Latest Issue of the MindBrainEd Think Tank + (ISSN 2434-1002) 5 MindBrainEd Bulletin V4i5 Think Tank Emotion May | Página 4

Cover photo: by Daniel Duchon, freeimages.com
Think Tank:
Emotion
Curtis Kelly
Beyond logic and why you should be careful in
the classroom
You are with a good friend. You both want to meet again. The friend asks you
whether getting together next Monday or Tuesday is better. Either is possible. You
had some minor other things you were thinking about doing, like shopping, but
nothing serious. Your wheels of reasoning start whirring and through logical
deduction, you come up with the best solution in about two seconds. You tell your
friend, “Let’s meet Tuesday.”
Deciding was a simple task of logical deduction, right? Not according to
neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. He says that you reached this decision more
through emotion than logic.
What? Aren’t most decisions, like the one above, made on the basis of logical
conclusion? And certainly, there was no anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness,
or surprise (Ekman’s six) involved in the decision-making, so what in the world does
he mean?
Damasio would say that you might have used logic to organize
the options, but weighing them was done through emotion. He
knows. He has patients with damage to their emotional areas
who have extreme difficulty making even the simplest decisions,
such as whether to meet again on the following Monday or
Tuesday. They make sound logical deductions, listing the merits
and demerits of each choice, but still cannot decide.
You see, when Damasio writes about “emotion,” he does not mean the kind described
above –anger, disgust, etc. – the way we use that word in the real world. He means
something much deeper, a cognitive processing that is the brain’s response to
external stimuli. You see a spider. Since your brain’s representation of spiders
includes danger (the emotion), your right hemisphere (your predator alert system)
becomes active, contacts the left side and instructs your body to react to this threat
by increasing your heartbeat, making you focus on the spider, and feeling fear. So,
this feeling of fear is the body’s reaction to much deeper processing and the resultant