Following your heart is the smart thing to do. Because when people tell you to follow your heart, what they’re really telling you to do is to allow your subconscious to make decisions for you.
Your subconscious is the part of the brain that’s not your frontal lobe, considered responsible for self-control, planning, and reasoning. It’s the size of our frontal lobe and other other parts of our neocortex, which sets us apart from animals, but it’s our limbic brain thats associated with things like pleasure and happiness, which light up when we experience extreme happiness.
Your subconscious also has the ability to tap into more knowledge than your logical self, which tries to structure select variables into a logical sequence. On the other hand, your subconscious takes into account every bit of knowledge you’ve ever accumulated and merely nudges you toward one decision or another. This is what many people call instinct or “gut feeling”. Because the subconscious takes into account an infinite number of variables, it’s often difficult to describe one’s “gut feeling”. Thin-slicing information is another term for this coined by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Blink, in which he explains the amount information we analyze in the blink of an eye, without even realizing.
Does any of this make sense?
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