The first of Jonathan Haidt's four principles of moral psychology is "intuitive primacy but not dictatorship ... the idea that the mind is driven by constant flashes of affect in response to everything we see and hear.
Our brains, like other animal brains, are constantly trying to fine tune and speed up the central decision of all action: approach or avoid. You can't understand the river of fMRI studies on neuroeconomics and decision making without embracing this principle. We have affectively-valenced intuitive reactions to almost everything, particularly to morally relevant stimuli such as gossip or the evening news. Reasoning by its very nature is slow, playing out in seconds.
Studies of everyday reasoning show that we usually use reason to search for evidence to support our initial judgment, which was made in milliseconds. But ... sometimes we can use controlled processes such as reasoning to override our initial intuitions. I just think this happens rarely, maybe in one or two percent of the hundreds of judgments we make each week."
above from Jonathan Haidt's excellent online article: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt07/haidt07_index.html
An important aspect of Mindfulness training is progressively increasing the above dismally low percentage, in all situations, and thus behaving increasingly more consistently as mature fully-evolved human beings.
 |
| Photo: Rithwik Virunnukandi http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/your-shot/weekly-wrapper |
No comments:
Post a Comment