Want to Think Logically? Trust Your Emotions

The author seems to be stretching quite far to reach her conclusion, which seems to be to be that intuition is just another aspect of emotional response. The difficulty I have had in trying to explain this intuition is that there is a feeling of confusion attached, which superficially seems like it just goes to prove her point.

I don't think it does, though, and hopefully I can argue my way through this without stepping on any traps.

The argument of the author seems to rest largely upon the function of the amygdala. Because it lights up when exposed to stimuli where the recipient has a memory of that stimuli associated with some undesirable outcome, her assertion seems to be that amygdala must be the basis behind our reaction to all things our memory has build intuitive associations of outcomes around. I think this is a conclusion we can't yet draw. Because these research subjects are able to isolate important photos in a series based upon some intuition of a prior exposure, this doesn't mean I will always build an intuitive order of things based upon my own prior recollections about my emotional state of mind. As Mz points out as well, it makes a tremendous assumption about memory.

This almost reads like she wants this to be true. If this is the case, she is not the only one. I've had a number of discussions about this with other people who seem emotionally reactive toward things, who have expressed a desire for similar findings, because then they can declare that the emotional snap judgments they had which resulted in very bad outcomes were as good as they could've possibly done. Based on anecdotes from people in my life, this seems wrong; hence, my intuitive sense that this author's conclusions are faulty doesn't seem entirely out of line. Both intuition and experience are feeling confused.

The flawed assumption is you can know what will be important ahead of time.

In this case, they are drawing on the fact that emotion is a type of memory. It has it's good points and bad points. Strongly emotional people are more able to make snap judgments. But those snap judgments may be biased by negative experiences. In some cases, those previous negative experiences are a good predictor (ie a good basis for judging X to be a bad thing). In other cases, they are essentially a personal stumbling block.

It often seems to me that emotional evaluation frequently amounts to shallow, parallel processing. For example "feelings" based on previous experience which you can't necessarily immediately deeply analyse and explain, but typically encompasses an enormously broad set of circumstances you've experienced in the past. When we hear a line like "I'll create a gui in visual basic, see if I can track an IP address" we don't immediately have an impartial, rational response as to why that doesn't make any sense, the shallow emotional response kicks in first and you roll your eyes and groan.

If you then needed to explain in detail and in a logical way why that response was provoked, you can, but it's not what's at the immediate cognitive surface of the response. Take a far more complex example that just leaves you feeling kinda vaguely uneasy at first glance (spacetime is quantized) and I think that better illustrates what I'm getting at.

Rational, logical evaluation on the other hand is a deep, focused analysis which can't quickly account for every little thing you've ever experienced, and often initially leaves you with the nagging feeling that "you're missing some little thing".

The constant attempt to link intuition to emotion is probably based around the fact that people don't have deep objective reality based models of the universe as a general rule, so it's very difficult for them to be able to imagine the kind of person who does.

On the other hand, it's not that hard to understand that there are intuitive patterns to human emotion, even amongst those that have trouble grasping those intuitive patterns, thus the two become linked in the minds of the majority.