Feel first, think second: is our brain really cut out for the modern world? | Big Think

The brain is only the organ with which we think; we think. Its job is not to win Nobel prizes and to pass math tests. Its job is to get us to tomorrow. It's a survival machine, and it plays a lot of tricks with the facts in order to get us to tomorrow. That worked pretty well when the risks were lions and tigers and bears and the dark, oh, my. It's not as good now when we need to rationalize and reason and use the facts more with the complicated risks we face in a modern age. Climate change and genetically modified food and unsustainable living on the planet, that takes a lot more thinking. We'd better accept that and understand it so that we can apply that in order to avoid the pitfalls of our subjective way of perceiving the world.

It's quite a robust thinking system that we've got between our ears, but what's going to happen, and has been happening for several millennia now, is we're gonna develop more and better-thinking tools, and we're going to identify more weaknesses in our rationality. A weakness identified is at least something that can be avoided to some degree. We can learn workarounds. We can recognize that we're suckers for certain sorts of bad ideas and, alerted to that, we can flag them when they come up.

There's one way to be rational. There are many ways to be irrational. We could be irrational by getting confused, not taking actions, being myopic, vindictive, emotional, you name it. There's lots of ways to be wrong, and because of that, there's not one way to fix it, but one interesting way to try and inject some rationality is to think from an outsider's perspective. Here's what happens- When you think about your own life, you're trapped within your own perspective, you're trapped within your own emotions and feelings and so on, but if you give advice to somebody else, all of a sudden, you're not trapped within that emotional combination, mishmash complexity, and you can give advice that is more forward-looking and not so specific to the emotions. One idea is to basically ask people for advice. So if you're falling in love with some person, good advice is to go to your mother and say, "Mother, what do you think about the long-term compatibility of that person?" You're infatuated, right? When you're infatuated, you're not able to see things three months down the road. You're saying, "I'm infatuated. I'll stay infatuated forever, this will never go away." Your mother, being an outsider, is not infatuated, and she could probably look at things like long-term compatibility and so on.

We stick with a business plan or a career or a relationship long after it's become quite clear that it's not doing anything for us or that it's actively destructive or self-destructive. We have an irrational commitment to whatever we have been doing for a while, 'cause we don't like the idea of our past investment having gone to waste or because it's become part of our identity.

Our brain is hardwired, and the chemistry of the brain guarantees that we feel first and think second. That's initially when we encounter information, but in an ongoing basis between the facts and the feelings in our brain, the feelings carry more weight. They feel wonderful, but they might be wrong. Recognizing that they might be wrong, here's what you can do- Take more time. If the brain jumps to conclusions out of emotion first, just assume that your first decision might not be the most informed one. Don't leap to conclusions. Take more time, a half an hour, an hour, a day, two. Think about it, cogitate on it, get more information. Get more information, not just from sources who already tell you what you know and believe, because that's gonna reinforce what you know, which will feel great but may not add to your knowledge. Take more time and get more information, and that allows that information and the facts side of this dual system to play more of a role.

I'd like to introduce you to a particularly powerful paradigm for thinking, called Bayes' rule. Bayes' rule is provably the best way to think about evidence. Many people, certainl...