Fellow ScienceBlogger Jonah Lehrer has a nice article on the new respect cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists have for emotion. Here's an excerpt:
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."
Lehrer goes on to discuss some of the key issues in detail, providing a nice summary of recent developments in cognition and emotion:
Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist at USC, has played a pivotal role in challenging the old assumptions and establishing emotions as an important scientific subject. 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.
For more on cognition and emotion, see these CogDaily reports:
- Log in to post comments
Can you or Jonah Leher suggest some reading materials on the interaction of the amygdala and cortex during the decision making process?
Ted -- maybe start with this post over at Developing Intelligence -- the articles linked there can give you more details.
If this is true, it should be epiphanous to the way we argue to convince. To me at least, the money shot of that article is:
Thanks for the link.
Ted, you might also check out Damasio's books, Descartes' Error and The Feeling of What Happens. Just ignore anything he says about the somatic marker hypothesis, because in the last few years, that hypothesis has been rendered all but falsified.
Also, you're right that it changes how we convince people, though the situation is incredibly complex. In our lab, we are currently working on integrating research on emotion into our work on conceptual frames. It's really, really hard. Part of the problem is that in some cases, people really do just use "cold" reasoning, while in others, they use "hot" or emotional reasoning. The result is not always, as Damasio often suggests, that "hot" reasoning produces better results. However, a lot of what goes into "hot" reasoning depends on the emotions involved. Fear produces a certain kind of reasoning, anger another, sadness another, and happiness another.
Chris, I have to say I don't think there can be any human thinking that is "cold reasoning." Take this sentence from the article about those with brain damage:
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.
To have what we would call proper reasoning requires the desire to reach a goal, and the desire to be right, etc. I would even say that logical people find great beauty in logical thinking with an intuitive sense of when something "clicks" into place.
Wonder if this will affect artificial brain modeling.
But it could also be an effect of how our particular brains are structured. For example, indecision problems could be solved by other means, since computers can do it.
"indecision problems could be solved" - indecision problems could perhaps be solved
Kevin, there are some problems with Damasio's experiments. I think the review discussed in the Developing Intelligence post actually touches on some of them, but the main issue is that subsequent research has found results that contradict Damasio's. That is, you can reason with damage to the amygdala and other areas associated with emotion. It does seem that there really are two types of systems: hot and cold(we usually call them system 1 and system 2, respectively), but of course in most real-world situations, you'll be using some combination.
Glad to see the establishment coming around. However, concluding "These results suggest that proper thinking requires feeling. Pure reason is a disease." goes too far. At best I think we can say that normative human cognition requires feeling. But to extend this to the idea of "proper thinking" is too anthropocentric. There's no evidence here, as far as I can tell, suggesting that something nonhuman might be capable of normative cognition without anything resembling human emotions.
I think the balance stands in between pure reasoning and pure mawkishness i.e. people should use both.
Anyway, the fact is that, for any kind of good thought process, sound emotions offer the guidelines; and logical reasoning based on sound information offers the method. If there was any person without any emotion whatsoever, then probably he/she wouldn't have an objective either.
Lets take an exhaustive standpoint on this :-
For instance, we go about doing things in our everyday lives so that one day we might meet with success. Here, the emotions that we feel during that period of success is the driving force and logical reasoning(pure reasoning) based on genuine information can be a great method to reach that goal; missing either one of them would mean failure. Missing emotions would mean no guidelines therefore leading to a state where there would be no necessity for the logical reasoning.
This argument can be extended with a thought experiment - imagine computers and humans(former has no emotions and the latter has a blend of both emotional and logical reasoning capabilities). The humans look at a painting with emotions and declare it "beautiful" because that painting had certain attributes that humans like; but they cannot replicate it in their mind because the emotions do not allow a photographic memory. In fact, though humans can remember the attributes of the painting that led them to call it "beautiful" and also how they felt when they saw the painting, they can easily meddle with other details of the painting like the colour of the frame, backgorund or even the place where they saw it( i.e. if these things weren't factors in deciding how they looked at the painting). That's why there's a difference between looking and noticing(noticing means that the object you're looking at has had an emotional impact on you and that becomes a reason for you to remember it.
On the other hand, while the computer can remember the hue of each and every pixel or the coordinates of the place where it saw it, it certainly wouldn't enjoy doing so. Therefore the comuter doesn't see/feel any difference being in a dump and being in louvre while a human does.
If at all, there were no emotions in human beings, everything would come to a grinding halt. Right from the manufacture of LCD TVs to footwears to life jackets and we'd all be free from the obligation to create better conditions because, obviously better or not the conditions around us will hardly have any impact on us.
My point is -
Today computers have taken over in every department of work and research. Why? Because they offer the pure reasoning that we need to achieve our emotion-driven goals.
My conclusion is that emotions and pure reasoning are essential to have a world that looks like what it is now and though emotions and pure reasoning are necessay, they needn't be simultaneous.
IMHO the article by Lehrer can be misinterpreted by a majority of people because, there are a lot of people out there who just lack a taste for scientific reasoning and probably they'd be encouraged by the last sentece. Putting a line such as "pure reasoning is a disease" without thorough evidence is in more than one ways naive and an insult for mathematicians, physicists and other such people whose work is entirely based on pure reasoning.
A slight update on this topic from the WSJ last Friday.
Scientists Draw Link Between Morality And Brain's Wiring"
I wonder if this "injury" could be taught without the corresponding pokery into the prefrontal cortex; not by abuse, but by well-intentioned design.