My one and only reader of this blog (let's call him Harry) emailed to let me know that he had an issue with the CIA's quotes, however. In talking about the mind, Harry wrote, the CIA was making that old faulty distinction between "body and mind", as if the mind could operate, Vulcan-like, unaffected by our body's emotions and desires.
I'm so glad you brought that up, Harry! I don't think the CIA was falling prey to that error, but - yes, oh yes - the idea that we have a mind that can think independent of all those emotions swirling through our gut, heart and loins is, indeed, the number one deceptive practice of the human mind.
I probably don't have to convince anyone that humans are not always rational. (If you've spoken to one recently, that'll be evident.) But it may take a moment to digest the proposition that humans are never rational.
For those jumping up saying "define your terms, lady!", let's say that "rationality" is the ability to make a decision based on reason and logical thought alone. (Still pretty murky, I know, but stick with me.)
One of everybody's favorite stories on this topic is poor old Phineas Gage. A 19th c. railroad foreman, in performing his duty of tamping down blasting powder one day, Gage accidentally sent a three and half foot, one inch wide "tamping rod" through his skull, blasting out a small chunk of his brain. Miraculously, he not only survived but also was up, walking and talking minutes after the accident (he later fell into a light coma for a couple of weeks before he made a full "recovery"). During the remainder of his life, he was appreciated primarily as a "freak", doing a few stints with Mr. Barnum. But as decades past, psychologists became fascinated by reports of Gage's personality change. Before the accident he was seen as a level-headed, upstanding kind of guy; after, if you believe the reports, he was a trash-talking, irresponsible thug. His friends said he was "no longer Gage."
The rod, it seems, had shot through one of the parts of our brain that regulate emotions. Gage went through life with his "logical" mind in tact; but with his emotional lobes gone kaplooey he no longer was the sensible, rational guy he was pre-blast.
Antonio Damasio, in his book Descartes' Error (the go-to tome on the mind-body fallacy, which was of course "Descartes' error"), talks about another poor brain-damaged fellow. Eliot was likewise missing his emotional faculties (eg gruesome pictures didn't seem to bother him) and was what one might imagine to be a Man of the Enlightenment - all logic and thinking. Yet, no Spock was Eliot. Eliot could explain social situations to you and spell out the consequences of actions just fine; but the one thing Eliot couldn't do was make a decision. Not that he was paralyzed in an angsty Hamlet way; he just didn't have any emotions to base a decision on.
This probably makes sense if you think about any big decision in your life. You might know you're a "go with your gut" guy, but if you're like many you may spend a lot of time mulling over the pros and cons of key choices (maybe even made a list?). No matter how detailed, thoughtful and logical the list, however, I'm betting that what finally tipped the scales was "an inner feeling." It really couldn't be any other way, if you think about it. Any decision is just going to have too may pluses and minuses to consider; how could you logically decide whether you should go to med school or study massage therapy when you have to factor in short term and long term financial considerations, quality of life, what your parents will say, what your boyfriend will say, etc. Even if you could make a complete pro/con chart, how would you weigh each of the items? You'd have to decide how much of those line items "mattered" to you, which is another way of saying you'd have to check in with your emotions.
So big decisions, yes, are emotion-wrought. But small decisions? Dean Shibata at the University of Washington was curious how much we depend on emotions even when deciding something as minor as fastening our seat belts. As scientists like to do nowadays, he hooked up an MRI to people's brains to see what parts would light up when asked about seat belts and when asked to do a little math. Unsurprisingly, the seat belt question lit up the lobe associated with emotions, which remained dormant during the math questions.
Some look at the evidence above (and charted in plenty of other studies with and without MRIs) and conclude that rationality does exist, but that emotions are part of being rational. That's not a wrong way to see it, but it opens up a Russian dolls' worth of worms. If based on emotions and logic, what's to say one decision is "rational" and another "irrational"? You'd have to judge some emotions as rational and others not - but what would you use to make that judgment? Another set of emotions. You can see it doesn't really end.
If the thought that your powers of reasoning are forever shackled to your emotions bums you out, you are not alone. I fancy myself the queen of rationality, but I know that's a fanciful illusion. But it's hard to see any other way. And all is not lost; even though we can't depend on logic and out analytical powers to lead us through life, they do help out a bunch. That is, until you run into the brain's other nasty deception...
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