In chapter 6, Decision making is usually not a step-by-step verbal argument or a mathematical calculation, but rather a mental parallel process of inference to the best plan. This process involves assessment of competing actions to determine which combination of them best accomplishes a person's goals.
Goals are emotionally valued mental representations of imagined states of the world and self. The brain performs such representations by patterns of firing in neural populations in multiple brain areas, including ones that encode verbal and sensory information.
Emotional value is part of the representation of goals and actions by virtue of coordination with brain areas such as the nucleus accumbens and the amygdala, which encode positive and negative aspects of the world.
The overall assessment of the coherence of actions and goals is the result of parallel constraint satisfaction carried out by firing of neurons in all the relevant populations based on the synaptic connections among them.
The psychological and neural complexities of decision making allow many ways in which people can make bad decisions, such as neglecting relevant goals, alternative actions, and relations among them. Decision making is ineliminably emotional, with its input valuations of relevant representations, accompanying feelings such as excitement or anxiety, and outputs such as satisfaction or disappointment.