I encountered a radical idea in Robert Wrights’s Why Buddhism is True. Our last big phase of evolution happened during the hunter-gatherer phase and we haven’t yet evolved to adapt to the modern world (this is not the radical idea). I encountered this fact for the first time in Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, where he claims that humans have been hunter-gatherers for a far longer time than we have been farmers and non-nomads. One of the corollaries of this fact is that we use Feelings, which are far older players in the evolutionary game than reason, to make decisions (yes, this is the critical fact). When we’re deciding something consciously or unconsciously, there is a competition going on in the brain without “our” knowing and the victor is the one who the brain evaluates to be associated to the stronger Feeling. Think of Feelings as weights associated with decisions and actions. Every time the brain has to make a decision it picks the one which is more weight. These weights are of course non-static and are a function of the current state of the brain.

For example, eating a bar of chocolate is more pleasant than exercising and so its default weight is larger. But using Reason we can reevaluate the Feeling of exercising as being more pleasant (and hence has more weight) as it leads to better physical health, lets you get out in the world, improves your social standing, and even saves money. There is a weighing of “pleasantness” going on, which involves Reason and memory and past experiences and the emotions attached to them and other things that cannot be expressed in words. Your brain accesses the memory to find the articles and podcasts about the benefits of exercising and the feelings of guilt and shame that are socially associated with overindulgence which further tips the scale in the favor of exercising. Or you could be in a state of mind where the access to memory is weak and the capacity for Reason is not too strong, perhaps because you’re too tired or too emotional, and then the scales tip in the other direction. Kids, who have not yet read those articles on WebMD and either do not have the negative experiences associated with eating sugar or have not yet developed the capacity to analyze memories and experiences properly, are much more likely to succumb to it.

We have evolved to be completely unaware of this decision-making process and instead, we use the conscious mind to create a story around our decisions. We exercise because it is has a stronger Feeling attached to it, as calculated by our brains, but we tell ourselves (and others) that we exercise because it is good for us. But in reality, the explanation comes AFTER the decision has been made. I encountered a similar idea in Kahnemann’s book, though there he does not attribute the decision-making to Feelings but just to some subconscious biases. I think both Wright and Kahnemann are talking about the same thing.

This also explains addiction. If you do something once, like smoke and you get a good Feeling and nothing bad happens, your brain increases the weight associated with smoking. Then when you try to quit and there is a physical reaction to the craving the brain decreases the weight associated with not smoking. One meditation-inspired technique, called RAIN (recognition, acceptance, investigation, non-attachment), to quit an addiction is to see the rise of the craving, wait for it to pass, and realize that nothing bad happens by not succumbing to it. This gradually reduces the weight associated with the craving and eventually leads to freedom from the addiction.

Another very concrete example of this comes from math. I do not know a single mathematician who does not find math pleasant. People who find math unpleasant are invariable bad at it. One can almost think of math as addiction - the more you do it the better you get at it the more pleasant it becomes and the easier it is to do the next time. And interesting being math-anxiety can also be thought of as an addiction. The key to becoming good at math might then be to figure out ways to make math more pleasant and make sure that it’s weighted higher than math-anxiety so that when your brain has to make a decision between doing math and being anxious about math it chooses the former.

Of course, I do not know how much of this is true. But it does explain the emphasis in Stoic and Buddhism philosophies on the non-attachment to Emotions and Feelings. One positive side-effect of meditation is that your brain gets better at playing the weighing game. For example, when you meditate on say, Anxiety, and “watch it from a distance” your brain learns that the effect of Anxiety is not as bad as it imagined it to be and consequently it reduces the weight associated with it. So that the next time it has to make a choice between Feeling anxious and thinking something more productive, it is more likely to pick the other option. Anxiety is never going to go away because Feelings are hard-coded in our brains and are bound to get activated every once in a while, but the weights associated with Anxiety can be reduced.