Wow, God. The mind is AMAZING!!!

So, I'm reading this book called How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer. It's SO fascinating. I should have been a psych major, seriously. The book talks about, well, how we decide! We make decisions based partly on our emotions and partly based on reason. Lehrer's point in his book is that we need both reason and emotion to make good decisions, and that without one of the other people make bad decisions all of the time. It has been proven that often times our feelings or intuition are what we must rely on to make the right choice. He gave this interesting example of a naval commander who had to make a quick decision in order to save an entire ship full of people. On the radar screen, the blip could have been a friendly plane or an enemy missile. He had a strong feeling that it was enemy fire, so he ordered it shot down, and in so doing saved hundreds of people. The reason that our intuition/strong feelings often help us make good decisions, according to Lehrer & the research that has been done is that our brains actually process a lot of data and translates that into a feeling, so in a way our feelings are often based on things that we know from experience or from the info that our brains collect without our conscious knowledge. Lehrer writes: "In this sense, every feeling is really a summary of data, a visceral response to all of the information that can't be accessed directly" (23). Anyways, I can't go off on all of the SUPER interesting stories and experiments and everything in the book. If you're like me and you find psychology interesting, you should read it. It's pretty simple to understand (= not too science-y. trust me, I haven't taken science since high school). But the more I read, the more I realize just how amazing the mind is, and the more that I realize how amazing God is! Wow, the brain is SO intricate and SO interconnected and SO much of what I read reminds me of things that are in the Bible. In one of the chapters that I read today it talked about how incredibly important love is to brain development. Not having love in the young formative years keeps children (or baby monkeys) from learning sympathy and empathy and so they really cannot connect with other people well (or monkeys). There were other things too, but I have a short term memory sometimes. Also, I'm being distracted by an episode of What Would You Do? that I'm watching right now. SO...yeah. read the book. It's small, and it's REALLY interesting.