"How We Decide" by Jonah Lehrer

The most interesting idea that I took away from the book "How We Decide" by Jonah Lehrer is that when patients suffered head injuries that affected their brains, causing them to lose their emotional faculties but retaining their reasoning ones, these patients end up being unable to make any decision, no matter how trivial the subject.

Without emotional faculties, the patients ended up rationalising everything they are doing. They could not make up their minds on what clothes to wear, what food to buy etc, as their brains constantly seek to evaluate all conceivable choices that could be made, no matter how irrelevant many of the choices would have been. Apparently, humans use their emotional faculties to discard choices. After we have discarded all other alternatives leaving our sole choice, our brains will then use these same emotional faculties to "rationalise" the choice we kept, regardless of how good or bad the choice actually was. Without emotions, the human brain cannot discard even the most remotest of choices, so the person becomes embroiled in a state of "analysis-paralysis".

This was very fascinating because I was not aware of the great impact our emotions had on our rationality. Most of us probably think that the less emotional person will make the more rational decision. Apparently, this is not really the case. In fact, people with strong emotions tend to be more rational in their decision making. It is just that these more rational people tend to also have better control of their emotions. When faced with a crisis, they can usually see both sides of a subjective situation, and maintain great discipline to not yield to the first instinctive emotional response.