Our Emotional Brain.

We think of ourselves as mostly rational beings, separated from the animals based on our ability to reason, to control emotion. It's a subject Jonah Lehrer (if you're not reading his blog, you're missing out big time) tackles in his new book, "How We Decide."

It's an image with roots throughout history, starting with Plato's description of humans as the rational Charioteers of our emotional horses. It continued throughout most of Western culture, from the Cult of Reason to the inception of our country with Jefferson's "governed by reason and reason alone." This is probably because people simply don't like thinking themselves to be something other than rational decision makers, nor do they want to feel duped by irrational emotions. We tend to think of emotional decisions negatively.

But that bicameral description isn't fully accurate. While obviously our rationality can overcome some of our emotional urges, we've also found that we can't really have the rational bits without the emotional either.

In studies of people with damage to the part of the brain involved with emotional processing in regards to decision-making, they actually tend to no longer be able to make decisions because of over-rationality. They obsess over the mundane details of life, from what color of pen to use to what restaurant to choose. After countless hours of weighing options, they've lost the emotions that allow them to use their rationality.

Or think of it this way. Our emotional instincts have been instilled in us over billions of years. Birds, fish, worms, etc. operate on emotional instincts solely. These parts of our brain are much more refined. It's the rationality that's new. Or as JL says:

“These new talents were incredibly useful. But they were also incredibly new. As a result, the parts of the human brain that make them possible - the ones that the driver of the chariot controls - suffer from the same problem that afflicts any new technology: the have lots of design flaws and software bugs. (The human brain is like a computing operating system that was rushed to market.) This is why a cheap calculator can do arithmetic better than a professional mathematician, why a mainframe computer can beat a grand master at chess, and why we so often confuse causation and correlation. When it comes to the new parts of the brain, evolution just hasn’t had the time to work out the kinks.

The emotional brain, however, has been exquisitely refined by evolution over the last several hundred million years.”

This reminds me of Feldwick's missive, "Exploding the message myth." Too much of our advertising is focused on selling rational benefits without catering enough to the emotional underpinning. He describes how a couple funny chimps kept a tea the undisputed category leader for decades. Or consider the explosion of Cadbury's Gorilla, or the goodwill created by Zappos on twitter. These companies are shedding emotional bread crumbs for the audience to use in forming opinions about the brand. It's not about the hard sell, but giving the consumer a greater volume of meaningful short cuts to use in decision making. Short cuts that make you a more viable option, mostly through trust and context, not necessarily price.

So what do we do with this? It means doing more cool stuff. Increasing small, expressive interactions and worrying less about the mass and meaningless. Don't do things that make you look like another cog in the corporate machine, do things that make you a valued member of a society. More reciprocal relationships and less trying to sell shit. In short, our new mission is to simply "be awesome" in every thing we do.

As Marty Neumeier described, "A brand is a person's gut feeling about a product, service or organization."

And our "gut" has everything to do with combining the emotional and the rational. One can't exist without the other.

(photo from kevindooley)