Decisions: Blink, Think, or Sleep On It?

Somewhere in the deep recesses of your soul you must have imagined what your life would have been like – call it a temporary release from the life sentence of the mirror, an anti self – but for certain life decisions you’d made. Perhaps it was an early career choice. Maybe it was whether and whom to marry.

It is sometimes said that big decisions are emotionally made and intellectually justified. Ben Franklin, on the other hand, advised the best course of decision-making was to rely on explicit, conscious thinking i.e. divide a sheet of paper into two columns, writing over one “Pro” and the other “Con,” wait three days, put down hints, and after a day or two of no additional considerations decide accordingly (focus article (What Science Says About Decision Making). Spock surveying the universe.

The article, in support of what Franklin had labeled “prudential algebra,” makes the central argument: “There is no free lunch when it comes to tricky decisions; you have to do the thinking. The alternative, delegating decisions to the lower reaches of the iceberg and hoping that the unconscious will decide fate for us, is misguided.” The remainder of the article addresses and ultimately discounts evidence that some “ghost in the machine” is there to guide us.

How disappointing that is to hear, for someone having seized more and more on “gut instinct” to explain the past and honor going forward. Besides, how else do you explain the occasional blinding insights or the power of intuition, whether experienced personally or evident in others – say the vision of a snake biting its tail revealing the ring structure of benzene; or Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday” coming to him in a dream; or a thousand other examples we could come up with. Anecdotes, mere anecdotes, it is maintained.

The value in reading the article is to judge for yourself the evidence, reasoning, conclusions, and qualifications in discounting the power of the subconscious to somehow inform us – how else to explain, say, a past instance where a jumble of complicated concepts magically coalesced overnight just before a tough physics exam. Maybe it’s a matter of semantics as when Einstein noted “intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.”

While there are other helpful resources, such as Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink” and Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast Thinking Slow: How Your Brain Leads You Astray,” let us discuss and compare our own dance with the subconscious. Compare and contrast some of your data-based versus gut-based decisions to determine the more reliable arbiter.

After all, are we not essentially the product of our past decisions and the operation of fate? That sense of fatalism, however, might tend to undermine our sense of agency i.e. that we are the masters of our destiny. Maybe so, but you know what they say about the gods laughing when you tell them of your future plans.

Decision-making would seem to lie somewhere in the midst. So much for free will.