“What am I going to do for dinner tonight? Can I trust this collaborator? ”. Our decision-making, whether personal or professional, banal or particular, is at Center of our lives ! We must constantly select an action among various alternatives. So how do you do the good choices ?

The heavy past of Descartes' theories in his Method speech (1637), still weighs heavily on our beliefs. Who hasn't already heard the saying that you have to stay rational, logical to make good decisions? But how do we decide? What does cognitive science tell us about this?

Numerous studies have shown that Emotions are essential in the decision-making process (1)! Emotions and “our rational part” turn out to be two inseparable processes when we want to make the right choices.

Why? Recent discoveries reveal that several regions in our brain are involved in decision-making mechanisms and not just one (that of our famous “rationality”). These regions are both so-called cortical structures such as our frontal cortex - at the front of our brain - our control tower, involved in planning or organizing our actions. But also in so-called non-cortical regions - which are deeper and inside our brain - such as the basal ganglia, the amygdala or the hippocampus involved in the processing of emotions and memory (2, 3).

According to Antonio Damasio, author of Descartes' error, emotions have a role Of label On the quality of our choices, or even defined in cognitive psychology as emotional valence. When our emotions are associated with a pleasant or unpleasant feeling for example. In other words, when we make decisions, we will: search our memory for the knowledge related to this labeling emotional (pleasant or unpleasant). And it is this emotional label that will allow us to make our choice. In other words, if the label is unpleasant, then we will avoid as much as possible to make the choice associated with it. And vice versa, if the label is pleasant so we will prefer to repeat this choice.

We are therefore far from making decisions that are only “logical” or “rational”. So our decision-making is the The result of a very complex mixture issues -among others- from our way of reasoning or even our past experiences. This research therefore shows us that to have access to our emotions and learn to understand them turns out to be fundamental and a valuable asset when we make decisions.

So let's use these reading keys and methods from cognitive science to have a finer analysis Of our sensations, of our emotional feelings, thus guaranteeing top choices and Fewer false paths !

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