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Why Should I Care About Emotional Bonding?
By Maggie Wright

What's your proof? How do you know that tapping into the emotions matters?
The proof is in neuroscience.

Neuroscience has proven that thinking and feeling are tied together. Humans cannot do anything in life without these two processes working together. Neurologist Antonio Demasio, Ph.D. (author of Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain; Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain) proved that thought, without emotion, cannot work... because reason depends on emotion, as a part of an evolutionary instinct to survive.

In his work with severely brain damaged patients, Dr. Damasio found that patients with severe damage in the emotional feeling centers of the brain were not able to function on a daily basis, even if their mental capabilities were superior. They were not even capable of making simple decisions, such as whether or not to go to a restaurant... and if so, to which restaurant to go. That's because the emotional side of making their daily-life decisions was missing.

He found that emotion "marks the value" and helps you consider the daily options that you mentally have. For example, if you were planning to cross the street and saw a car coming, the image would trigger a physical internal chemical/muscular/neurological emotion response that is translated into the feeling of the fear of being run over by the car, so you would choose not to cross the street, until the car passes.

In other words, the feeling thought that was triggered by the fear emotion marked the "value" of the options of either, crossing the street or not crossing the street. Therefore, it helped you decide whether or not to cross the street. Emotion and cognition are integrated biochemically and neurologically, in order to work together, so that the organism (ie. human) is able to interact within his environment.

Okay. So, what does this mean? It means that thinking and feeling are wrapped together. It means that our thoughts and emotions are involved in everything that we do. It means that our customer consumers' perceptions of our brands and purchase decisions are made by a combination of thought and emotion.

Small businesses and entrepreneurs... let's work together. Let's rebuild America!