Algorithms, Heuristics, and You

Let’s begin with a short retrospective time travel.  Picture yourself as an early elementary school child, pencil in hand and paper before you. You are just learning to regroup in addition and subtraction—what then, respectively, were called carrying and borrowing.  At the time, no one labeled these as “algorithms,” but the lessons probably were your introduction to them.  You need not have known anything about rationales behind the processes; if you followed them faithfully, you invariably arrived at the “correct” answers and were happy to have done so.  However, in contrast to algorithms, you already had learned some fundamental heuristics long before you entered your first classroom.  And much of that learning was acquired independently and automatically.  For instance, you could have come to believe that grandparents were more likely to buy you a new toy than were mom and dad.  You, of course, were not aware of the term “heuristics,” and they did not always produce the intended effect, but they worked well enough for them to become established in your behavioral repertoire

One of those former elementary school children, Bob—now an adult—was my patient (whose identity I am disguising).  Highly educated and very cerebral, he frequently referred to how he strove to live life by algorithms.  By that, Bob meant that he prioritized following a series of invariant logical steps that he had fashioned to manage broad features of his lifestyle. Whenever his formulae achieved their desired effects, he made sure that I—and everyone around him—knew about it.   Most often those successes were professional ones.   By contrast, when his algorithms failed—often in interpersonal realms—Bob committed the “fundamental attribution error,” always finding time-limited external reasons for his shortcomings while believing that other people’s shortcomings were due to their permanent character flaws.   

In contrast to Bob, another patient, whom I will call Carol, spoke about her heuristic approach—one that she personally characterized as being dominated by “gut feelings” and intuitions.  She did not believe that she could trust any widely available information, feeling that it either would be purely manipulative or unsuited to her circumstances.

The first patient was reluctant to introspect about his feelings and the second, reluctant to entertain information generated outside herself.  Of course, both patients had come to see me because their customary life strategies failed to resolve major life challenges.  And, as expected, the first patient wanted me to help him construct or revise his algorithms and the second wanted me to help her tweak her heuristics.  The patients unwittingly entertained the anachronistic notion of a thoughts-feelings dichotomy.  The approaches offered each a simplified strategy to life consistent with their predispositions and preferences.

So, what does science propose that contradicts their outdated dichotomies?  The renowned neurologist Antonio Damasio offers both research and theory that unites thought and feeling.  He emphasizes body, feeling, emotion, and thought.  I must simplify his complex ideas in order to keep this blog brief.  We start with the body as our nexus. The body generates internal states consistent with health promotion and health threat. Feelings comprise our basic conscious or unconscious awareness of the promotions or threats.  And emotions are the “action programs” instigated by our body-inspired feelings.  You are in an unfamiliar setting, you hear a loud bang, your heart pounds, you feel scared, you scream and/or curse, and/or run. 

The course of events that follow hearing a loud bang in an unfamiliar setting is obvious.  But what about less dramatic everyday situations that might present to Bob, Carol, me, or you? The setting is a car showroom. A salesperson just finished his “final offers” narratives to Bob regarding two favorite automobiles under consideration.   Bob’s heart is unaffected.  He feels calm. The feeling enables him dispassionately to mentally [pm1] calculate the cars’ stats, comparing one car with another to decide which is the better value.  He buys a car.  Carol’s salesperson presents his narrative.  Her heart is pounding.  She feels anxious.  The feeling disrupts her thought processes.  She intuits from his facial expression that the salesperson is overcharging, declines the offers, and leaves the showroom.

If Bob’s salesperson had provided a false narrative, Bob might have deduced that by using his intuition about the salesperson, and refused to purchase.  If Carol’s salesperson had provided a correct narrative, Carol might have used what he presented to objectively evaluate the facts and purchase a proposed car.  In other words, on-line bodily states serve us well when their signals to us are aligned with external realities associated with the decisions that we need to make. And on-line bodily states serve us poorly when their signals to us are misaligned with external realities associated with the decisions that we need to make.  In concrete terms, we ideally make decisions that take into account both what our higher-level brain processes are signaling (called top-down), and our gut-level intuitions are signaling (bottom-up).  To categorically ignore either is to invite problems.  That means that whenever confronting a decision we first must tune in to our dominate on-line bodily state and then employ both our intuition and our rationality before acting.  Per the car-purchasing metaphor then, you get the best car at the best price if you enter the showroom in a calm bodily condition, monitor your body changes in response to the salesperson’s conduct, have in your possession objective information about the car you are considering, and integrate all those elements before reaching your decision.

Broadly speaking then, heuristics are our gut-level intuitions and algorithms are our methodical objective calculations. Neither Bob, Carol, you, nor I are can afford to live life and decide actions exclusively through either strategy.  The trick is for us to start with a body that is as composed as reasonable and strive to integrate our gut-level intuitions with our cerebral inductions and deductions. Body, feelings, and emotions always are present to some degree and always exerting their influences.  Let’s use all three adaptively.