Hearts and minds: science, thought and emotion

The following are some highlights from an article on thought and emotion.

“Hearts & Minds – Since Plato, scholars have drawn a clear distinction between thinking and feeling. Now science suggests that our emotions are what make thought possible.

“Ever since Plato, scholars have drawn a clear distinction between thinking and feeling. Cognitive psychology tended to reinforce this divide: emotions were seen as interfering with cognition; they were the antagonists of reason. Now, building on more than a decade of mounting work, researchers have discovered that it is impossible to understand how we think without understanding how we feel.

“Because we subscribed to this false ideal of rational, logical thought, we diminished the importance of everything else,” said Marvin Minsky, a professor at MIT and pioneer of artificial intelligence. “Seeing our emotions as distinct from thinking was really quite disastrous.”

This new scientific appreciation of emotion is profoundly altering the field. The top journals are now filled with research on the connections between emotion and cognition. New academic stars have emerged, such as Antonio Damasio of USC, Joseph LeDoux of NYU, and Joshua Greene, a rising scholar at Harvard. At the same time, the influx of neuroscientists into the field, armed with powerful brain-scanning technology, has underscored the thinking-feeling connection.

“When you look at the actual anatomy of the brain you quickly see that everything is connected,” said Elizabeth Phelps, a cognitive neuroscientist at NYU. “The brain is a category buster.”

But the computer metaphor was misleading, at least in one crucial respect. Computers don’t have feelings. Feelings didn’t fit into the preferred language of thought. Because our emotions weren’t reducible to bits of information or logical structures, cognitive psychologists diminished their importance.

When Damasio first published his results in the early 1990s, most cognitive scientists assumed that emotions interfered with rational thought. A person without any emotions should be a better thinker, since their cortical computer could process information without any distractions. But Damasio sought out patients who had suffered brain injuries that prevented them from perceiving their own feelings, and put this idea to the test. The lives of these patients quickly fell apart, he found, because they could not make effective decisions. Some made terrible investments and ended up bankrupt; most just spent hours deliberating over irrelevant details, such as where to eat lunch. These results suggest that proper thinking requires feeling. Pure reason is a disease.

In 2004, Harvard psychologist Joshua Greene used brain imaging to demonstrate that our emotions play an essential role in ordinary moral decision-making. Whenever we contemplate hurting someone else, our brain automatically generates a negative emotion. This visceral signal discourages violence. Greene’s data builds on evidence suggesting that psychopaths suffer from a severe emotional disorder — that they can’t think properly because they can’t feel properly.

“This lack of emotion is what causes the dangerous behavior,” said James Blair, a cognitive psychologist at the National Institute of Mental Health.
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This new science of emotion has brought a new conception of what it means to think, and, in some sense, a rediscovery of the unconscious. In the five decades since the cognitive revolution began, scientists have developed ways of measuring the brain that could not have been imagined at the time. Researchers can make maps of the brain at work, and literally monitor emotions as they unfold, measuring the interplay of feeling and thinking in colorful snapshots. Although we aren’t aware of this mental activity — much of it occurs unconsciously — it plays a crucial role in governing all aspects of thought. The black box of the mind has been flung wide open.

The increasing use of sophisticated imaging is clearly the direction in which the field is moving, scientists say. And yet some cognitive psychologists worry that this “trend to integrate with neuroscience” means that some aspects of cognition will be neglected.

The lasting influence of the cognitive revolution is apparent in the language used by neuroscientists when describing the mind. For example, the unconscious is often described as a massive computer, processing millions of bits of information per second. Emotions emerge from this activity. Feelings can be seen as responses to facts and sensations that exist beyond the tight horizon of awareness. They can also be thought of as messages from the unconscious, as conclusions it has reached after considering a wide range of information — they are the necessary foundation of thought.

As Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia, recently wrote, “It is only because our emotional brains work so well that our reasoning can work at all.”

Source
Credit: Jonah Lehrer – Jonah Lehrer is an editor at large at Seed magazine. His first book, “Proust Was a Neuroscientist,” will be published in November. Boston Globe. Boston, Mass.: Apr 29, 2007. pg. E.1
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-Daniel Montano
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