Heart or Brain, or Heart and Brain?
“Abba, kya hoga agar mai photographer ban gaya… toh kam paise kamaunga na. Ghar chhota hoga, gaadi chhoti hogi. Par Abba mai khush rahunga… Aaj tak maine aapki har baat suni hai, aaj bas ek baar mujhe apne dil ki baat sunne dijiye na…”
~ Farhan, 3 Idiots
Farhan didn’t really mind a low salary or a small house as long as his happiness was promising to remain intact. All he wanted was his father’s permission to let his passion become his profession, and his heart would go on a joyride. So it did.
A slight character shift. My English teacher in 10th grade asked us what two privileges set the human species apart from animals. My hand shot up as usual, and I knew the first bit (now that I look back, I think everyone knew that much): the ability to speak. Miss gave us twenty minutes but no one could come up with the second half. Exhausted with our sheer lack of thinking capacity, she performed a mock drum-roll, and like Keatings, dramatically whispered the answer to the silent class: “The ability to make a choice, my girls. Choice. Decision. You have the choice to pet an animal, they can only rely on pure instinct, whether your touch feels safe for them to stay or not. You have every opportunity to choose, they don’t.” Of course, this was our icebreaker to set the tone for Walt Whitman’s ‘Animals’, so I shall cease her genuinely riveting explanation here.
Indeed, humans are so blessed. We get to make choices right from what to wear, tea or coffee, to what to do in life. But every time we try to decide, two clouds form and threaten to bump and precipitate in the form of irretrievable time. We more often than not try to choose between these two nauseous clouds of cold logic and pure passion. Instead of making the actual choice, we start off by frustrating ourselves in the very choice between being rational and emotional. And God forbid we pick one side… there is a high probability of the decision being lopsided.
There are trends and tendencies I see in human behaviour here. The French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) wrote, “The heart has its reasons, which reason knows nothing of” (Osterath, 2025). But gone are the days of Farhan and his friends, all of whom followed their heart. Heart reigned in the past. Today, at least in my surroundings, I perceive much more of the brain, more of the reason and rationality. People are wholeheartedly giving up on their passions so that they can make good money and postpone their passions to a later age, or are looking for money and material gains even in their personal ambitions. Of course, with the cost of living and the cost of everything rising, everyone needs to make good enough, and they’re just doing their bit too. And it is not just about career or marriage, or life in general. Logic seeps into something as simple as a post-exam plan with friends – I’ve had them say, “Logically speaking, we have the whole day to sleep. Why waste that time, and some money too, on taxi rides and restaurants?” So, contrary to the days left behind, we are in the years where logic is valued over feeling. The world seems to have transitioned from Tamasha’s Ved in Corsica to Ved in corporate.
To substantiate this notion, the prominent German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) predicted in his era itself, that the modern transition of social action will act as an “iron cage” of rising rationality overruling, rather than co-existing with, emotional life. He gave four types of social action in his work Economy and Society: Zweckrationalität (instrumental rationality based on goal-oriented calculation), Wertrationalität (value-constrained rationality), affective (emotional) and traditional (habitual) action (Sociology.Institute, 2025). The very nomenclature he uses indicates contrasting ways of acting and living in our day-to-day lives. In simple words, he foretold the impending reign of the brain.
And to talk about recent developments, there is a neuroscience study that in fact suggests, and for all good reasons, that we tend to make decisions guided by pure emotion, and when asked to justify, we inject reason and rationality (Olstein, n.d.). This means we may make instinctive decisions based on just “gut feeling”, and when held accountable or simply asked about the thought process behind the decision, we manipulate our way through existing facts and figures to blurt something out that might sound justifiable to the logic-heavy listeners. This also implies the inherent and implicit predominance of the brain over the heart. We often hear the term “emotional fool”, but has anyone ever been called a “logical lunatic”? Humans themselves show the brain as a superior being and run on their hearts regardless (do we think so because the brain is anatomically situated topmost, and the heart slightly lower?).
