Brain injuries that block emotion leave people unable to decide anything, even what to eat. One patient spent hours analyzing options with pure logic and got nowhere. The speaker argues emotions generate choices first, then reason justifies them after.
coming to mind is there's been patients who maybe through accidents or basically had a brain injury that didn't enable them to feel their feelings, like fundamentally, like couldn't access their feelings. And what they discovered about— there's a man in particular I'm remembering, he literally couldn't make decisions. Mm-hmm. Like the question they'd ask him, like, what would you like for lunch? And it'd be hours and hours of looping and trying to rationalize and analyze and figure out what he should have for lunch. And what they discovered is that we literally, we human beings, we make decisions emotionally. Like without our emotional system, we are incapable of making choices. So it made it really apparent to me that we actually make decisions emotionally and then we rationalize them. Hmm. So all the rational stuff is really just a little bit of smoke and mirrors. I don't wanna overstate it. There's times where we could do an analysis that's useful, but still, end of the day, what leads to that moment of, okay, I'm doing this, is some feeling.
