Dump the chariot

What Are We Thinking?

Our thoughts are an ever-changing swirl of fears, feelings, desires, impulses, memories and body sensations that interact to form a single mind.

...we can dump one of the more unfortunate metaphors we in the West have relied on to understand the mind. This metaphor, going back to ancient Greece, holds that reason is a wise charioteer and the passions — emotions and desires — are the stallions who pull the chariot. In this fable, reason is the calm, sophisticated smart guy, while the emotions and desires are dumb, primitive beasts. People lead good rational lives when they use reason to suppress and control the passions.

This chariot metaphor rests on an overly positive estimation of the power of pure reason and an overly negative view of the passions. The fact is that your emotions are not primitive and dumb. Positive emotions encourage risk-taking. Awe encourages you to broaden your focus beyond your narrow self. Sadness encourages you to change your way of thinking.

Your desires are not dumb, either. They tell you what is worth valuing and where you should go. Your body also contains its own form of wisdom. Cortisol increases vigilance. Adrenaline prepares the body for quick and decisive action.

As Annie Murphy Paul writes in her book “The Extended Mind,” “Recent research suggests a rather astonishing possibility: The body can be more rational than the brain.”

If we wanted to step back and look at the whole mind, we’d say — to the extent that we can even separate these faculties — that reason, emotions and desires are just different resources people draw upon to help make judgments about what to do next. Each faculty has its own strengths and weaknesses, and life goes best when a person coordinates all the faculties in one graceful swirl.

Your job as a conscious person is not to be a dominating, rationalist charioteer. It’s to read the judgments that your emotions, desires and body are sending you, act on them when their judgments are appropriate and redirect them when they are getting carried away.

Some people are so misled by the charioteer fable that they don’t cultivate or use all their faculties. They are so smitten with their own high intelligence that they don’t pay attention to their own emotions and desires, or to the signals their guts are sending them. This is why phenomenally smart people often do astoundingly stupid things...

David Brooks
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/16/opinion/neuroscience-thinking-human.html?smid=em-share