On September 13, 1848, a near-fatal accident in Cavendish, Vermont, forever changed the world of neuroscience. It has become one of the most famous cases in brain research, both proving and disproving a wide variety of studies and theories.18
Twenty-five-year-old Phineas Gage was working for the railroad, helping blast away a section of rock for a new line of track. The process of blasting required drilling a hole, dumping in blasting powder, a fuse, and sand. Then the men would take a long metal rod to tamp the materials in the hole, so the explosion would break apart the rock, rather than just blast out the hole.
Unfortunately, as Phineas began the process of compacting, his tamping rod hit the side of the rock and created a spark. That spark lit the blasting powder, shooting the three-foot-seven-inch tamping iron into the air. The rod rocketed up through the base of Gage’s jaw, behind his left eye, through his brain, and exploded out through the top of his skull. The sharp tip of the iron acted like a needle, creating a wide-open hole in his head.
Miraculously, Phineas lived. In fact, he was conscious and alert as the local doctor arrived to help bandage him up later that day. Unfortunately, a chunk of his frontal lobe was destroyed in the accident. According to the doctor, Phineas retained all his general intelligence and memory. And he eventually recovered, but his personality was never the same.19
Before the accident, Phineas was a hard-working, upstanding supervisor. After the accident, he indulged in the grossest profanity and became obstinate, with little regard for his fellows. He was impulsive, abandoning plans as quickly as they were devised. As doctors and scientists have studied his case over the years, there’s been controversy over many aspects of Gage’s recovery, mostly because of the lack of details.
However, in 1994, we finally discovered a link to Gage’s change in personality. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio published his book, Descartes’ Error, which connected Gage’s accident to other patients who, because of tumors or other accidents, had lost or damaged the same portion of the brain as Gage.20 Damasio studied these patients in great detail, learning all he could about the effects of this missing portion of the brain.
The most famous of Damasio’s patients was a man named Elliot. After a portion of Elliot’s brain was removed because of a tumor, Elliot recovered and seemed to be a functional, intelligent person, just like Gage. Unfortunately, the removed portion of his brain was responsible for regulating his emotions.
Damasio performed a number of tests with Elliot to confirm that he was indeed incapable of emotion. For example, he attached a machine that tested Elliot’s sweat glands as Damasio showed a variety of shocking images that always cause immediate emotional responses in normal patients, causing their hands to sweat.
No matter how disturbing the image, Elliot was never affected. He’d lost the ability to feel.
In all the hours of tests and studies, Damasio described him as never showing any sign of emotion. No sadness, no impatience, no frustration. Even when his life unraveled—he lost his job, his income, and even his wife left him—Elliot was completely dispassionate.
Elliot maintained a high IQ, but when forced to make a decision, he would deliberate for long periods of time on all the logical pros and cons of the decision. Simple choices such as where to eat would cause Elliot to debate the benefits and shortcomings of restaurants, distances traveled, and other factors that would influence the decision.
Through a variety of tests on Elliot and other patients, Damasio concluded that this inability to make decisions, even a simple decision, was the result of the missing part of their brains that processed emotions. The patient would be overwhelmed with logical thought, without the help of emotions to lock in decisions.
They would process and process endlessly. They would weigh the facts, but never arrive at a decision. And even if they made a decision, they would never feel good about it. They would go back and continue to analyze. They couldn’t lock in a decision and move on—they kept evaluating. It’s no surprise that Elliot’s wife left him. She was going crazy with his constant processing of choices. It was all logic without any action. He had no connection to all his past good and bad decisions. He was starting from ground zero on every choice.
Damasio describes how emotion and logic are not separate, but completely integrated. As noted in the title of his book, he shows how Descartes got it wrong. Descartes suggested that reason and emotion are opposing forces. Descartes writes about a homunculus, or a small man, inside our brain that helps us use logic to control the raging emotions or animal instinct inside us.
But in reality, the opposite is true. Humans rely heavily on both logic and emotions and use many parts of the brain throughout the entire decision-making process.
You can’t silence emotion from a decision and rely solely on logic. Elliot and others proved that logic helps us understand decisions as we rationally weigh the good and bad. But you also need emotions to help your brain connect decisions with past experiences. Otherwise, you start from scratch on every single decision, just like many of Damasio’s patents.
The insight from Damasio is that a brain that can’t feel, can’t make a decision. In other words, logic alone won’t cut it. You can’t drive the emotions from a human experience. To make a decision, you need to be able to feel.
