What we feel while deciding

The Western tradition long opposed reason, which judges, to the passions, which lead astray. The Platonic image of the charioteer and his horses provided the diagram, and it still structures the way decision-making is talked about in business.

This opposition was contested as early as the eighteenth century. David Hume argued that reason establishes means without ever setting ends, and that it therefore cannot decide on its own what is to be wanted. The argument has gone without a convincing answer.

From the 1980s onwards, Antonio Damasio and colleagues studied patients with lesions in a precise region of the prefrontal cortex. The picture is consistent: intelligence preserved, memory intact, social knowledge preserved, and yet disastrous life decisions and an inability to choose between two equivalent options.

Damasio drew from this the somatic marker hypothesis: past experiences would leave traces in the form of associated bodily states, which reactivate at the moment of choosing and quickly eliminate part of the options. Without that signal, rational examination continues without ever concluding.

The interpretation has been disputed. A study published in 2004 shows, by questioning participants earlier and more finely during the gambling task used by that team, that they have explicit knowledge of the good options sooner than was thought. Choice would therefore not necessarily precede knowledge.

What the criticism does not contest is the clinical fact it started from: lesions that do not impair intelligence can wreck the conduct of a life. It is that fact, more than the mechanism proposed, that shifted the question.

Some people treat their feeling as information to examine: a persistent unease about a project indicates that something needs a closer look, without saying what. Others discard it on principle, on the grounds that a decision must be taken on criteria.

Neither position is more rational than the other. The first exposes one to confusing a signal with its supposed cause, the second to ignoring information that explicit reasoning has not yet formulated. The cost is real on both sides.

The most solid formulation research allows is not "trust your intuition", which means nothing, nor "decide coolly", which is not possible. It is rather: an affective signal indicates that there is something, never what.

Treating it as a clue to check, rather than as a verdict or as a parasite, is the only conduct the data make defensible. It simply requires accepting that checking takes time.