Emotional Decision Making

Two of the head men (Whittle and Klavan) over at PJTV have a post up (members only) about the rational style vs the emotional style in politics. But that is a false dichotomy. May I quote from a paper on the subject:

The modern era of the neuroscience of decision making began with the observation by Antonio Damasio that patients with damage in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), an area of the brain located above the eye sockets, often engaged in behaviors that were detrimental to their well-being. The actions that these patients elected to pursue led to diverse kinds of losses including financial losses, losses in social standing, and losses of family and friends. These patients seemed unable to learn from previous mistakes, as reflected by repeated engagement in decisions that led to negative consequences. In striking contrast to this real-life decision-making impairment, these patients’ intellect and problem-solving abilities were largely normal; their decision-making deficits could not be explained by impairments in the retrieval of semantic knowledge pertinent to the situation, language comprehension or expression, attention, working memory, or long-term memory (Damasio, 1994).

An important insight into the nature of the impairments resulting from vmPFC damage came from the observation that, in addition to their inability to make advantageous decisions in real life, patients with damage to the vmPFC evinced a generally flat affect, and their ability to react to emotional situations was somewhat impaired. This led Damasio to hypothesize that the primary dysfunction of patients with vmPFC damage was an inability to use emotions to aid in decision making, particularly decision making in the personal, financial, and moral realms. This was the fundamental tenet of the somatic-marker hypothesis: that emotions play a role in guiding decisions, especially in situations in which the outcome of one’s choices, in terms of reward and punishment, are uncertain.

If you can’t use emotions to aid decision making you are going to make bad decisions. As PD Ouspensky says in the Fourth Way – pdf – what is wanted is not less emotion but more.

But he also states that the emotions must be trained.

1. Do not identify
2. Do not consider
3. Do not tell lies
4. Do not express negative emotions

Now the first two have a very specific meaning in his system. The last two are obvious. So if some one has a PJTV account they ought to give the boys a heads up. A link to this would be a start.

Also a good resource is this page the First Mate directed me to. How memory works in the brain. It explains why rote memorization – of the right things – is a good way to train the brain to properly respond in novel situations. The right thing to do “feels right” if you have trained your brain properly in advance. Because the brain – although it can do digital computing is not a digital computer.

Now why the rational/feeling dichotomy? Well it makes each side of the dichotomy feel better (heh) about itself. – You can’t reason. You have no feelings. – Get thrown back and forth to no useful purpose. So get with the program guys – you need both and the reason and the emotions must be properly trained. Now that is the hard part. What kind of training? Who does the training? What are people’s heads filled with? Because it affects how they make decisions.


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  1. […] A gang of us over at Talk Polywell were discussing my recent post Emotional Decision Making. […]