

Want to Think Logically? Trust Your Emotions  - bootload
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brain-sense/200909/want-think-logically-trust-your-emotions

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azanar
The author seems to be stretching quite far to reach her conclusion, which
seems to be to be that intuition is just another aspect of emotional response.
The difficulty I have had in trying to explain this intuition is that there
_is_ a feeling of confusion attached, which superficially seems like it just
goes to prove her point.

I don't think it does, though, and hopefully I can argue my way through this
without stepping on any traps.

The argument of the author seems to rest largely upon the function of the
amygdala. Because it lights up when exposed to stimuli where the recipient has
a memory of that stimuli associated with some undesirable outcome, her
assertion seems to be that amygdala must be the basis behind our reaction to
all things our memory has build intuitive associations of outcomes around. I
think this is a conclusion we can't yet draw. Because these research subjects
are able to isolate important photos in a series based upon some intuition of
a prior exposure, this doesn't mean I will always build an intuitive order of
things based upon my own prior recollections about my emotional state of mind.
As Mz points out as well, it makes a tremendous assumption about memory.

This almost reads like she _wants_ this to be true. If this is the case, she
is not the only one. I've had a number of discussions about this with other
people who seem emotionally reactive toward things, who have expressed a
desire for similar findings, because then they can declare that the emotional
snap judgments they had which resulted in very bad outcomes were as good as
they could've possibly done. Based on anecdotes from people in my life, this
seems wrong; hence, my intuitive sense that this author's conclusions are
faulty doesn't seem entirely out of line. Both intuition and experience are
feeling confused.

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Retric
The flawed assumption is you can know what will be important ahead of time.

~~~
gloob
True, but some sort of heuristic is necessary. Without a heuristic for
guessing what would be important ahead of time, we wouldn't have paging on
computers, and then where would we be? If the heuristic is right more often
than not, at least it's useful.

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Mz
In this case, they are drawing on the fact that emotion is a type of memory.
It has it's good points and bad points. Strongly emotional people are more
able to make snap judgments. But those snap judgments may be biased by
negative experiences. In some cases, those previous negative experiences are a
good predictor (ie a good basis for judging X to be a bad thing). In other
cases, they are essentially a personal stumbling block.

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etherael
It often seems to me that emotional evaluation frequently amounts to shallow,
parallel processing. For example "feelings" based on previous experience which
you can't necessarily immediately deeply analyse and explain, but typically
encompasses an enormously broad set of circumstances you've experienced in the
past. When we hear a line like "I'll create a gui in visual basic, see if I
can track an IP address" we don't immediately have an impartial, rational
response as to why that doesn't make any sense, the shallow emotional response
kicks in first and you roll your eyes and groan.

If you then needed to explain in detail and in a logical way why that response
was provoked, you can, but it's not what's at the immediate cognitive surface
of the response. Take a far more complex example that just leaves you feeling
kinda vaguely uneasy at first glance (spacetime is quantized) and I think that
better illustrates what I'm getting at.

Rational, logical evaluation on the other hand is a deep, focused analysis
which can't quickly account for every little thing you've ever experienced,
and often initially leaves you with the nagging feeling that "you're missing
some little thing".

The constant attempt to link intuition to emotion is probably based around the
fact that people don't have deep objective reality based models of the
universe as a general rule, so it's very difficult for them to be able to
imagine the kind of person who does.

On the other hand, it's not that hard to understand that there are intuitive
patterns to human emotion, even amongst those that have trouble grasping those
intuitive patterns, thus the two become linked in the minds of the majority.

