"The brain does not make decisions alone. The body is always in the room. It has already voted — long before the frontal lobe begins its deliberation. Consciousness is not the general. Consciousness is the diplomat who arrives after the negotiation."
Neurologist whose somatic marker hypothesis upended the Cartesian separation of mind and body: decisions are not made by pure reason, he showed, but by the body's felt sense of past outcomes, registered as somatic markers that guide cognition from below. Patients with damage to emotion-processing brain regions — while retaining full logical ability — become catastrophically bad at decisions.