Social rejection doesn't just cause emotional pain; it affects our physical being.

Language is handy, but we humans have social and emotional connections that transcend words and are communicated - and understood - without conscious thought.

Touch seems to be such an important tool for enhancing social cooperation and affiliation that we have evolved a special physical route along which those subliminal feelings of social connection travel from skin to brain.

Of course our feelings matter. But emotional decisions are usually not the best ones. On the other hand, your emotions can affect your decisions whether you like it or not because the effects can occur on the unconscious level.

When judging a product, we rarely have exhaustive scientific data to go by. As a result, if we are to form a complete picture, we must fill in the blanks, just as we must in our visual perception.

By subliminal, I mean things that occur in our world that are below the threshold of consciousness but do have a psychological effect on us.