PROMPT: Instincts

Do you trust your instincts?

With regards to some types of questions, I trust my instincts implicitly. This is NOT because I think I have infallible instincts or a gift, but rather because reasoning and conscious cognitive processes are often demonstrably and systematically wrong in some domains. For example, the science shows people who think they can detect lies by observing and employing their reasoning to what they observe are wrong far more often than people who go with their gut, sans analysis. There are many areas like this, where being overly cerebral offers bad outcomes.

Of course, there are cases like the Monty Hall problem, in which being more deeply analytic and reasoned yields a better outcome. And, so, the trick is to know when to go with your gut and when to systematically think things through.

The Emotional Beast [Free Verse]

We laud our rational side

- The Thinking Man -

But we're emotional beasts
to the core.

To use that old
[and disparately applied]
chestnut:

Of emotions, 
better master
than servant.

Poetry is a conduit
to emotional savvy.

That's part of the reason
Plato urged poetic restraint;

he found the emotional
inferior to the rational,
and thought most youngsters 
couldn't behave responsibly
in the face of poetry's 
emotional power.

It's also where Aristotle
found virtue in poetry,
its ability to induce 
catharsis.

Could they both 
be right?