Plato made this analogy to human consciousness:
It is like a two-wheeled chariot, the chariot keeper is the intellect, and the two horses that drive, one representing emotion and quite tame, while the other represents desire, it is unruly and always tries to lead the chariot astray.
Plato's thought believed that reason was superior to sensibility, and pure reason was also admired by many philosophers. For a long time, both in the East and the West, perceptual thinking had no status, and was even considered inferior and inferior;Making decisions based on emotions is always seen as blind, inefficient, and prone to failure. Even if it did, it would be seen as luck rather than as how effective the emotional decision itself was.
But when scientists opened the black box of the brain with the latest tools in neuroscience, they found that the brain doesn't work that way. Plato's chariot metaphor is outdated.
Consciousness consists of two different systems of thinking, one is a conscious rational thinking system and the other is an unconscious rapid perceptual thinking system, and the key to a good decision is to know which system to rely on and when.
Emotions are actually the conclusions and signals given by the brain after a series of automatic operations, and from this point of view, what people often call "intuition" is actually the result of careful consideration, and "following feelings" is also based on it.
Here's an example. Competitive players have to make decisions in a very short period of time on the field, such as a baseball batsman needs to be 0Making the decision of whether to swing the stick in 1 second, as well as the direction and force of the swing, all rely on a strong emotional brain.
Why gorillas are better than expertsClever?Because in scenarios that require an emotional brain to make decisions, gorillas make decisions much faster and more accurately than humans.
Don't get me wrong, this isn't to say that gorillas are better at playing baseball than humans, or that intuition is necessarily more reliable than reason when it comes to making decisions;Rather, it saidFailure is due to the wrong choice, and the best decision is one that carefully reconciles reason and emotion according to the situation.
For example, when buying a house, it's best to let the subconscious mind carefully consider numerous variables;But when it comes to choosing, intuition can lead us astray – the trick is knowing what brain area to use and when. And to do that, we need to work harder and think wiser about how we think.
Think about your own thoughts,It's the smart way to make decisions.
For this reason, we especially recommend Jonah Lehrer's "Why Gorillas Are Smarter Than Experts", originally known in English as "How We Decide", how we make decisions. This is the first book to apply the amazing findings of neuroscience to guide us in making the right decisions.
Through this book, you can understand the thinking mechanism of the brain and become a reliable decision-maker.
Rational Brain:Although the rational brain of human beings is based on logic and rational conscious thinking, is good at simple and precise problems, and is creative, it is like an old-fashioned computer, which can only run on a single line and can only process about 7 data at the same time, which is not conducive to dealing with complex problems.
Emotional Brain:Although the human emotional brain is multi-line and parallel, and is good at quickly drawing conclusions through a large number of complex data, it must be based on long-term experience accumulation, and it is an unconscious thinking, which is easy to fall into psychological traps such as loss aversion, and is easy to drill into the tip of the bull's horns in small things.
There are pros and cons to both systems, and how to reconcile them is the crux of the matter. Through cutting-edge research in neuroscience and real-world examples of real-world decision-makers, from pilots to hedging** investors, from serial killers to poker players, Jonah Lehrer is armed with the tools we need.
This is an insightful and entertaining book that is not only useful but also fun. This made it a super bestseller when it hit the market in the United States. It's been said that the way to become a good decision-maker is simple: read this book. Click on the product card below to receive ** good books with one click.