Is There a Difference Between Cognitive and Emotional Decision Making?

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When we buy a house, I'm sure there's some emotional things to come into it and some rational things that come into it. How well do we understand that? Well, depends on what level you're looking at. If you're thinking somebody in a brain scanner, you could see that if they give them a decision to make about something totally like soulless and bloodless and cold or whatever,. You're just activating some not very exciting cortical regions. But the thing that is most like important about that is you can tell the decision someone is going to make by looking at the readout for their limbic emotional brain before you get a readout from the cortex. It's a

A common argument against free will is that human behavior is not freely chosen, but rather determined by a number of factors. So what are those factors, anyway? There’s no one better equipped to answer this question than Robert Sapolsky, a leading psychoneurobiologist who has studied human behavior from a variety of angles. In this conversation we follow the path Sapolsky sets out in his bestselling book Behave, where he examines the influences on our behavior from a variety of timescales, from the very short (signals from the amygdala) to the quite ancient (genetic factors tracing back tens of thousands of years and more). It’s a dizzying tour that helps us understand the complexity of human action.

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Robert Sapolsky received his Ph.D. in neuroendocrinology from Rockefeller University. He is currently the John and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor of Biology, Neurology, and Neurosurgery at Stanford University. His awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, the McGovern Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Wonderfest’s Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization.

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