What is the difference between thoughts and feelings?
Emotions or
feelings are often distinguished from thoughts. Emotions are typically
considered the irrational or animal part of humans, whereas thoughts are
the rational. Strong feelings such as anger, joy, fear, and sadness
result in behaviors that do not seem to always serve one's interest.
Thoughts are the words in the head that give mental content to hopes,
dreams, and desires and allow for reasoning and weighing of options so
that an assessment of consequences can be made before actions are taken.
Scientists now
know through the use of experiments and clinical observation that
thoughts, feelings, and perceptions coexist as a unified whole and cannot
be easily teased apart. Thus, every thought is given a positive or
negative emotional valence that allows us to prioritize our actions on
those thoughts. Evidence in support of that comes from the fields of
neurology and the computer sciences. Neurologic studies show that people
who suffered brain damage that cuts thoughts off from feelings are unable
to prioritize a list of preferences and act on them in order to achieve
even the simplest of goals. Even simple tasks, such as choosing a
restaurant, become impossible because of entrapment in a never-ending
cost-benefit analysis of numerous and conflicting options. Similarly,
computer programmers have struggled to develop simple algorithms that can
generate decisions, appropriately weighing all of the costs and benefits
without becoming literally buried underneath an infinite loop of ones and
zeros. Emotions are therefore a necessary piece that works with thoughts
in decision making and hence planning of future goals.
