There once was a man from Nantucket...

As an Engineer...
I like to start most of my sentences with the phrase 'as an Engineer' because it implies that I am an Engineer, which I am. It also implies that I spent a lot of time and hard work to become 'an Engineer', of which I am very proud. Some may find this a bit condescending, but I bet those few would be comforted to know that this also implies I have been formally trained to only use half of my brain.
It is commonly known that the left hemisphere of the brain is responsible for most of what we call 'ourself'. It does the talking, the reasoning, and most of all of our conscious behaviors come from ol' lefty. Over the years, people seem to have placed significantly more importance on the left side, and the right is unable to protest. Yet, still, it is taken for granted.

My whole life, I've been slowly taught to ignore my own emotions. The is true for everyone, but especially for men. Emotions are the barnacles on the S.S. Rationality. They have been deemed a hindrance to clear judgement and must be repressed. Buy why? The argument is that if emotions are so bad, why bother having them at all? At this point, I'm going to start directly quoting from "The Most Human Human" by Brian Christian

In the late '80s and through the '90s neuroscientists started providing evidence that emotion is essential for and fundamental to making good decisions. Neuroscientist Baba Shiv recalls a patient he worked with 'who had an area of the emotional brain knocked off' by a stroke. After a day of doing some tests and diagnostics for which the patient had volunteered, Shiv offered him a free item as a way of saying 'thank you' - in this case, a choice between a pen and a wallet. "If you're faced with such a trivial decision, you're going to examine the pen, examine the wallet, think a little bit, grab one, and go," he says. "That's it. It's non-consequential. It's just a pen and a wallet. This patient didn't do that. He does the same thing that we would do, examine them and think a little bit, and he grabs the pen starts walking - hesitates, grabs the wallet. He goes outside our office - come back in and grabs the pen. He goes to his hotel room- believe me: inconsequential a decision! - he leaves a message on our voice-mail mailbox, saying, 'When I come tomorrow, can I pick up the wallet?' This constant state of indecision."
USC professor and neurologist Antoine Bechara had a similar patient, who, needing to sign a document, waffled between the two pens on the table for a full twenty minutes. If we are some computer/creature hybrid, then it seems that damage to the creature forces and impulses leaves us vulnerable to computer-type problems, like processor freezing and halting. In cases like this where there is no "rational" or "correct" answer. So the logical, analytical mind just flounders and flounders.
In other decisions where there is no objectively best choice, where there are simply a number of subjective variables with trade-offs between them (airline tickets is one example, houses another, and Shiv includes "mate selection: - a.k.a. dating - among these), the hyper-rational mind basically freaks out, something that Shiv calls a 'decision dilemma.' The nature of the situation is such that additional information probably won't even help. What we want more than to be 'correct', is to be satisfied with our choice and out of the dilemma.

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So there it is in a nutshell. Some of the most important (and least important) decisions that we make, aren't based on reason at all. It's time we give the right brain some credit. Without emotional investment, we are no better than the computers that we mock for lacking our superior mental abilities.