Your unconscious, in this sense, was acting as a kind of mental
valet. It was taking care of all the minor mental details in your
life. It was keeping tabs on everything going on around you and
making sure you were acting appropriately, while leaving you
free to concentrate on the main problem at hand.
The team that created the Iowa gambling experiments was
headed by the neurologist Antonio Damasio, and Damasio’s
group has done some fascinating research on just what happens
when too much of our thinking takes place outside the locked
door. Damasio studied patients with damage to a small but
critical part of the brain called the ventromedial prefrontal
cortex, which lies behind the nose. The ventromedial area plays
a critical role in decision making. It works out contingencies
and relationships and sorts through the mountain of information
we get from the outside world, prioritizing it and putting flags
on things that demand our immediate attention. People with
damage to their ventromedial area are perfectly rational. They
can be highly intelligent and functional, but they lack judgment.
More precisely, they don’t have that mental valet in their
unconscious that frees them up to concentrate on what really
matters. In his book Descartes’ Error, Damasio describes trying to
set up an appointment with a patient with this kind of brain