When Emotions Make Better Decisions - Antonio Damasio

fored TV the world is [Music] thinking one of the most famous patients you had was a fellow named Elliot who was a very successful person suffered this damage and whose life went down the tubes basically made a series of terrible decisions another case that is always fascinating me the seeing you describe in one of your books one of your patients who also has trouble making decisions and you're asking him at at what point should we schedule the next appointment Tuesday or Wednesday and as you describe it in the book he spends I think 20 or 30 minutes saying well Tuesday has this advantag as Wednesday has this advantages unable to make up his mind exactly and that is very illustrative example because it it it shows you on the one hand that the cognitive abilities the ability to manipulate data and to make analysis of costs and benefits in a very cold way is maintained and people can still do that well you know you know I but the thing I'm most liked in the in these patients when we ask them about restaurants and this was really quite remarkable and they say what restaurant do you want to go to tonight and said well we could go to this one and then said but uh I I I take it that this restaurant has been rather empty recently so that's probably a bad sign it's a sign that the food may not be so good on the other hand it's true that it is more empty we're likely to get a table and therefore we should go there but then and and and the thing will go on endlessly and until you really feel like pounding on the table and said well get real and choose but the reason why they can't choose is that they haven't got this sort of lift that comes from emotion it is emotion that allows you to Mark things as good bad or indifferent literally in the flesh and it is that kind of emotional uh impetus that they are lacking they cannot conjure up for a given situation an emotional state that would decide them in one direction or another and of course this is something that we all can relate to we're constantly being swayed in what we do by just a little teeny change uh something that comes for example from our past experience with a certain kind of situation but what we remember from the previous situation that is like that is not just the facts not just the outcome that may be good or bad we also remember whether or not what we felt was good or bad and this is something that people need to understand is that when you are making decisions any day of your life and of course the options you make are going to produce a good or a bad outcome or something in between you do you do not only remember what the factual result is but also what the emotional result is and that that tandem of uh fact and associated emotion is critical and of course most of what we construct as wisdom over time is actually a result of cultivating that knowledge about uh how our our emotions behaved and what we learn from them

Channel: FORA.tv

Views: 212,869

Keywords: neurology, science, research, psychology, reason, logic, gut, feelings, emotional, logical, empathy, biology, fact, critical, thinking, fora.tv, foratv, fora, tv

Id: 1wup_K2WN0I

Length: 3min 23sec (203 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 11 2009