posted
There was a Nova special called 'Secrets of the Mind' in which a doctor was seeking out various abnormalities due to brain injuries and head trauma and studying them. One such case was of a man who after suffering a serious head injury would periodically not recognize his parents. He visually recognized the person he was seeing as his mother or father, but thought that the person he was seeing was an imposter. What was happening was that there was a disconnect in the area of the brain that connects emotional responses to visual stimuli. And when he would see his parents, he would recognize them, but since he also didn’t have the associated emotional response he normally has when seeing them he would be led to the conclusion that the person in front of him was an imposter. This didn’t only happen with people, it also happened with his apartment. He would see it as his apartment, but since he wasn’t having the normal emotional response to it, he assumed that it was a fake, set up to look like his apartment.
The doctor said something along the lines of “the lack of an emotional response leads him to an absurd conclusion”. I thought that quote was fascinating. That it’s almost saying that we NEED our emotional responses to think logically. That emotion is part of logic and invaluable to it. But at the same time, it also shows how weak or non-trustworthy our emotions are. That our emotional responses(or lack thereof) can override everything our logic is telling us. That our logic is a slave to our emotions. Now, I’m not anti-emotion, but emotion isn’t always trustworthy, which is why we use logic in our lives. But if our logic is really tied to our emotion at some fundamental base level, then we can never truly separate the two, and our view of the world is always tainted/affected/altered by this thing that we have no control over. And yet emotions are in a sense gut instincts. And our instincts have developed over millions of years for a reason. And evolutionary instincts aren’t the only kind of instincts, we all have learned instincts from experience. Conditioning if you will.
I don’t really know my point in any of this, because like I said, I see two sides to it. On the one hand, this man needs his emotional response to think logically, and without it his conclusions are absurd. But at the same time, that emotional response has tainted his ability to think logically without it.
Then again, people with this condition get over it eventually. I think the important question though about that is whether they get over it because eventually they learn to understand what is happening and to trust their logic, or because they create all new emotional connections in the brain. The show didn't answer this question.
posted
Whoa. I just saw that special a few weeks ago -- we watched it during a M&M lecture.
I think it makes sense that logic and emotion are related, though I don't think one is necessarily controlled by the other. We make logical conclusions based on whatever information we have at a given moment. My guess is that emotion "feeds" logic the same way touch, sight, and hearing do, and when recognizing family members emotional reactions are weighed heavily.
Put it this way: a block of ice sits melting on the table. You pick it up, and it's actually quite warm. It looks like ice, it's slippery like ice, it's melting at room temperature -- but it's not cold. The first thing that comes to mind is "This is not ice." Even if a dozen witnesses testified otherwise, on some level you might still believe that the block sitting on the table is not ice, because "ice" is cold, and this thing isn't. Logic tells you that this doesn't make sense.
We recognize family members because we feel a certain way about them (which I'd assume is important to any social species). Without that feeling, the logical puzzle doesn't quite work and it's just like picking up a lukewarm block of ice.
quote:Originally posted by James Tiberius Kirk: My guess is that emotion "feeds" logic the same way touch, sight, and hearing do, and when recognizing family members emotional reactions are weighed heavily.
yeah, that.
"Everything that is in the mind, was first in the senses..." --Thomas Aquinas as summed up by G. K. chesterton
Posts: 3846 | Registered: Apr 2004
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quote:That it’s almost saying that we NEED our emotional responses to think logically.
I think it sounds like he's saying that in that particular instance, not having that emotional response leads him to an illogical conclusion. I don't think he's saying that having no emotion enter into the initial "understanding" of his parents -- that is, the point at which he first understood who they were and what they meant to them (all, obviously, below the level of conscious thought) -- would lead him to an illogical conclusion about them. It would just lead to an un-emotional conclusion (and this is purely hypothetical, since i don't know if we can process ideas about people we meet without having some sort of emotion enter into it.
posted
'David', as Dr. Ramachandran calls him, suffers from Capgras Syndrome caused by an auto accident which damaged the connection from his amygdala to the limbic system. He will not recover that connection. The connection from his auditory cortex to the limbic system was undamaged however so the delusion doesn't affect him when he speaks to his mother on the phone.
David's faculty for logic is intact and testable outside the boundaries of the delusion about his mother.
There are other patients whose emotional centers become diconnected from all the senses, Cotard's Syndrome. Functional humans who can still fillout an IQ test but are nonetheless convinced that they are dead.
quote:Originally posted by orlox: 'David', as Dr. Ramachandran calls him, suffers from Capgras Syndrome caused by an auto accident which damaged the connection from his amygdala to the limbic system.
Hey, "amygdala" was the thing River didn't have in Firefly!
sorry, I couldn't let that go without pointing it out.
Anyhoo, this is fascinating, and your conclusion was very insightful (to the original starter of the thread...). it's one of the those things that makes you realize that your whole mind, your whole sense of self, is just a bunch of tissue inside your head that could easily be damaged...weird. eeehhg.
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quote:That it’s almost saying that we NEED our emotional responses to think logically. That emotion is part of logic and invaluable to it. But at the same time, it also shows how weak or non-trustworthy our emotions are. That our emotional responses(or lack thereof) can override everything our logic is telling us. That our logic is a slave to our emotions. Now, I’m not anti-emotion, but emotion isn’t always trustworthy, which is why we use logic in our lives. But if our logic is really tied to our emotion at some fundamental base level, then we can never truly separate the two, and our view of the world is always tainted/affected/altered by this thing that we have no control over. And yet emotions are in a sense gut instincts. And our instincts have developed over millions of years for a reason. And evolutionary instincts aren’t the only kind of instincts, we all have learned instincts from experience. Conditioning if you will.
So I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you.
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quote:Originally posted by Strider: But at the same time, it also shows how weak or non-trustworthy our emotions are. That our emotional responses(or lack thereof) can override everything our logic is telling us. That our logic is a slave to our emotions. Now, I’m not anti-emotion, but emotion isn’t always trustworthy, which is why we use logic in our lives. But if our logic is really tied to our emotion at some fundamental base level, then we can never truly separate the two, and our view of the world is always tainted/affected/altered by this thing that we have no control over. And yet emotions are in a sense gut instincts. And our instincts have developed over millions of years for a reason. And evolutionary instincts aren’t the only kind of instincts, we all have learned instincts from experience. Conditioning if you will.
posted
while I'll check out your link orlox, trust me, I gave up on the idea of free will a long time ago. But i'll listen to anything Brian Greene or Ramachandran have to say about anything.
Icarus, that's the main problem with most of my thoughts on a regular basis...HELP! Posts: 8741 | Registered: Apr 2001
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posted
I don't think it shows that emotions are needed for logic. It shows that emotions, like everything else, are things we can reason about.
Syllogism: If these were my parents, I would feel something for them. I don't feel anything for them. ------------------------------- Therefore, these are not my parents.
This is sound logic ("modus tollens"). The fact that one of the propositions ("I feel something for them") has the word "feel" in it doesn't mean feelings are needed for logic. You can reason about feelings, or Happy Meals, or goosefeathers...anything. Doesn't mean Happy Meals are needed for logic!
I would believe, though, that emotions are an essential part of our decision-making apparatus (not about what's true, but about what to do). They get us to prefer some states of the worlds to others.
I also believe we are primarily emotional beings that have an ability to think, rather than rational beings that have an ability to feel. Certainly other animals seem more emotion-driven than we, and that's the more true the further you get from humanity. Also, we're born equipped with emotion but not much thinking ability; and we revert to more feeling and less thinking under stress.
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