Meet the Tragic Poster Boy for the Emotional Brain

While Enlightenment-era thinkers like Denis Diderot, Benjamin Franklin, René Descartes, David Hume, and Thomas Jefferson — giants from the age of reason — would like you to believe otherwise, we are not as rational as we think we are.

Recent books like Irrational Exuberance, Emotional Intelligence, and Descartes’ Error teach us that even the most analytical among us make decisions with emotions.

They can disparage the emotions as much as they want, but the fact remains that without emotions we can’t make a decision in the first place.

And strangely enough, the one incident that seemed to break the influence that the …read more