Emotional Beings

It seems like most people think of themselves as rational beings. I used to myself, until the evidence to the contrary became undeniable. It's all about physiology. Over the course of evolution, the globules of changing and reproducing organic matter, which is now temporarily you and I, went through a number of phases. Here I'm primarily talking about the evolution of our consciousness:

1. Reptilian - Instinct based. No thinking or emotions. Brain stem.
2. Mammalian - Emotion and instinct. Well integrated over the course of millennium. Limbic system.
3. Human - Thinking, emotion and instinct. Relatively recent in evolutionary terms, thinking is not that well integrated with the other two components. Neocortex, grey matter.

Logically I could argue that since the instinctual and emotional physiological structures of our being have been around for longer, and are more mechanically or physiologically central to our functioning, that we naturally operate from those areas, more so than the peripheral and newly developed thinking structures. That argument would, in itself, be ironic, because I came to that conclusion by emotionally experiencing it, and rationalized the argument afterwards. We react and feel instantaneously. Then we either rationalize the reason, if one is needed, or for some, we handily apply one of the many reasons that has been supplied us through our social conditioning.