Which is better? Rational or Emotional

Humans have two systems of thinking - The Rational brain and the Emotional brain.
In the last post, the features of both the brains were explained. Intuitive / Emotional brain is responsible for decisions that need to be made fast and instinctively for our survival. Ration brain analyses all the data that is available and logically concludes to arrive at a decision. While the intuitive brain aims at immediacy and sufficiency, rational brain looks for optimization, reasoning and explanations.

Given that, which is better? Should we act intuitively trusting our impressions and gut feeling or should we analyze the situation and act rationally? Is it better to act rationally or is it better to act intuitively? If we act rationally, does it mean that we are devoid of emotions? And if we act intuitively does it mean we give up reason?

The answer is we need both Rational and Intuitive brain and apply both to our decision making. Even we apply rationality, our emotional brain still provides its inputs in the form of tacit knowledge, pattern recognition, past experiences. There is no 100% rational decision. There can be 100% intuitive decision where we can purely based on instinct or our emotions. This is because we need to apply our fore brain for emotional control. In situations that threaten our survival, we do not think rationally but act emotionally out of pure instinct to avoid the threat. Why? Because, we evolved from animals, our natural urge is survival. While the intuitive brain has existed for millions of years, our rational brain has evolved only over a few hundred thousand years.

Intuitive brain makes rapid decisions for sufficiency using heuristics such as recognition heuristics and Tacit Knowledge. Though effective in several ways it has the disadvantages of Sensory illusion, Rational anomalies and Cognitive biases. (More on these in future posts)

While our instincts are often accurate, acting without a rational thought is not always wise. The reason for this is our current way of life. In a civilized world, there is no immediate threat to survival. The perceived threats to survival, except for a few life threatening situations are not a threat to our life. They do not warrant the same reaction as a life threat that triggers a fight or flight mode.

We will not lose our life during an argument with people who we come across, a difficult situation that we encounter, a conflict that needs to be resolved. Several of the other emotions that arise in our intuitive brain and cause extreme distress such as fear of things, losing our savings, losing love, anxiety about the future, past events that can no longer be controlled, lost love, grief, an abuse that was encountered in the past, a traumatic event or experience are extremely painful and can lead to serious difficulties. What we need to remember is they are not life threatening if we do not let them to control us. This is where we need our Rational brain to control the emotions of the intuitive brain, indicate that they do no threaten our life, we can survive without any of these and thrive in the future. We are here, now and the past or future do not control the present. We can think things through logically, we have all the time in the world to work out things, apply reason and take decisions.

Thus both Intuitive and Rational brain are necessary for our survival. When we look at the basic activity of our life, which is decision making, we need both rational and intuitive brain. However, we need to be aware of the limitations of our intuitive brain and let our Rational brain be more assertive and control the emotions of Intuitive brain.