Choosing is feeling—the cognitive neuroscience of decision making

Abstract

Why do we often know exactly what we should do, but end up doing something completely different? For example, how many times were you supposed to study an important article, but read the latest thrilling crime novel instead? How often did you miss a lecture when you were a student because you were too lazy to get out of bed? In other words, how many times did you make an unreasonable decision? In his book Emotion and Reason: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Decision Making, Alain Berthoz aims to answer these questions and to shed light on the neural underpinnings of the highly familiar, yet so puzzling, phenomenon of making decisions. In 295 pages, he gives a comprehensive and entertaining overview of the neuroscience of choice behaviour. The focus of the later chapters is preluded by the first section of the book, entitled ‘Is decision making rational or irrational?’. In this section, Berthoz gives a brief account of the current controversy of whether decision making is just about computing gains, losses, and probabilities, or whether it is more than that. Decision making is of course more than that as emotional, social, and other factors frequently bias a person's judgment to deviate from the path of rationality, hence the book's title.