Reason and the Brain Reason is often contrasted with emotion. This strikes me as a rather inappropriate contrast. For starters, they're different types of things. Reason is either an ideal or an activity, while emotion is a family of states. Anger, fear, love, intrique, these are all examples of the emotions. There is no corresponding list of "the reasons". The closest I could come

There has been a significan amount of research on the neurobiology of emotions
Antonio Damasio has written the most widely read popular books on this topic. Damasio's thesis is that the emotions have an under appreciated role in how reasoning works. His picture of reason, however, is an activity in which people engage. This activity does not have a particular seat in the brain, but calls on various neural systems in various ways. He doesn't spell this out in too much detail except to dispell the commonly held belief that "reason" is a neocortical function. The emotions, on the other hand, do seem to be tied to particular neural functions.

Even though Damasio doesn't go this far, one might conclude that reason and emotion are really both parts of the same phenomena (deliberate human decision making) looked at on different scales. In any case, it is pretty clear that emotions have a straight-forward physiological explanation while reason does not. This could mean that emotions are "real" in a sense that reason isn't. It could also just hightlight that these two concepts don't make any sort of useful contrast. One captures a set of states that we all pass through and the other a standard of excellence to which we might aspire, and there's at least some evidence that those states make that standard achievable.
  ¶ #

0 comments Post a Comment