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into any conscious message. But the choice to fall in love would just sort of well up inside of them. It didn’t feel like they had made a choice, but that a choice had made them. A desire for the other had formed. It would take each of them awhile to realize that a ferocious commitment to the other had already been made. The heart, Blaise Pascal observed, has reasons the head knows not of.
    But this is how deciding works. This is how knowing what we want happens—not only when it comes to marriage but in many of the other important parts of life. Deciding whom to love is not a strange alien form of decision making, a romantic interlude in the midst of normal life. Instead, decisions about whom to love are more intense versions of the sorts of decisions we make throughout the course of life, from what food to order to what career to pursue. Decision making is an inherently emotional business.

Love’s Role
    Revolutions in our understanding of ourselves begin in the oddest ways. One of the breakthroughs that helped us understand the interplay between emotion and decision making began with a man named Elliot, whose story has become one of the most famous in the world of brain research. Elliot had suffered damage to the frontal lobes of his brain as the result of a tumor. Elliot was intelligent, well informed, and diplomatic. He possessed an attractively wry view of the world. But, after surgery, Elliot began to have trouble managing his day. Whenever he tried to accomplish something, he’d ignore the most important parts of the task and get sidetracked by trivial distractions. At work he’d set out to file some reports, but then would just sit down and start reading them. He’d spend an entire day trying to decide on a filing system. He’d spend hours deciding where to have lunch, and still couldn’t settle on a place. He made foolish investments that cost him his life savings. He divorced his wife, married a woman his family disapproved of, and quickly divorced again. In short, he was incapable of making sensible choices.
    Elliot went to see a scientist named Antonio Damasio, who evaluated him with a battery of tests. They showed that Elliot had a superior IQ. He had an excellent memory for numbers and geometric designs and was proficient at making estimates based upon incomplete information. But in the many hours of conversation Damasio had with Elliot, he noticed that the man never showed any emotion. He could recount the tragedy that had befallen his life without the slightest tinge of sadness.
    Damasio showed Elliot gory and traumatic images from earthquakes, fires, accidents, and floods. Elliot understood how he was supposed to respond emotionally to these images. He just didn’t actually feel anything. Damasio began to investigate whether Elliot’s reduced emotions played a role in his decision-making failures.
    A series of further tests showed that Elliot understood how to imagine different options when making a decision. He was able to understand conflicts between two moral imperatives. In short, he could prepare himself to make a choice between a complex range of possibilities.
     
    What Elliot couldn’t do was actually make the choice. He was incapable of assigning value to different options. As Damasio put it, “His decision-making landscape [was] hopelessly flat.”
     
    Another of Damasio’s research subjects illustrated the same phenomenon in stark form. This middle-aged man, who had also lost his emotional functions through a brain injury, was finishing an interview session in Damasio’s office, and Damasio suggested two alternative dates for their next meeting. The man pulled out his datebook and began listing the pros and cons of each option. For the better part of half an hour, he went on and on, listing possible conflicts, potential weather conditions on the two days in question, the proximity of other appointments. “It took enormous discipline to listen to all this without pounding the table