The Two Different Ways We Navigate In The World

We are listening to two voices at once

New York City. Photo credit: Phil Mayes

Last week, I wrote about how language has allowed us to understand and control the world like no other species. I don’t want to imply that it has superseded our reflexes and emotions; language is just an add-on. Early humans were able to survive without it.

Emotions still greatly influence all our actions. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio studied people with damage to the amygdala that made them unable to feel emotions. Peculiarly, this also removed their ability to make decisions. Even their choice of what to eat was difficult—should it be the chicken or the turkey? With no emotional input, these people were unable to arrive at a decision.

The development of the neocortex gave us an alternative way to assess risks and understand the world, a way that sometimes contradicts our senses or our feelings. Most people believe that when the sun goes across the sky, it is actually because the earth is rotating, not because the sun is moving.

Having these two ways of interpreting the world — the modern neocortex and the ancient animal brain — sometimes makes choosing the best action extremely difficult. We are prone to make choices based on feelings more than reason, then come up with reasons that justify those feelings. There are many pairs of words for this dichotomy: thinking and feeling, heart and mind, body and soul, head and heart, mental and physical, system one and system two. The numerous ways of expressing this are an indicator of how much this divide preoccupies us.

Much of our distress as humans is because we are receiving contradictory messages about the world. It is like listening to two radio stations at once. The idea of an unconscious side has, of course, been described by Freud, Jung, Kahneman, and others, but phrasing it as two voices speaking different languages has great explanatory power for me.

This problem of different senses generating disparate information has arisen numerous times in evolution. It was a challenge every time a new sense developed. For instance, when vision arose, how did it relate to the sense of touch? Species have resolved this problem of merging disparate senses multiple times. When you see and hear John approaching you and feel him shaking your hand, your different senses all agree that this is John.

I see humans as a transitional species that has not yet integrated the new way of understanding the world through ideas with its sensory and emotional responses. From this follow a number of interesting ideas that I will explore in later posts.

May 24, 2025. A thought that didn’t occur to me while writing this piece is that Genesis could be an ancient story handed down through generations telling about the preverbal state (the Garden of Eden), and language (the fruit of the tree of knowledge).