Imagine you wake up tomorrow, lying in bed.
Your family is around you, looking both relieved and concerned.
“What’s the matter?” you ask.
A doctor steps forward from somewhere.
“You’ve just come out of a coma,” he says, “and I have some bad news. You’ve suffered severe head trauma resulting in total paralysis.”
“No, come on,” you say with a chuckle. “I feel fine.”
You try to sit up to show everyone how fine you are. But nothing happens. Your body doesn’t respond. Still, you don’t feel any sense of panic.
“Ok,” you say, “so I can’t move right now. But I’m not paralyzed. I feel fine.”
Now imagine this goes on week after week. You cannot move. But you don’t get upset over it.
And when your family and doctors try to confront you with the fact that you’re paralyzed… you insist there is nothing wrong. Soon you even forget that you tried to move and couldn’t.
This might sound like a bizarre scene to paint. But the fact is, it’s something that does happen in real life.
It’s a condition known as anosognosia. It’s caused by just the right kind of brain damage. And it makes people who suffer from it unaware of their disease or disability — even paralysis or blindness.
I read about anosognosia in a book called Descartes’ Error, by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio.
Damasio’s book is all about the role of emotions in normal human functioning.Because anosognosia isn’t just about thinking you’re fine when you’re not.
This condition also comes with a strange emotional bluntness. You don’t get upset about the whole situation.
And while you can be forced to accept through logical means that something isn’t right — “just try to sit up — see?” — the realization that something is wrong soon disappears.
Because the same neural circuitry that gets damaged in anosognosia is also involved in experiencing normal emotions.
And as Damasio says:
“Somehow, what does not come naturally and automatically through the primacy of feeling cannot be maintained in the mind.”
That’s why a person with anosognosia can be forced to face the fact something is wrong with his body… but that awareness soon disappears.
So what’s my point?
Well, my own mental image of myself is as a very logical, unemotional person.
And when I first heard the advertising mantra that people make decisions based on emotions first, and only then justify them using logic, my own logical mind rebelled.
”Ok,” I would say, “so I made an impulsive decision once. But I’m not emotional. I make decisions based on logic.”
Maybe you are the same.
So let me tell you, the truth is out there.
Damasio’s book is full of stories of people who have their emotional processing damaged in some way. Their brain goes haywire in all kinds of weird ways.
It turns out having no emotions can even make it impossible to make any kind of a decision. And what we think of as being logical decisions were mostly made long before… by the emotional parts of our brains.
In other words, all those advertising and persuasion gurus are right. Emotions trump logic all the way. And there’s science to prove it. If you’re ever trying to persuade, that tells you where to focus your efforts.
But that doesn’t mean you only have basic emotions like fear and greed to appeal to. Surprise is also a good emotion to stimulate. If you tell people something new, odds are good they will be moved later to do what you ask them to do.
Speaking of which:
I write an email un-newsletter about marketing and persuasion. “Un-newsletter” because most of this knowledge has been around for decades or centuries. Still, it might be news to you. So if you’d like get those emails I send, here’s where to go.
