Descartes era. In his 2011 bestseller, The Social Animal, New York Times columnist David Brooks writes,

we are living in the middle of a revolution in consciousness. Over the past few years, geneticists,

neuroscientists, psychologists, psychologists, and others have made great strides in understanding the building blocks of human flourishing.

And a core finding of their work is that we are not primarily products of our conscious thinking.

We are primarily the products of thinking that happens below the level of awareness.

Too much takes place in the mind for us to be fully aware of it.

Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia estimates that the human mind can absorb

11 million pieces of information at any given moment, but we can be conscious of only a tiny fraction of this. Most of what is going

on mentally lies below the threshold of awareness. One result of the new neuroscience is that we're

becoming aware of the hugely significant part played by emotion in decision-making. The French Enlightenment emphasized

the role of reason and regarded emotion as a distraction and a distortion. We now know scientifically

how wrong this is. Antonio DiMazio in his Descartes' era tells the story of a man who as a result of a tumor suffered

damage to the frontal lobes of his brain.

He had a high IQ, was well informed and had an excellent memory, but after surgery to remove

the tumor his life went into free fall.

He was unable to organize his time.

He made bad investments that cost him his

savings. He divorced his wife, married a second time, and rapidly divorced again. He could still

reason perfectly, but had lost the ability to feel emotion. As a result, he was unable to make

sensible choices.

Another man with a similar injury found it impossible to make decisions at all.

At the end of one session, DeMazio suggested two possible dates for their next meeting.

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