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

“body states.” Emotion, then, in my own words, is the emotional valence associated
with our representations of the world, the value each thing has to us.
Your experiences become your memories, and where these memories overlap
becomes your representation of things in the world, the cartoon-like mental models
we construct to identify and react to things like spiders, spaghetti, and Damasio. The
affect from the original experiences – feeling good or bad, feeling aroused or calm –
were also recorded in the memory’s interpretation of them and became part of the
representations, too. Somehow, you found out spiders bite and so danger bec ame a
part of their representation. Again, that is the emotion attached to each
representation, and that emotion, as Immordino-Yang says, steers us through life.
Emotion and feeling of danger is what keeps us away from the cliff edge and steers us
into a Haagen Daaz shop. Take that, Mr. Spock.
Now let’s go back to Damasio’s patients with damage to their emotional system. They
could reach logical conclusions but since they could not process the emotional
valences behind each option, they could not choose one. They could not evaluate
whether shopping on Monday instead of meeting was better than shopping on
Tuesday.
So, if emotional processing, completely subconscious, is included in every
representation and steers us through life, what role does it play in language learning?
I am sure your mind is already churning out a multitude of ideas, but I would like to
focus on just two: emotion in the experience of language learning, and the necessity
of emotion in learning virtually anything.