Cognition provides understanding

Cognition provides understanding: emotion provides value judgments. A human without a working emotional system has difficulty making choices. A human without a cognitive system is dysfunctional.

— from The Mind in the Cockpit

In the book

It runs mostly underground: the conscious mind you experience is a thin sliver riding on a vast subconscious that matches patterns and hands up answers before you know you asked. And it does not think in cold isolation, the way we like to imagine — thought and emotion cannot actually be separated; cognition gives us understanding while emotion supplies the value, and a mind with no feeling at all cannot even decide. There are, roughly, two systems at work in you at all times: a fast, intuitive one that leaps, and a slow, reasoning one that checks. — The Mind in the Cockpit

The thinking mind gives you understanding, but it is the heart that gives you value — the sense that this matters and that does not, that this is worth flying toward and that is worth turning from. A person with a perfectly working logical brain but no working emotional system cannot even make ordinary choices; the reasoning just runs and runs and never lands. The old idea that reason should rule and passion should be chained turned out to be exactly backward: reasoning itself requires the passions. — The Heart in the Cockpit (Emotion/Awe/Anxiety/Regret/Empathy)

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