Mike: Piercing concentration and years of attention to detail and (significantly, attention to failure) inform some minds and lead to decisions long before any kind of rationality can ever begin to recognize what's going on. It is the recognition of those cues that triggers the dopamine that tells the mind: "Yes, go for it."
Yes, Mike puts it well. (Recall I mentioned _How We Decide_ in connection with musical performances.)
The issue of contention is the statement about purely rational decision-making (in daily life) being "refuted."
Here's an extract from Terry Gross's interview with the author of _How We Decide_, available on the NPR Web site.
_____Mr. LEHRER: Well, Plato had this great metaphor for the mind, which was that there's this rational charioteer, and it's his job to oversee these emotional horses who tend to run wild, and you know, this is - you know, reason's in the seat, reason's in the driver's seat, and we make the best decisions when we trust the rational charioteer.
I think most scientists would modify that metaphor a bit and say, well, it's not quite a, you know, rider with reigns on horses. It's more like a rider trying to control an elephant, and the elephant is the emotional brain and we have much less control over what we actually do than we think we do.
It's sort of the illusion of rationality, where we're great at rationalizing decisions, but we're not quite so rational. And so what I refer to an emotional brain, and what scientists tend to refer to as the emotional brain or limbic system, is the collection of brain areas scattered throughout the cortex -includes the amygdala, the insula, the nucleus accumbens, the ventral striatum - brain areas that tend to traffic in Dopamine, and they generate all sorts of subtle feeling that drive our behavior, even when we're not aware of them.
And I think one of the best examples of this comes from the work of a neurologist named Antonio Demasio, who in the early 1980s was studying patients who, because of a brain tumor, lost the ability to experience their emotions. So they didn't feel the everyday feelings of fear and pleasure. And you'd think, if you were Plato, that these people would be philosopher-kings, that they would be *perfectly* [emphasis mine -EY] rational creatures, they'd make the best set of decisions possible. And instead, what you find is that they are like me in the cereal aisle, that they're pathologically indecisive, that they would spend all day trying to figure out where to eat lunch.
They'd spend five hours choosing between a blue pen or a black pen or a red pen, that all these everyday decisions we take for granted, they couldn't make. And that's because they were missing these subtle, visceral signals that were telling them to just choose the black pen or to eat the tuna fish sandwich or whatever. And then when we're cut off from these emotional signals, the most basic decisions become all but impossible.
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