This is the opposite of what many philosophers and intellectuals over the centuries have taught. Like Descartes, they taught that our rational or logical thought is supreme. And it needs to overpower our emotions in order for us to be a better human.
Take the famous statement from Descartes: “I think, therefore I am.”21 Descartes goes on to explain in his script Habius Corpus that rational thought and emotions are separate. Rational thought, Descartes argues, is the higher level, and emotions are a lower level of humanity. Rational thought is supreme, and emotions cloud your judgment.
He felt that our emotions are base and should be tempered, allowing our true intellect to shine. But what Damasio discovered is something that creative advertising has been telling us for years. That emotion is critical to making a brand decision. And not just at the first exposure, but throughout the entire decision-making process.
Unfortunately, when it comes to believing that rational thought is supreme, Descartes is not alone. The idea that logic is king is saturated into western culture.
Take medicine, business, and education. The only way to find truth or success is by following a logical pattern of steps that lead to a rational conclusion. Deep down in many of us, we feel that the best way to avoid bad decisions and succeed in life is to stop and think objectively about everything.
There is less trust in emotion. In fact, we often think emotions and instincts render the process invalid. Only rational thought from the logical areas of our brain, like the prefrontal cortex, is acceptable.
I often ask people what they really trust more, logic or emotion. If you honestly look deep inside yourself, it’s a tough question to answer. From the scientific method to data measurement, our culture has trained us to believe that hard facts and logic always win. Emotions are a bit of a black box.
We’ll come back to this question. But as we continue to explore the relationship between logic and emotion, really think about how you think. Don’t just accept how culture or ancient philosophers would answer that question.
Descartes and Damasio aren’t alone in asking the question of what makes us human. And the perception that our emotions are like animal instincts is a concern that many have considered.
Fortunately, two curious researchers from Harvard decided to figure out the true answer.
Cognitive psychologist Leda Cosmides and anthropologist John Tooby pioneered the new field of evolutionary psychology in the 1990s. Their goal was to understand the design of the human mind through a variety of disciplines including cognitive science, human evolution, neuroscience, and psychology.
In a famous study called Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer, they tackled the question of how our instincts guide us and the relationship between reason and instinct.
In the introduction to their study, they argue, “It was (and is) common to think that other animals are ruled by “instinct” whereas humans lost their instincts and are ruled by “reason”, and that this is why we are so much more flexibly intelligent than other animals.”22
These are pivotal questions. Said another way, are we human because we are rational and we can overpower our instincts? Do our emotions put us on the same level as animals, relying on instinct to guide our actions?
Through deep analysis, they discovered that we aren’t more intelligent because we are more rational or logical. Just the opposite. It’s because we have so many emotions or instincts that we’re more intelligent beings.
“Human behavior is more flexibly intelligent than that of other animals because we have more instincts than they do, not fewer. We tend to be blind to the existence of these instincts, however, precisely because they work so well—because they process information so effortlessly and automatically.
“But our natural competences—our abilities to see, to speak, to find someone beautiful, to reciprocate a favor, to fear disease, to fall in love, to initiate an attack, to experience moral outrage, to navigate a landscape, and myriad others—are possible only because there is a vast and heterogenous array of complex computational machinery supporting and regulating these activities. This machinery works so well that we don’t even realize that it exists—We all suffer from instinct blindness.”23
When you think about the differences between humans and animals, our instincts are quite unique. Our fear of disease helps us live longer and keep our loved ones healthy. And the fact that we love others and care about strangers is yet another instinct that makes us a superior species.
What Cosmides and Tooby teach us in evolutionary psychology is that our emotions don’t make us weaker. Our emotions are maybe our most valuable asset.
Even with new insights from science that help us understand the relationship between logic and emotion, we’re still molded by history and culture. Like Descartes’ homunculus. Culture, both ancient and modern, has perpetuated the idea that logic is king.
A major example in our modern culture that’s based on the model of supreme logical thought is our educational system.
In school, we’re taught to only accept a rational thought as the correct answer. Our children are measured on the strength of their left and front brains. From how we measure success with grades to the methods we use for taking tests, it’s all about facts and data.
Sure, we have elective classes such as art and sports, but even those classes are judged by the number of assignments produced and other data points. We don’t measure success on how well children see the big picture or how they are skilled at connotation.
Several books have been written on our lopsided educational system, including Ken Robinson’s book, Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative,24 where he describes a paradox in today’s business environment. Companies are trying to compete in a world where technology is changing faster than ever. A world that needs innovative and creative thought and ideas. And yet most adults don’t consider themselves highly creative.
