Heroes Not Zombies

When you stop to think about it, there’s an awful lot going on inside your brain that’s nothing to do with thinking. Well, when I say nothing to do with thinking, I don’t exactly mean that….after all, everything is connected to everything else in there. What I mean is that conscious thought and reasoning is only a small part of the function of the brain and the mind. Some of that is about sensory and motor function – your brain processes a lot of signals from the sensory nerves and a lot of those signals don’t make it as far as conscious awareness. Your brain also processes a lot of the muscle activity of your body…everything from voluntary movements eg picking up a pencil….to involuntary effects like heart rate and rhythm.

One interesting aspect of what goes on in the mind is emotions – by “mind” I do not mean “brain” – I mean the extended, embodied network of nerves and chemicals which are involved in “mental processes”. Emotions occur below the level of consciousness and some of them we become directly aware of and can think about, but others seem to occur in what Freud and Jung described as the “unconscious”. In fact, “depth psychology” is all about trying to work with all this material which lies either wholly or partly inaccessible to conscious, rational thought.

We have tended to hold rational, cognitive thought, at the highest level. As if it is best to think things through, and not to trust our feelings. But is that the best strategy?

Here’s a fascinating article on this subject from Jonah Lehrer writing in Wired.

…..from the lab of Michael Pham at Columbia Business School. The study involved asking undergraduates to make predictions about eight different outcomes, from the Democratic presidential primary of 2008 to the finalists of American Idol. They forecast the Dow Jones and picked the winner of the BCS championship game. They even made predictions about the weather. Here’s the strange part: although these predictions concerned a vast range of events, the results were consistent across every trial: people who were more likely to trust their feelings were also more likely to accurately predict the outcome. Pham’s catchy name for this phenomenon is the emotional oracle effect. Consider the results from the American Idol quiz: while high-trust-in-feelings subjects correctly predicted the winner 41 percent of the time, those who distrusted their emotions were only right 24 percent of the time. The same lesson applied to the stock market, that classic example of a random walk: those emotional souls made predictions that were 25 percent more accurate than those who aspired to Spock-like cognition.

The explanation given for this is…

Every feeling is like a summary of data, a quick encapsulation of all the information processing that we don’t have access to. (As Pham puts it, emotions are like a “privileged window” into the subterranean mind.) When it comes to making predictions about complex events, this extra information is often essential. It represents the difference between an informed guess and random chance.

One important aspect of this study was that just guessing about a subject you knew nothing about, and cared nothing about, didn’t produce the same results. But if you really care about something, and are knowledgeable about that subject, then learning to be aware of, and trust, your feelings can produce better results than relying on logic and reason.

This reminds me of a Heartmath technique called “Heart mapping” where you make a “mind map” about your project, then, get coherent, then ask your heart what more does this project need, and create a second, complementary map – a “heart map”. Between them, you have a more holistic map of your project – one which captures both practicalities and values.

It’s reassuring to learn that our feelings are actually such potentially powerful and useful tools.