ABSTRACT
Picasso said, “If you know exactly what you are going to do, what is the good in doing it?” How many times have you thought of doing something and you did something else? How many times have you planned, for example, to go to a Web site and you have seen a Web site quite different? How many times were you talking about shopping on Sunday and instead preferred having a coffee with friends? These questions and others may be asked in addressing the relationship between reason and decision, questions that take us back to our everyday moments involving more or less important decisions. Are our decisions rational or irrational? This is a question whose answer seems obvious to anyone who thinks that decision and reason go together, who believes that affect (feeling) cannot have an effect on the rational. However, recent works in cognitive neuroscience and cognitive psychology on decision making tend to give counterintuitive answers. In his book, Emotion and Reason: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Decision Making, Berthoz (2006) shed light on the neural bases of the decisional processes and choice-related behaviors. In the first section of this book, rightly titled “Is Decision-Making Rational or Irrational?” Berthoz reports the current controversy on the account of the decision-making process as a probabilistic accounting of gains and losses. It thus appears that emotion and motivation interfere in the rational decision-making process, yielding a personal and subjective decision process (instead of logical rules) that endows it with a more adapted enactive characteristic to the social and personal needs. But, how is this possible? Would this diminish the value of the decision and reduce its cognitive and adaptive roles for the individual?
