Emotion as an Accelerator for Logic

We often view logic as the gold standard for cognition. Especially amongst engineers, logic seems so… clean… so… perfect.

Yet the human mind is inextricably linked with emotion. Neural networks are modulated by emotions – chemically on a whole brain level and electrically by coupled neural networks through synapses. We are not logical creatures. Emotion helps to accelerate processes such as decision making by quickly assigning value (Don Norman in Design of Everyday Things). I suggest emotion is the link between neural networks that allows us to synthesize parallel processes in the brain and converge on output decisions quickly and efficiently (low power consumption).

We need to recognize that emotions are intractable from logic in the human mind and instead use emotion to our advantage.