Many children start out with a lot of creative instinct. But in our school systems, their creative talents are suppressed. Robinson argues that today’s business problems could be solved if we could fix our school systems and retrain ourselves to think and value creative intelligence.
“Companies and organizations are trying to fix a downstream problem that originates in schools and universities. It would be naïve to think that education is simply a process of developing our natural abilities and rewarding achievements: that schools, colleges and universities simply sort out the intellectual sheep from the goats; that intelligent students do well and the less intelligent don’t.
“Education doesn’t just follow the natural grain of young people’s abilities; it sorts them through two different filters. The first is economic: education categorizes people on implicit assumptions about the labour market. The second filter is intellectual: education sorts people according to a particular view of intelligence. The problem we face now is that the economic assumptions are no longer true and the intellectual filter screens out some of the most important intellectual abilities that children possess. There are drastic consequences for the development of creative abilities. This was always a problem, but now it’s getting critical.”25
He argues that this crisis is only getting worse. And the answer isn’t to educate more people. We don’t have a problem of not having enough graduates—we have too many graduates that have flooded the market. And most of these graduates have been educated in the same logical way. Some don’t work well in teams, have a hard time communicating, and most of all, many can’t think creatively.
“A major reason for this vast waste of ability in education is academicism: the preoccupation with developing certain sorts of academic ability to the exclusion of others, and its confusion with general intelligence. This preoccupation has led to an incalculable waste of human talent and resources. This is a price we can no longer afford.”
His answer is to change the educational system. To have it value the benefits of creative thought and balance that with academic standards. We can’t just raise our educational standards—we need to completely change them.
“To move forward we need a fresh understanding of intelligence, of human capacity and of the nature of creativity. Human intelligence is richer and more dynamic than we have been led to believe by formal academic education.”
Robinson understands the need for both analytical and emotional intelligence. We need both to progress. “Conventional education separates intelligence from feeling, and concentrates only on particular aspects of the first. This is why being highly educated is no guarantee of emotional intelligence. Yet there is an intimate relationship between knowing and feeling: how we feel is directly related to what we know and think. Creativity is not a purely intellectual process. It is enriched by other capacities and in particular by feelings, intuition and by a playful imagination.”26
Our educational system isn’t the only example of how the forces of logic and emotion are out of balance in our culture. Logic has dominated business for years, and author Daniel Pink points out the need for more emotional ideas in A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future.
Pink talks about how left-brain thinking has been a major part of our economy and has driven much of the growth in the past economic era. Knowledge-worker jobs like lawyers, accountants, and engineers ruled the information age.27
But times are changing, as the economy shifts toward a new age. And Pink explains how in the future, creative and emotional ideas will become the major force in driving key jobs and the economy. In the future, the jobs that companies will depend on will include inventors, designers, storytellers, big-picture thinkers, and meaning makers.
Pink refers to right brain, or creative thinking, as R-Directed thinking, and left brain, or logical and rational thought, as L-Directed thinking. (As I pointed out in the last chapter, there is more to the equation than just the two hemispheres, and the relationship of logic and emotion includes the front and back of the brain. For simplicity in this section, I’ll refer to Pink’s terms of left and right, so as to not confuse his arguments.)
Pink argues that for too long, rational thinking has been considered the less important half. And it’s time we gave creativity an equal seat at the table.
He brings up three major reasons that are pushing the world toward a future that belongs to creative thinking, “Three forces are tilting the scales in favor of R-Directed thinking. Abundance has satisfied, and even over satisfied, the material needs of millions—boosting the significance of beauty and emotion and accelerating individuals’ search for meaning. Asia is now performing large amounts of routine, white-collar, L-Directed work at significantly lower costs, thereby forcing knowledge workers in the advanced world to master abilities that can’t be shipped overseas. And automation has begun to affect this generation’s white-collar workers in much the same way it did last generation’s blue-collar workers, requiring L-Directed professionals to develop aptitudes that computers can’t do better, faster, or cheaper.”
Thanks to today’s abundance, everything we could ever want is readily available and extremely affordable. Which means we now look to designer labels on everything, including mundane products like a spatula. Pink details how design and the customer experience are the only way for companies to differentiate.
“In an age of abundance, appealing only to rational, logical, and functional needs is woefully insufficient. Engineers must figure out how to get things to work. But if those things are not also pleasing to the eye or compelling to the soul, few will buy them. There are now too many options. Mastery of design, empathy, play, and other seemingly ‘soft’ aptitudes is now the main way for individuals and firms to stand out in a crowded marketplace.”
