Hi there. This is Josh of Dharma Punks, New York. If you would like to support my work, everything I do is available to all for free. I survive entirely just by donations. The donations are, or can be made at Dharma Punks with an ex-NYC and Venmo.

Or if you go to the website, you can find both the PayPal and the Patreon buttons as well.

So thanks for your support really allows me to do what I do, which I've been doing.

Now I'm in my 21st year of being a Buddhist teacher-pastor, so I'm grateful for you keeping

the roof over my heads.

And now tonight's talk, we like to think that we're a logical species, but in fact,

we act in accordance with how we feel,

not how we think.

Bold statement, but actually if, like me, in any way, you are a neuroscience or psychology nerd

or any combination thereof, agreement with that basic statement.

Antonio DiMascio, one of the most esteemed neuropsychologists noted with this somatic marker

hypothesis that feelings are actually fundamental to decision-making. And when people have damaged

regions that read their body states like the insula and the ventral medial prefrontal cortex,

they can't make a decision for the life of themselves. They're stuck. Joseph Lidu noted,

the famous neuroscientist at NYU,

noted that the amygdala processes all stimuli in deep brain structures

far before consciousness and is far more influential.

Daniel Conman, the Nobel Prize winner, noted that gut instincts are system

one and are far more influential most of the time than any form of rational system two,

thinking Jonathan Haidt, the most esteemed of clinical psychologist compares emotions to the elephant and reason to the monkey

riding on the elephant's back and argues that it's the elephant that makes all the decisions.

It's just the monkey thinks somehow that it's choosing where the elephant is going.

...