How We Decide: Spectrum Theory

I've decided that my next blog project will be to go back and reread the book assigned to me as an incoming freshman at Stonehill, How We Decide. I immediately fell in love with the book because of the incredibly interesting investigation between reason and emotion, and how they fuel our decision-making processes. So, in similar fashion to what I did with This I Believe, I'll talk about cool stuff from How We Decide. What I'm most excited for in rereading the book is to go back and see what annotations I made. It'll be my own version of thinking about thinking, and seeing if I knew anything more now than I did two years ago.

One thing I do now that I didn't at the time is create names for things that lack nomenclature. In the first chapter, Jonah Lehrer (the author) talks about the historical ignorance of emotion when regarding decisions. Everyone thought that reason was the way to go, and that emotion should be cast aside. Well, they were horribly wrong. Emotion helps us a lot more than we think (pun possibly intended), and "reason without emotion is impotent." A big metaphor in the reason/emotion debate is the charioteer and his horses. The charioteer would be reason, steering the horses in the right direction. However, there would be one horse that was considerably weaker than the other - emotion - and it was the job of the charioteer to put the horse in its place. (This is where I personally believe the idiom "hold your horses" comes from, as opposed to many other alternatives.) But for the human mind to work most effectively, there needs to be a relationship between charioteer and horse - there can't be a winner, and that's what drives my theory.

Spectrum Theory. Almost everyone has heard about the nature/nurture debate in regards to developmental psychology. Nature and genetics, one argument says, creates who we are. It is simply in our genetic code to have a language, and to be able to walk. Nurture, on the other hand, is much more environmental - what language is spoken to us is the one we learn best. When conversations like this happen, the tendency is that a middle ground wins out - we have the capacity to learn language (nature), but how that language is acquired is more dependent on our surroundings (nurture).

Spectrum Theory, then, is simply a solution to these types of problems - nature/nurture and reason/emotion to name two. It really is that simple - any debate that has strong arguments supporting each side never seems to end, and that's because each school of thought requires the other to survive. When you open your mind to the whole spectrum as opposed to one extreme, you allow yourself to see the entire picture. In the case of How We Decide, doing so will help you to think much more effectively, which is something I hope to be able to do by the end of my second reading of the book.