eliot was a businessman who had a benign brain tumor removed near the prefontal cortex part of his brain. he remains intelligent and seemingly rational, with a wry sense of humor. but he now has trouble making decisions, keeping appointments and has squandered his life savings on bad investments. ok, so do i sometimes, but the thing is these things don't bother him so he keeps making the same mistakes over again.

the university of iowa doctor who treated eliot has determined thru psychological testing that he has almost completely lost the ability to experience emotion due to his injury. we've known for a while the amygdala near the back of the brain processes fear, but research is showing that other parts are also critical for registering emotion, i.e. the prefontal cortex.

it's becoming clearer that emotion is a key element of learning. if you make a crappy investment, you feel bad about it and act more carefully next time - something eliot can no longer do. interestingly, logic alone doesn't make a good decision. we can't decide who to marry or where to live on the basis of reason alone.

but until recently, the western approach to thinking and feeling (cognition and emotion) has been to regard them as polar opposites - kant believed emotion was 'an illness of the mind'. i don't want to get all emotional here, but it seems like everything, everything, is connected somehow including logic and emotion.

ever think about what emotion is? how would you describe it to someone? darwin considered emotions to represent mechanisms for the adaptation and survival of the individual. skinner thought they were states elicited by ‘the delivery, omission, or termination of rewarding or punishing stimuli’. i personally like a the combo put forth by james... ‘bodily expressions’ which follow the perception of an ‘exciting fact’.

an 'exciting fact'. i like that idea. hopefully i won't get a head injury so i will continue to get excited about facts like these.

posted by bluematrix at 12/26/07 17:29 | link | comments (2)