choice

I was listening to Radiolab which is a radio show that covers different topics, and the topic I was listening to was about choice, and one section was called "over come with emotion," in which they discussed the role of instinct and analysis in decision making. While it seems like if one could use only the analytical left side of the brain and silence the emotional right side, one would always make the best decisions, based entirely in logic. However, this is not the case. Antoine Bechara, a psych professor at USC (http://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/faculty-and-staff/faculty.cfm?pid=1008327&CFID=15113231&CFTOKEN=82848612), tells the story of a man who has a tumor removed from his brain and become entirely too rational. After the removal of the tumor, he seems to be doing fine, but something strange starts happening. In his work as an accountant, he finds himself stuck making very simple decisions. He remains at his desk debating about wether to use a blue or black pen for over an hour. It is simple decisions like that that he becomes stuck on, his brain going crazy thinking of every logical reason to choose one way or another. He could not make a descion because he would analyze it way too much. It would seem the tumor removal affected an emotional part of the brain, something that would allow to make impulsive or instinctual choices. With this damage done, he was left only with the analytical, logical part of his brain with which to make a decision, which became impossible because it would over focus over every aspect of everything. Eventually this man could no longer work, lost his job, his wife left him and he went bankrupt. The professor suggests that although it would seem that putting your emotional side away would allow you to make only intelligent, informed choices, the emotional side is needed to prioritize the different decisions that must be made and to make snap judgement calls so unimportant things like pen color dont need to be debated over endlessly.
It is fascinating how you would think that a lack of emotions would make you more intelligent, and focused on the truth and logic and rationality, but you do in fact need the right side of your brain so that analytical thinking doesn't just zero in on useless things. It would seem that one needs their emotional side to guide and direct their intelligence in the best way. This kind of explains "nerds", people who are super smart, but know way too much about one thing. It's like they've used their intelligence to just overfocus on one really specific thing, which they know everyhting about, but that thing often seems irrelevant or uninteresting to pretty much everyone else.