For most people, emotions are just there. We take them for granted. But where is ‘‘there’’? No doubt you can recall times when you reacted emotionally to a situation before you had time to con- sciously interpret or think about it. How did you do it? How do we process threatening information in milliseconds, below the radar of our awareness? Have neuroscientists located social and emotional intuition in the brain? Although human abilities do not reside in any one place, researchers have identified pathways that explain why feeling sometimes precedes thinking.
Some of the brain’s emotional pathways bypass the cortical areas involved in thinking. One such pathway runs from the eye via the thalamus, the brain’s sensory switchboard, to the amygdala, a pair of emotional control centers in the brain’s primitive core. This eye-to- amygdala shortcut, bypassing the cortex, enables your emotional re- sponse before your intellect intervenes.
The amygdala sends more neural projections up to the cortex than it receives. This makes it easier for our feelings to hijack our thinking than for our thinking to rule our feelings, note brain researchers Joseph LeDoux and Jorge Armony. After the cortex has further inter- preted a threat, the thinking brain takes over. In the forest, we jump
*Star Trek’s Data is the embodiment of cool, emotionless rationality. His brilliance and logic give him superhuman analytical intelligence. And yet he realizes that something is missing. He tries to write poetry, but without the passions of the heart it falls flat. Data’s intellectual curiosity leads him to wonder about fear, anger, and joy, but he cannot create such feelings. He is all cognition, no emotion. In the film A.I., Steven Spielberg created a different sort of robot, one programmed to give and receive love.
at the sound of rustling leaves, leaving the cortex to decide later whether the sound was made by a predator or just by the wind. Some of our emotional reactions apparently involve no deliberate thinking. The heart is not always subject to the mind.
The amygdala is a key part of our hard-wired alarm system, which was one aspect of the social intuition that enabled our ancestors instinctively to avoid predators and disasters and to know whom to trust. Another part, Damasio and his colleagues report, is an area of the frontal lobes lying just above our eyes. They studied six patients whose damage here spared their general intelligence but hampered the emotional memories that underlie effective intuition. They gave the patients, and ten normal individuals, a stash of phony money and four decks of cards, face down. The participants then turned 100 cards from the deck tops, hoping to find cards that brought cash rewards and to avoid cards that carried penalties. Two of the decks were ‘‘bad’’; the cards usually gave rewards of $100, but sometimes they told participants to hand over large sums, resulting in an overall loss. The other decks were ‘‘good’’; they carried rewards of only $50, but the penalty cards were less severe, resulting in an overall gain. Given this task—‘‘designed to resemble life,’’ with its uncertain risks and rewards—the unemotional patients showed minimal stress re- sponse when drawing the severe penalties, and they persevered longer in drawing from the bad decks. The normal individuals ex- hibited a more emotional response to the severe penalties and began to avoid the bad decks well before they could articulate their reason for
doing so. Thanks to their emotional memories, they had a hunch, a
gut-level intuition, that guided their choices. In many real-life situa- tions, from the poker table to the board room, conscious reasoning likewise arises as an afterthought to the intuitive knowledge rooted in emotional memories. Sometimes ‘‘an ounce of intuition trumps a pound of pondering.’’
Classical (‘‘Pavlovian’’) conditioning adds punch to the hunch. Af- ter Pavlov’s hungry dogs repeatedly heard a tone before receiving food, their bodies intuitively knew to begin salivating in anticipation of the food. When researcher Michael Domjan turned on a red light just before presenting male quail with an approachable female, the
males soon became sexually excited in response to the light, their body’s intuitive wisdom preparing them for the impending rendez- vous. Fears, too, get classically conditioned into our intuition. A year after being shot in the shoulder and ribs during the 1995 massacre of sixteen five-year-olds and their teacher in Dunblane, Scotland, Mat- thew Birnie still responded with terror to the sight of toy guns and the sound of balloons popping. The phenomenon has been brought to the laboratory in studies comparing abused with nonabused children. For abused children, an angry face on a computer screen produces brain waves that are dramatically stronger and longer lasting.
With conditioning, stimuli that are similar to naturally disgusting or appealing objects will, by association, evoke intuitive disgust or liking. Normally desirable foods, such as fudge, are unappealing when presented in a disgusting form, as when shaped to resemble dog feces. We perceive adults with childlike facial features (round face, large forehead, small chin, large eyes) as having childlike warmth, sub- missiveness, and naiveté. In both cases, people’s emotional reactions to one stimulus intuitively generalize to similar stimuli.
The bottom line: Thanks to our neural shortcuts, our storehouse of emotional memories, and our conditioned likes and dislikes, our bodies accumulate and express our adaptive intuitions.