Emotions make the world go round

MUMBAI: Emotion split from Reason when the French philosopher Rene Descartes pronounced their incompatibility. Today, many people believe that the estranged partners stay separately in watertight compartments in the human ‘headquarters’.
Recent research has shown, however, that it’s impossible to separate emotionality from rationality in real life in the way one separates say, Mr Kramer from Ms Kramer, in a Hollywood divorce suit.
Eminent neurologist and writer Antonio Damasio has been articulating that view in books such as Descartes’ Error, Feeling Of What Happens , and Looking for Spinoza .
According to Dr Damasio, emotions play a pivotal part in the making (and unmaking) of rational decisions. Using striking case histories, he has shown how rational choice seems to become impossible or meaningless when circuits that lend different degrees of emotional colour to the various options are damaged by disease or accident.
Fresh support for Dr Damasio’s work comes from recent research in an emerging discipline called neuro-economics.
It says that contrary to what economic theory claims, people are not bloodlessly efficient nerds working tirelessly in their own rational self-interest. Nor do they make financial decisions based only on shining reason which leaves emotion alone, roiling and fuming in the basement of the mind.
More important, say scientists, when it comes to making financial decisions, flesh-and-blood folks are regularly influenced by ‘irrational’ hunches and nonverbal gut feelings.
They also “cooperate with total strangers, gamble away the family paycheck and squander their savings on investments touted by known liars’’, reports Sandra Blakeslee in The New York Times. “Such human frailties may seem far too complicated and unpredictable to fold into economic equations.
But now many neuroscientists are beginning to argue that it is time to create a new field of study..They are busy scanning the brains of people as they make economic decisions, barter, compete, cooperate, defect, punish, engage in auctions, gamble and calculate their next economic moves.
Based on their understanding of how fluctuations in neurons and brain chemicals drive those behaviours, the neuroscientists are expressing their findings in differential equations and other mathematical language beloved by economists.’’
Using results from brain scans, for instance, researchers at Princeton have reported in last week’s Science that people regularly act against their own financial self-interest if the emotional part of the brain overcomes the rational part. This was revealed in the course of a relatively simple game called the Ultimate Game.
Each participant gets to play one round with another person. So, it’s just a oneshot interaction aimed at dividing up ten dollars, the researchers told Reuters Health. One player proposes how to divide the money. The other has to make the decision to accept the offer or reject it.
Says Dr Alan Sanfey, lead author of the Princeton study, “The quirk of the game is that it’s never in your self-interest to reject an offer. That’s because nobody gets anything if the offer is rejected.’’
However, studies have shown that when the offer is not even—or fair— people will reject it and forgo the money altogether. Indeed, the researchers found that when people are annoyed at unfair offers, they will forgo financial gain just to spite other players. And an emotion-linked part of the brain appears to be quite active when they make these bad money decisions.
“About half the time they reject the offer.Whether it’s wounded pride or the wish to punish the other player for trying to take advantage of the situation, we don’t know,’’ Dr Sanfey explains.
To discover how the brain was coming to the decision to reject, the researchers used MRI scans to see what parts of the brain players were using when making decisions.
When the offer was rejected, the brain cells working hardest were in a region called the anterior insula. And when the offers were accepted, a region called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was more active.