The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: How Risk Taking Transforms Us, Body and Mind

by John Coates

What evidence is there that signals our brain receives from the body can help with our higher decisions? Recently there has been quite a bit of evidence. The signals flowing from the body to the brain act silently, hardly breaking the surface of consciousness, giving us a diffuse and barely perceptible sense of the body, but nonetheless act powerfully, influencing our every decision. Not only that, but without their guiding hand even the cold rationality of economic man cannot make any progress. Gut feelings are not only real; they are essential to rational choice. The necessity of gut feelings becomes all the more apparent when decisions have to be made quickly, when we are online and in the flow, as Martin was this morning when given a minute or two to price the DuPont trade and then half an hour or so to buy the bonds he sold. In situations like these he does not have the leisure to gather all relevant data, consider all possible options, probability-weight their outcomes and systematically work through a decision tree as an engineer might when given months, years even, to solve a problem.