Not the author, but taking a stab at your question: I think it means that regardless of how logically unassailable you believe your position to be in an argumen

Not the author, but taking a stab at your question: I think it means that regardless of how logically unassailable you believe your position to be in an argument, that position is heavily influenced by your emotions (whether you realize it or not). This is I think a very good piece of advice to consider carefully. It is common with engineers I've worked with to see people cringe when emotions are brought up. Surely, the ideal state for an engineer is to be devoid of strong emotion while assessing information and writing code? I'm sure we'd all like to believe in the consistency of our own performance and our ability to remain rational despite varying circumstances. The truth is that without the powerful emotional signals in your brain, you would be mentally crippled in practically all decision making tasks. There's a good deal of science on this. A single paper can be found here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15134841 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15134841 If you can key in to the emotional state of team members, you may be able to navigate arguments by understanding/anticipating their angles and communicating in a way that is more likely to be heard/well-received.