Read The Social Animal for Free Online Page B

happy right now I want to pick up this hand and start kissing it, but I’ve got these other memories of freaking people out when I do things like that.”)
    Even through much of this stage there is still no conscious awareness, argues Joseph LeDoux, another prominent researcher in these vineyards. The touch of the hand has been felt and refelt, sorted and resorted. The body has reacted, plans have been hatched, reactions prepared, and all this complex activity has happened under the surface of awareness and in the blink of an eye. And this process happens not only on a date, with the touch of a hand. It happens at the supermarket when you scan an array of cereal boxes. It happens at the jobs fair when you look over different career options. The Emotional Positioning System is coating each possibility with emotional value.
     
    Eventually, at the end of these complex feedbacks, a desire bursts into consciousness—a desire to choose that cereal or seek that job, or to squeeze the hand, to touch this person, to be with this person forever. The emotion emerges from the deep. It may not be a brilliant impulse; emotion sometimes leads us astray and sometimes leads us wisely. And it doesn’t control. It can be overridden, but it propels and guides. As LeDoux writes, “The brain states and bodily responses are the fundamental facts of an emotion, and the conscious feelings are the frills that have added icing to the emotional cake.”

Implications
    This understanding of decision making leads to some essential truths. Reason and emotion are not separate and opposed. Reason is nestled upon emotion and dependent upon it. Emotion assigns value to things, and reason can only make choices on the basis of those valuations. The human mind can be pragmatic because deep down it is romantic.
     
    Further, the mind or the self is no one thing. The mind is a blindingly complicated series of parallel processes. There is no captain sitting in a cockpit making decisions. There is no Cartesian theater—a spot where all the different processes and possibilities come together to get ranked and where actions get planned. Instead, as Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman put it, the brain looks like an ecosystem, a fantastically complex associative network of firings, patterns, reactions, and sensations all communicating with and responding to different parts of the brain and all competing for a piece of control over the organism.
    Finally, we are primarily wanderers, not decision makers. Over the past century, people have tended to conceive decision making as a point in time. You amass the facts and circumstances and evidence and then make a call. In fact, it is more accurate to say that we are pilgrims in a social landscape. We wander across an environment of people and possibilities. As we wander, the mind makes a near-infinite number of value judgments, which accumulate to form goals, ambitions, dreams, desires, and ways of doing things. The key to a well-lived life is to have trained the emotions to send the right signals and to be sensitive to their subtle calls.
     
    Rob and Julia were not the best-educated people on earth, nor the most profound. But they knew how to love. As they sat at the restaurant, focusing more and more attention on each other, their emotions were sending a rapid stream of guidance signals and shaping whole series of small decisions, and thereby gradually reorienting their lives. “All information processing is emotional,” notes Kenneth Dodge, “in that emotion is the energy that drives, organizes, amplifies and attenuates cognitive activity and in turn is the experience and expression of this activity.”
    Rob and Julia were assigning value to each other. They felt themselves swept along in some strong and delightful current that was carrying them toward someplace they deliriously wanted to go. This wasn’t the sort of dissecting analysis Julia’s inner smart-ass had used when she first glimpsed Rob. This was a powerful,