Is There a Part of the Brain Where Emotions Make Decisions?

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There's a part of the brain where emotion and decision making come together. Some people who have a lesion in this area can no longer draw on their emotions to make decisions. If you are a strong believer in the idea that emotions cloud our thinking, we can do laser surgery to triangulate different laser beams to create a lesion there. So you will no longer be troubled by emotions where you make decisions. And my challenge is to any of the judgment decision researchers who worry about emotions clapping our decisions, would you have the surgery done? I have yet to find the backer.

My guest today is celebrated research psychologist Gary Klein who has spent nearly 50 years studying how and why people make the decisions they do.

We discuss naturalistic decision making, the crucial difference between experience and expertise, why some people stagnate and others progress, Cognitive Flexibility Theory, the role of storytelling, surprising ways to gain insights, fixation errors, cognitive biases, mental models, accelerated learning, and so much more.

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