I have had this sense that emotions are critical to decision making. Yesterday, while puttering around on the Internet, I came across a story which supports that view:
Talk about a “sea change”: today cognitive neuroscientists have begun to understand how our emotions drive virtually every decision we make, from our morning cereal choice, to who we sit next to at a dinner party, to how sight, smell, and sound affect our mood.
The above quote is part of a much longer book excerpt. The full document may be found at Salon here.
A decision involves a choice between two alternate outcomes. Once you begin to examine even the most basic decisions, you quickly discover they mandate the review of a significant amount of information. Sifting through this information requires brain horsepower. It also requires considerable time. Brain horsepower, and time, are both scarce resources. The brain is able to maximize the utilization of these resources through the use of heuristics and bias. Let me give you an example.
What are you going to eat for dinner tonight? My hunch is that you have an initial response, an immediate preference which makes itself known to you almost instantly. You didn’t need to think about it much, if at all. The answer was immediately conjured up.
If you then begin to unpack your initial choice you will likely find it was based on your existing “preference envelope,” a food stuff that you prefer above all others. In fact, once you begin to search the fridge, or your shelves, you may find the desired food is not available to you.
Were you to attempt a “rational” answer, the amount of decision relevant information would increase exponentially. Do you consider the health benefits of your next meal? Do you contemplate potential weight gain? Do you estimate the micro-nutrients required to fulfill your daily requirements?
Or do you invoke an economic perspective and consider total meal cost against your available cash budget? Decision making now requires an answer to the question “What can you afford to eat?” rather than simply what you want. Or do you begin to contemplate the amount of time required for food preparation versus the amount of time you have available? I am hungry and want sustenance now! is much different from thinking about hunting through recipe books for an hour for that Mexican recipe which requires two hours of preparation time.
The point to all this is that decision making has the potential to be a difficult and time consuming process. The mind is able to shorten this process by using established bias as a trigger criterion. This results in a satisfactory quick decision. It may not be the optimum decision but it is a workable solution.
My hunch is that decision making is subject to emotion based bias. We make choices not on the basis of observable fact, and established rational criteria, but on emotional bias, on hunches, and on memories of past pleasures.
When I try and understand why it is that I spend long sleepless nights in review of very basic events, my sense is that my inability to arrive at a decision is due to some impairment consequent on the injury. I have difficult deciding what to do because the emotional bias that would assist in decision making is in some way impaired. The outcome is that I need to do two things:
- Follow established patterns and routines so as to reduce the burden of decision making
- Where I lack such established patterns and routines, I am forced to undertake an intensive review of decision relevant criteria in order to come to a decision. This intensive review is what keeps me up all night.
Update July 21st 2014
I saw Dr H today and she described my night time efforts as an attempt at problem solving. I think her view of the process is better than mine. What I am doing at night is acknowledging a problem and then attempting to arrive at a solution. I face two different obstacles. The first is gaining an overview and awareness of my situation. The second is making a decision based on that awareness. I appear to have difficulty with both of these processes.