Rationality depends on emotion. A.R. Damasio’s Descartes’ Error – Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain reveals how the human ability to make rational, prudent choices fails unless it is supported by normal emotional responses. His findings fly in the face of conventional wisdom which portrays emotions as enemies to reason – impulsive forces which urge us to make poor choices, and which must be held in check by cool logic and deduction.
Damasio shows that rational behaviour results from a bottom-up process that begins with subconsciously learned emotional responses that can be detected in galvanic skin responses (GSR’s), and other physical signs. This unconscious learning preceeds, and helps to facilitate, cognitive learning.
Moreover, people require these learned emotional responses to make rational, self-interested choices, even after they have cognitively ‘figured out’ what choices are in their interests.
Both results seem counterintuitive, the latter most strikingly. Most people who consider themselves sane think that if they know what is in their best interests, they will choose accordingly. They won’t, says Damasio, unless that knowledge is supported by feeling. Continue reading “Rationality and its Limits”