And just another intrusive thought – is it a coincidence that the term ‘reason’ is defined as “a cause, explanation, or justification for an event, action, or belief” as well as “the mental power to think and make logical judgments”? (Cambridge Dictionary, 2026). Is this also an implicit way of referring to the cause behind any decision or action as based solely on logic and rationality?
But with all this game of supremacy, the actual question is: a fatal heart attack or brain-dead, a person is declared dead either way, right? So by what authority exactly does one get to preside over the other? What makes us choose between two equally vital outlooks of life?
In reality, prioritising any one over the other can take a toll on one's personal as well as professional life, and none of us are shielded from such repercussions. The entire work-life (im)balance is the epitome of this statement. A working parent thinks rationally in the morning while leaving for work, and gets homesick and family-sick by the evening – picking the path of the brain at dawn and that of the heart by dusk not only unsettles our inner world by entangling us in a needless duality, but also, by extension, ruffles the embodied, physical self. Of course, the parent does not possess the power to live life differently, at least for the time-being, but what can help to a certain degree is hitting the middle ground.
We keep labelling someone as either an emotional person or a rational person, but these terms do not actually exist as two extreme points. It is by no means a binary. The truth is that we as human beings have evolved to be able to place both on an equal footing and strike a balance (Poh, 2022). We have seen the same person using both these dimensions in different time-frames, but this equal footing corresponds to the same person making one single decision. Say, my cousin loves dance but has a degree in engineering which she wants to put to some lucrative use. She joined a tech-based company where she works the entire morning and afternoon, and is voluntarily interning at a dance organisation that hosts classes across the city in the evening. She had to make one single decision—how do I earn as well as dance? Farhan, too, had to make one single decision—what do I do with my life? He chose the very reasonable path of convincing and gaining his father’s confidence, without any suicide threats, so that his emotional attachment to his passion would rise in value. Using the power of the heart and the brain in one swift decision is the way.
Of course, there is no right or wrong. There might be occasions where one has to let either of the decision-making processes prevail, lest the action transform into a mayhem. And where there is going to be a disaster, there is going to be one anyway. But when we try to generalise such a delicate matter, we should let emotion and reason go hand-in-hand. Such co-ordination truly makes human decisions holistic, and the outcome, more holistic. This is because the only thing we know for certain is that emotion is not separate from reason, as was believed for so many years. It has been proven that the limbic system in which emotions develop and the cortex where reason operates constantly interact, permanently influencing our brain. There is no activity without emotion or reason: both must be present in every decision (Olstein, n.d.).
So, the intention is not to villainise or belittle either of them. It is to demonstrate how, if the sort of co-existence and harmony we look for in the outer world can exist within our own internal framework, we can indeed incorporate the change we wish to see out there. Charity and change, both begin at home, and so, it is high time for us to stop asking “Should I listen to my brain or simply follow my heart?” every time we need to make a decision whether simple or complex. Give it some time, and our heart and brain will work out their magic together to ensure neither has to compromise!
For as David Caruso said and rightly so, “It is very important to understand that emotional intelligence is not the opposite of intelligence, it is not the triumph of heart over head, it is the unique intersection of both.”
References
Cambridge Dictionary. (2026). reason. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/reason
Olstein, D. (n.d.). Decisions made by their owners: emotion and reason when deciding. Tandem. https://tandemsd.com/decisions-made-by-their-owners-emotion-and-reason-when-deciding/
Osterath, B. (2025). Reason vs. Emotion? Think | Emotions | thebrain.info. https://www.thebrain.info/think/emotions/reason-vs-emotion
Poh, M. (2022, April 4). Rational vs Emotional Decision Making (Short Vlog) [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oadviSSPLqU
Sociology.Institute. (2025, August 23). Max Weber’s Typology: Social Actions and Authority Types in Political Sociology. Political Sociology | Sociology.Institute. https://sociology.institute/political-sociology/max-weber-social-actions-authority-types-political-sociology/
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