Which means companies need to use all the creative arts such as compelling design and storytelling to make amazing customer experiences. Or they face becoming irrelevant.
Many leaders and company executives are realizing how critical these types of experiences are to the bottom line. It’s no longer enough to have a team of number-crunching MBAs. You need people who think about the customer journey, who make meaningful connections, and who create emotional moments with brands that are deeply personal.
Pink refers to these types of experiences as high touch and high concept. “Businesses are realizing that the only way to differentiate their goods and services in today’s overstocked marketplace is to make their offerings physically beautiful and emotionally compelling. Thus the high-concept abilities of an artist are often more valuable than the easily replicated L-Directed skills of an entry-level business graduate.”28
In this new conceptual age, creation and empathy are the new masters. In order to succeed, businesses need to create high-concept and high-touch experiences for their customers. The bottom-line results of today demand emotional and personal experiences. Straightforward facts and unemotional marketing are just like the knowledge worker jobs of the past era—outdated. If you want marketing and advertising that works, you need to champion emotional and creative ideas.
The argument that emotional skills are more important than logic in today’s business environment is interesting. But just like being human, both are necessary. Which leads me to the question, does one have to overpower the other? Certainly in our business environment, the power has long sat with logic. But if we believe that the future will require more emotional skills, the answer should be giving emotion and creativity an equal seat at the table.
While Daniel Pink describes a new era of creative jobs, executives at my own company, Adobe, are championing a similar idea. For Adobe, a company that balances both a history in the creative arts as well as deep data insights, this new era is all about creating deeply emotional customer experiences.
According to Shantanu Narayen, CEO of Adobe, the importance of the customer experience in today’s digital business is paramount.
“Companies everywhere are doing great digital marketing campaigns. But if that’s all we talked about, we’d be missing the point. Because digital experiences today have the power to transform every aspect of our life. They change the way we think, the way we travel, spend our money, do our jobs, and even relate to the entire world around us.
“We know today that some experiences are designed to blow our minds, and some have to go completely unnoticed and blend into our daily existence. No matter what the intent is, digital experiences need to be provocative, they need to be personal, and they need to be predictive. And they must work flawlessly and beautifully. This is the experience era.”29
This is coming from a company that is leading the industry on data-driven marketing and analytics, as well as creativity tools, which is a great testament to the fact that in today’s digital marketing world, data and creativity can live hand in hand.
Many companies who are trying to transform in order to compete in the digital age are only focused on the data. They spend lots of money on systems that process big data, but ignore the emotional side. They don’t create experiences that connect with people, just data that connects with systems.
Logic and data alone will never rule the marketing world. Data isn’t the end, but the beginning. Data inspires creativity. And creativity requires a foundation of rational thought. The future isn’t about one or the other. It’s the perfect balance of both logic and creativity.
This idea of creating personal and emotional experiences is something that many enterprise businesses understand and believe in. Some CEOs today look very different than their equals a few decades ago. Today, they must embrace more creative and soft tactics such as storytelling and design in order to grow business.
This new breed of business, namely design-led companies, not only understands the importance of how design and art can differentiate their business, but they make design a core competency. Business decisions aren’t just made from crunching the numbers, they’re also based on the emotional benefits of creative connection. This includes both product design and how the company designs customer experiences.
According to the Design Management Institute, this design-led philosophy is paying off. They tracked design-led companies against the S&P Index and reported that design-driven brands outperformed the index by 211 percent.30
In order to reach that level of success, design must be a core belief of everyone in your organization, especially your executive team.
A great example of this new type of CEO is the president of Mattel, Richard Dickson. He recently explained how their company is transforming to compete in the digital era by understanding what made their company great in the first place. And that beginning is all about creativity.
“Our founders thought of Mattel not as a toy company, but as a creations company. It was a great, American, started-in-a-garage company. That was design-led before anybody ever knew what that meant. Our founders weren’t toy people. They were designers and inventors.”31
Mattel understood the value of creative ideas from the start. They believed that the way to build and grow a business was all about creative ideas.
“The first big idea to come out of Ruth and Elliot Handler’s garage wasn’t a toy. It was a mindset. A conviction that taking bold risks on insightful and thoughtful and innovative ideas would delight children, and as a result, build a business. And it worked.”
