Sunday, February 7, 2010

thinking vs feeling

by most modern scientific accounts (ignoring the possibilities of psychic experiences), both thinking and feeling are processes that occur in our brains.

in problem solving - thinking is possibly a bit more logical, going through things line by line, calculating whether the next step makes rational sense. feeling on the other hand bypasses all these formalities and goes right to the answer. much faster, and even possibly more accurate, accordingly to gladwell's "blink".

in relationships - well, thinking doesn't work most of the time. we think hard about how to maintain it, how to make our significant others happy. but, if we didn't feel in love in the first place we wouldn't be doing all this thinking.

is feeling simply a super fast way of thinking? heuristics we have acquired over our life experiences? what about cognitive bias traps that we are so well known to fall into?

or does the evident non-logical aspects of love already prove that the brain was never meant to operate under pure logic, and that intellectualizing things will only take us so far?