Hi Tom, I'm pleased you picked up on this. I read it last week when my SciAm issue arrived in the mail. The sub-head for the article is: Of course, I see this confirmation bias and the results of this study as a subset of my larger assertion - that Behavior choice (decision-making) in humans is the result of a subconscious summation of somatic effects.

It is becoming increasingly evident that emotions provide the only real force that causes direction and choice of activities in all living things. In humans, emotions also cause us to conceptualize and think about things - and come to conclusions (behavior decisions). They are part of a closed loop, the purpose of which is to make us feel good.

Emotions cause thinking - and emotions are the result of thinking. Thinking (conceptualizing) is a peculiar adaptation - an external subroutine that sometimes produces more useful results than behavior decisions based on more pure emotion - sans intellect.

But, the only reality that living things can truly experience is through our emotions. Our most profound thoughts only have value according to the emotions they foster in terms of their percieved survival value. What we think about the world is just a crude caricature of that emotional reality. And yet, we are so certain that our thoughts and intellectual conclusions are the only reality worth knowing - that we go to war and kill each other in the name of those conclusions (Gods).

Thinking may be useful - we have evolved to depend on it and can not now exist without doing a lot of it. But, the very objectivity that makes it useful, separates us from what is real on the emotional level - and that allows us to make bad decisions and reach unrealistic, self-destructive concusions.

Margaret