Another modern CEO who understands the importance of creating engaging content takes this idea even further. Gary Vaynerchuk, the energetic entrepreneur, author, and CEO of VaynerMedia, claims that every business better start creating entertaining content and holding their customer’s attention or they risk becoming extinct.32
“Every single company out there, whether they know it or not, is a media company in addition to the business or product that they specialize in.” He continues, “The faster your business realizes that it’s a media company, the more likely it will be to succeed in 2020, in 2025, in 2030.”33
That’s a bold statement. It means that every company needs to understand that the way to succeed today is creating entertaining and emotional experiences. End of discussion. If you rely solely on the old way of doing business, by offering a great product and then simply sharing the benefits to your customers, you’re sunk.
Rather, you need to use emotion to create experiences that hold your customer’s attention, like a movie. And then continue to create compelling content that makes them feel something. Content that is entertaining and engaging. Only then will your customers stay loyal. These customer experiences aren’t just marketing fluff.
One final example of this new change in mindset from big business leadership is Robert Lutz from GM. Daniel Pink describes his story.34
“GM hired a man named Robert Lutz to help turn around the ailing automaker. During his career, he’s been an executive at each of the big three American automakers. He looks and acts like a marine, which he once was. He smokes cigars. He flies his own plane. He believes global warming is a myth peddled by the environmental movement.
“But when Lutz took over his post at beleaguered GM, and the New York Times asked him how his approach would differ from that of his predecessors, here’s how he responded: ‘It’s more right brain… I see us being in the art business. Art, entertainment and mobile sculpture, which, coincidentally, also happens to provide transportation.’”
What we learn from these examples is that business is changing. The way to success is no longer just about great product development and number crunching. Consumers expect much more. They want amazing brand experiences. And these experiences require more than just a logical laundry list of product benefits and features.
To compete in this new era of business, you need to become an experience business. It’s the next evolution from becoming a design-led company. Except the core requirement isn’t just a belief in design. It’s a belief in creating experiences that connect at an emotional level with people. It’s ensuring that every decision in your company is focused on creating and delivering these emotional experiences. This certainly requires a transformation of not just your digital platforms, but a philosophical transformation of your leadership and employees.
No matter what company you work for, you are now in the art business. In the media business. In the emotion business.
I would venture to say that most of you reading this book have a deep-down belief that rational thought is still king. It’s a concept that has been instilled in our brains from a young age. Do you feel that for any given problem, if you just slow down and really think about it in a logical way, you’ll find the solution?
This deeply held belief isn’t just a big part of our culture, it’s a big part of business thinking. Years ago, while working at a regional advertising agency, I worked with an executive who’d say the same thing at the start of every project. “Hey guys,” she’d say, “Before we try to solve this marketing problem, let’s just slow down. Back up a bit. And let’s think about this strategically.” Her meaning was simple. Throwing creative ideas at a problem isn’t the answer. If we slow down and just think rationally and tactically about the problem, we’ll find the right solution.
More than just slowing down and thinking about it, many feel that our emotions can cloud our judgment. Which is why the philosophers of old felt we had to tame our emotions. We must strip ourselves of any emotions so they don’t influence good thought.
Unfortunately, try as we might to stay purely logical, our emotions are deeply linked to our decisions. They’re not separate. Logic and emotion are both connected in every decision we make. We can’t have one without the other.
Logic isn’t the great ruler in our brains. And we can’t blame all mistakes on our emotions. If we rely solely only on logic for decisions, we simply won’t be able to make them. Being human requires using emotions throughout the entire decision-making process. It’s not just helpful in the discovery stage, but it’s required all the way to deliberation and validation of a decision.
Our superiority over animals isn’t that we can logically overpower our brain. Our superiority is that we are emotional beings.
Before you complain that I’m giving too much hate to logic, understand that I’m simply trying to give creativity an equal seat at the table. Remember, I’m a central brainer. I believe there is a need for both logical and creative ideas. But in my twenty-two years of experience in marketing, these two haven’t been equals.
For centuries, logic has been elevated on a high pillar, and emotional ideas have been tossed aside as fluffy. But thanks to scientific discoveries in neuroscience, we know that humans literally can’t make a decision with just logic. We need emotion. We need creative ideas.
Today, creative thought is no longer a side show. In our modern economy, it’s becoming a major differentiator for businesses that hope to succeed. This is no longer just a rant from someone in your creative department, this is a topic that is top of mind for CEOs and thought leaders. Creative ideas are a major part of our economic future.
Logic isn’t dead. The creative gut isn’t dead. We need both.