The Intelligence of Emotions Why Feeling Is Part of Thinking

There is a patient in a neurology case file who should haunt everyone who has ever been told to "just be rational" and "leave your feelings out of it." His name, in the literature, is Elliot. He was a successful businessman before a tumor the size of a small orange was discovered pressing against the front of his brain. Surgeons removed it. The operation, by any clinical measure, was a success. Elliot woke up with his intelligence intact, his memory pristine, his language perfect, his perception sharp as ever. And yet something was deeply, irreversibly wrong.

Elliot could no longer make decisions.

Not complex decisions. Not decisions under extraordinary pressure. Any decisions. He could spend an entire afternoon deliberating over whether to use a blue pen or a black pen to fill out a form. He lost his job. He lost his marriage. He lost another marriage after that. He launched business ventures that collapsed spectacularly. And through all of it — through the ruin of everything he had built — he felt absolutely nothing. No grief. No regret. No anxiety. No hope.

Elliot had become, in a very precise neurological sense, perfectly rational. And it had destroyed him.

The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, who treated Elliot, walked away from those sessions with a realization that would reshape our understanding of the human mind. Emotions, he concluded, are not the enemy of reason. They are its engine. Without feeling, thought becomes paralyzed. Without affect, cognition loses its compass. The ancient war between head and heart, between logos and pathos, between reason and feeling — it was never a war at all. It was a fundamental misreading of what it means to think.

We are going to go somewhere unsettling tonight. We are going to look beneath the surface of our emotional lives and find something strange and a little vertiginous: that the feelings you've been told to suppress, to overcome, to be ashamed of, are in fact among the most sophisticated computational systems in the known universe. That your fear knows things your logic doesn't. That your gut is running calculations your prefrontal cortex hasn't even begun.

And that the people who seem the most emotionally cold are not, in fact, the most rational. They may be among the most dangerously impaired.