In answering some personality questions, the contrast between head and heart popped up a couple of times.
To bolster this, I have been reading the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and in the first page of the book, I read “It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise, but admirably balanced mind. He was the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has ever seen.”
Perfect reasoning, we are told, must be absent emotions.
Usually I found myself siding with at least wanting to be more head, or reason, driven. But then the question came: if the head is so much better, why do we have the heart? And of course I’m using colloquial terms to define what most people think of as the distinction between rational or emotional decision making.
One site called head thinking analytical/cognitive; heart thinking it called emotional/affective. Another site called heart thinking ‘intuitive’ and head thinking ‘rational’. Thinkers v feelers is the way a third site put it.
A fourth site suggested that where you see yourself is the more important factor. People who see themselves as heart tend to see themselves as more interconnected, whereas people who see themselves as head see themselves as more independent.
I saw head thinking described as consequential thinking; playing through steps to see if you get to where you want. Heart thinking is more gut-based- something feels right, so you do it. But as one site said, sometimes what feels like ‘inner knowing’ might just be an emotional response coloring your judgment.
But of course things that often ‘feel right’ can actually turn out quite wrong.
One site thought we needed to ditch the distinction altogether and see them not as sides, or different ways of thinking, but as interconnected.
Resolving the Head vs. Heart Dilemma | Mindful Leadership with Jennifer Riggs
They mentioned an interesting case. A successful and intelligent businessman had a brain tumor removed near the amygdala, which they said is a “critical part of the limbic area of the brain, sometimes called the emotional brain for it’s critical role in handling our emotions.” After the surgery he changed dramatically. “He lost his emotional capacities and motivation, but also his ability to make decisions. Even mundane decisions became a long a difficult process. Although his reasoning and logic weren’t affected, his brain became unable to make even simple decisions with logical thoughts alone.”
The site that mentions this goes on to note feelings arise when we connect meaning to changes in the body and brain. The brain becomes aware of the body’s reactions to stimuli, then processes this awareness of physical sensations to make meaning from them using pre-existing neural maps, which result from prior experiences and meanings.
For example, they mentioned you might see a dog running towards you and sense a rapid heartbeat. Whether the emotion that rises is fear or excitement will depend on existing neural maps or concepts.
If you’ve had prior experience with a dog jumping at you and biting you, fear will be the emotion and will signal you to escape.
Essentially, the site says, the brain is constantly trying to predict outcomes to get us closer to the universal goal of achieving pleasure and avoiding pain. The brain uses the feeling process to help it predict possible outcomes. But you can’t just separate feelings from reason.
Psychology Today also wrote in an article that head thinkers can fall into what is called analysis paralysis, by trying to weigh too much evidence before making a decision.
Cognition Today wrote an article agreeing with the position that there aren’t really two separate categories.
The Heart vs. The Mind (scientific explanation) – A false dichotomy by the mind. – Cognition Today
Emotions and thoughts ( the word used here for the logic process) inform one another. It isn’t an either/or.
The heart carries connotations- implied meanings, associations. When we look at these connotations, we can have informed ideas about what we wish for, or wish to do.
The heart v mind metaphors represent these types of comparisons:
Illogic v logic
Emotion v logic
Feeling v thought
Simple v complicated
Unconscious v conscious
Instinct v purposeful
Inner voice v outer voice
It’s convenient for us to think in binary, but both these metaphors are created by the mind and are a false dichotomy. We make decisions with both rational and irrational thought. Heart-based thoughts could emerge from habits (automatic processing), experience (intuition), or emotional reactions before you’ve processed the thoughts. Emotions make you want to choose or avoid something and there is often no need to think when your heart says something based on your experience or emotional reactions. Even if you rationalize it, you may end up with cognitive dissonance. Likewise, if you have thought something through but your heart says you don’t like it, you may feel uncomfortable or keep doubting.
While the dichotomy may be false, it’s also inevitable. Understanding the connotations help you understand your own thoughts, so try and be precise with your ideas. Understand both heart and head are different perspectives to evaluate when making a decision.
Clearly, as the case of the gentleman with the section of brain removed due to the tumorectomy (I made that word up because I didn’t know what else to call it), having only reason with no emotion cripples the decision making process. So despite Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s remark that Holmes was the most perfect reasoning specimen ever known, because he eschewed emotions, that can’t be right.
If I’m going to try and process all of this, I get the usefulness of the head/heart dichotomy, but it doesn’t seem like it can be true that there are two separate processes for deliberation. They have to be connected and I like the idea that they are simply different perspectives we use. We have the facts in front of us, but we also have gut feeling and past experience that play a role. We must use both of all of that when confronted with choices.
I may look at the facts in front of me, but what I do about those is going to be informed by my past experiences that are similar in whatever way, and the combination of experience and the present facts will produce an intuition that influences my leaning.
If I’m going back to the original personality test statements, I feel like I can’t make a solid distinction about what influences me more.
Did you find your answers?
One thing that seems like it ought to be true: the older we are, the more our experiences will influence our decisions. This brings up an interesting conundrum. One of the examples of connotation that was mentioned in the article was; between a baby and 60 year old, which is heart and which is brain? Most of us would probably say the baby is heart and the 60 year-old is brain. But if I’m correct, then the 60 year-old’s 60 years of experience should give him/her a lot more intuition to pull from when making decisions, and therefore the decisions are likely more heart/intuition based, rather than fact based. But of course a 60 year-old has a lot more practice evaluating facts in a logical process too, so maybe I should throw that hypothesis out.