I’ve just started reading Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide. Here is my initial thought/interpretation of what he’s saying. I wonder how it will hold up as I keep reading…
Emotions can be seen as an evolutionary tagging system. Through experience, we begin to recognize and record patterns. These patterns are tagged with emotion. When we encounter a similar experiential pattern again, the emotion serves as the quick reference that allows us to act. It’s like shorthand for our brain. Or like an indexed database (to go back to the flawed analogy of our brains as computers).