speed.
Damasio argues that patients with damaged prefrontal cortexes operate like computer programs without heuristics. Our ability to process information is incredibly resource constrained–our working memory has a limited capacity. As a result, these patients may get stuck in an infinite loop or take incredibly long to prune the search tree to find the “optimal” answer.
Emotions as Heuristics
Damasio argues that emotions serve as a heuristic for our brain’s decision-making process. Emotions bias us toward certain options and eliminate others. In short, people with healthy prefrontal cortexes can make simple decisions in a fraction of the time it takes those who have damaged prefrontal cortexes.
Damasio refers to this idea of emotional heuristics as the “somatic-marker hypothesis.” “Soma” means body in Greek and he takes “marker” to mean an emotional hue. In layman terms, I take his fancy label to be interchangeable with what we call a gut feeling.
So where do these emotions, markers, or gut feelings–whatever we want to call them–come from? And are they good heuristics?
Damasio breaks down emotions into two categories: primary and secondary.
Primary emotions are a result of nature–we’re born with them. Damasio lists six primary emotions in Feeling of What Happens: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust. These are universal emotions that served mankind’s evolutionary goal to survive and reproduce.
Meanwhile, secondary emotions are a result of nurture–they’re formed as a result of our individual environments and are more complex than their primary counterparts. Examples include embarrassment, jealousy, guilt, and pride. We each have unique secondary emotions that help us navigate the complex nature of our modern world.
Emotions as Compiled Code
In addition to viewing emotions as a heuristic, I find it useful to compare emotions to compiled code–it has significantly faster execution and consumes fewer resources than interpreted code. The downside is that compiled code that may have been beneficial to us in the past may no longer be helpful now. That stale compiled code is hard and slow to recompile–and we may not even be aware that it’s stale.
An example of stale compiled code for a primary emotion is our fight or flight fear response to many of today’s modern problems. Change and adaptation are becoming increasingly important in today’s fast-paced technological world, but when confronted with “risky” options like switching careers or starting a business, most people are paralyzed by fear. Taking the less traveled path used to be risky when there were threats all around us thousands of years ago.
In today’s world, however, not taking a risk may be the riskiest option of all. Just look at the jobs that are going to be replaced by automation soon. The emotion of fear–which used to protect us from physical risks of death–now pervades our lives and prevents us from evolving in the modern world.
What Can We Do?
So, what can we do?
First, let’s start by changing our relationship with emotions. Let’s stop viewing emotions as the enemy. All our emotions served us at some point. Some of them have grown outdated. When old soldiers retire from the military, you don’t ostracize them. Instead, you thank and honor them for their service on their way out. We should act in the same way toward our outdated emotions.
Second, let’s get to know our emotions better. Let’s figure out which ones still serve us, which ones don’t, and in what context. Every person’s secondary emotions are unique, so we each have to get curious to figure out which emotions no longer serve us. Journaling can be helpful in this regard. Research shows that journaling about your feelings can produce therapeutic effects.
Third, let’s accept Damasio’s theory that bodies and minds are inseparable and take advantage of it. Studies have shown that meditation can help control negative emotions. Research also finds that exercise not only provides stress relief but helps with emotional regulation.
My Challenge To You
I challenge you to ask yourself: what is the biggest stale compiled emotion you would like to recompile?
