Free The Most Human Human by Brian Christian Page B

evolutionary biologists began to ask—well, if the emotional contribution to decision making is so terrible and detrimental, why did it develop? If it was so bad, wouldn’t we have evolved differently? The rational-choice theorists, I imagine, would respond by saying something like “we’re on our way there, but just not fast enough.” In the late ’80s and through the ’90s, says Shiv, neuroscientists “started providing evidence for the diametric opposite viewpoint” to rational-choice theory: “that emotion is
essential
for and
fundamental
to making good decisions.”
    Shiv recalls a patient he worked with “who had an area of the emotional brain knocked off” by a stroke. After a day of doing some tests and diagnostics for which the patient had volunteered, Shiv offered him a free item as a way of saying “thank you”—in this case, a choice between a pen and a wallet. “If you’re faced with such a trivial decision, you’re going to examine the pen, examine the wallet, think a little bit, grab one, and go,” he says. “That’s it. It’s non-consequential. It’s just a pen and a wallet. This patient didn’t do that. He does the same thing that we would do, examine them and think a little bit, and he grabs the pen, starts walking—hesitates, grabs the wallet. He goes outside our office—comes back and grabs the pen. He goes to his hotel room—believe me: inconsequential a decision!—he leaves a message on our voice-mail mailbox, saying, ‘When I come tomorrow, can I pick up the wallet?’ This constant state of indecision.”
    USC professor and neurologist Antoine Bechara had a similar patient, who, needing to sign a document, waffled between the two pens on the table for a full twenty minutes. 13 (If we are somecomputer/creature hybrid, then it seems that damage to the creature forces and impulses leaves us vulnerable to computer-type problems, like processor freezing and halting.) In cases like this there is no “rational” or “correct” answer. So the logical, analytical mind just flounders and flounders.
    In other decisions where there is no objectively best choice, where there are simply a number of subjective variables with trade-offs between them (airline tickets is one example, houses another, and Shiv includes “mate selection”—a.k.a. dating—among these), the hyperrational mind basically freaks out, something that Shiv calls a “decision dilemma.” The nature of the situation is such that additional information probably won’t even help. In these cases—consider the parable of the donkey that, halfway between two bales of hay and unable to decide which way to walk, starves to death—what we want, more than to be “correct,” is to be
satisfied
with our choice (and out of the dilemma).
    Shiv practices what he preaches. His and his wife’s marriage was arranged—they decided to tie the knot after talking for twenty minutes 14 —and they committed to buying their house at first sight.
Coming Back to Our Senses
    All this “hemispheric bias,” you might call it, or rationality bias, or analytical bias—for it’s in actuality more about analytical thought and linguistic articulation than about the left hemisphere
per se
—both compounds and is compounded by a whole host of other prevailing societal winds to produce some decidedly troubling outcomes.
    I think back, for instance, to my youthful days in CCD—Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, or Catholicism night classes for kids in secular public schools. The ideal of piousness, it seemed to me in those days, was the life of a cloistered monk, attempting a kind of afterlife on earth by living, as much as possible, apart from the “creatural”aspects of life. The Aristotelian ideal: a life spent entirely in contemplation. No rich foods, no aestheticizing the body with fashion, no reveling in the body qua body through athletics—nor dancing—nor, of course, sex. On occasion making music, yes, but music so