Chapter 11 – The False Dichotomy of Reason versus Emotions

I have returned with another lesson for, you, my hypothetical newborn baby. This is my eleventh lesson and like many of these lessons you will be able to find in this series of what will be 100 lessons, you might find this lesson counter-intuitive. That is why I am going to discuss this topic of emotions in some detail. Let me say, though, that you have been incredibly patient with my long intense lessons and I appreciate your stamina. Then again, after all, you are only a hypothetical baby standing in for my fantasy might time-travel back to warn my younger self some of these things. On second thought, maybe I should leave my younger self alone to figure things out on his own because half the fun is in figuring it all out, right?

There is a long and false history of emotions that continues to this day. It goes like this. There is Reason over here and Emotions over there and they are completely different things even though they are both experienced, sometimes simultaneously, by each human animal. This false dichotomy goes at least as far back as the dualist Rene Descartes, who famously declared that the human mind is separate from the animalistic human body, yet they are somehow yoked together at the specific location of the human pineal gland. Descartes has been highly influential. Although he did not believe that the mind was a divine soul (and religions attacked him for this), many religions have embraced dualism, the entities denominated as the body versus the “soul.”

How is it that so many people are so convinced that the mind is not merely a physical function of the physical body? Historically, they taken educated guesses based upon the scant information that is available. Most of the thinkers weighing in on this topic did not have the benefit of critically important information. Further, most of people convinced of dualism rely on introspection, though cognitive scientists now know that introspection is not a reliable or valid way to determine what is going on “under the hood.”

But let’s get back to the false dichotomy of Reason versus Emotion. This dualist approach is confidently and ubiquitously asserted by earnest looking people. This false story seems plausible because emotions do sometimes cause us to lose control. Emotions sometimes do scramble our thoughts. We sometimes need to tamp down emotions, so we can get our head clear. And sometimes, it is only after we set the emotions aside can we seemingly use Reason alone to think clearly. In my work as an attorney I have heard many people claim that it is critically important for judges to be unemotional so that they can make rational legal decisions.

Cognitive scientists almost unanimously disagree. Over the past few decades, old models of cognition that failed to consider the ubiquity of emotions have crumbled. Modern writers and scientists challenging the old models include Daniel Kahneman whose long litany of cognitive fallacies and heuristics have reshaped how we see ourselves. Kahneman’s “prospect theory,” for example, has severely crimped economists’ “objective standard” of homo economicus. It turns out that we are much less logical than we’d like to believe. Even our understanding of how words carry meaning is undergoing a sea change. Mark Johnson and George Lakoff, best known for their work on conceptual metaphor, have made a strong case that meaning is thoroughly embodied—we understand meaning with our entire emotion-permeated bodies, not with dispassionate brains. The past few decades have not been kind to the long-held idea that a word can have a singular “objective” word meaning that is universal and independent of the emotion-permeated bodies that use that word.

Consider also the many insights of Daniel Goleman, found in his 1995 best seller, Emotional Intelligence. His five components of “emotional intelligence” (self-awareness, self-regulation, social skill, empathy and motivation) are key to one’s ability to succeed as an attorney.

Moral Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has painted each of us as cohabited by two personas. This moral intuitionist approach posits that our first (and most dominant) persona is a big elephant (“automatic processes, including emotion, intuition”). The second persona is a much less influential lawyer-like elephant rider, who is skilled at fabricating post hoc explanations for whatever the elephant decides, including dishing out reasons to convince others. Haidt’s approach, bolstered by many experiments, is that “Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.” In sum, “The Emotional tail wags the rational dog.” Haidt approvingly quotes philosopher David Hume who, in 1739 wrote: “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”

Neuroscientist Antonio R. Damasio disagreed, as set forth in Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (1994). Damasio has delivered substantial evidence demonstrating that emotions must, of necessity, permeate everything we say and do. In Descartes’ Error, Damasio turns Descartes’ model of human beings upside down (p. 128):

The apparatus of rationality, traditionally presumed to be neocortical, does not seem to work without that of biological regulation, traditionally presumed to be subcortical. Nature appears to have built the apparatus of rationality not just on top of the apparatus of biological regulation, but also from it and with it.

Failure to see this extensive integration of thought and emotion, Damasio writes, is “Descartes’ error.”

What are emotions? Damasio distinguishes emotions from feelings. 

In everyday language we often use the terms interchangeably. This shows how closely connected emotions are with feelings. But for neuroscience, emotions are more or less the complex reactions the body has to certain stimuli. When we are afraid of something, our hearts begin to race, our mouths become dry, our skin turns pale and our muscles contract. This emotional reaction occurs automatically and unconsciously. Feelings occur after we become aware in our brain of such physical changes; only then do we experience the feeling of fear.”

In Descartes’ Error, Damasio introduced the cases of Phineas Gage (long dead) and “Elliot” (a living patient), who both suffered brain damage to the ventromedial prefrontal area of their brains.

Gage’s brain damage occurred when a metal tamping rod was accidentally shot through his brain during a blasting operation (he recovered and lived many years). Elliot’s damage occurred as a result of a brain tumor. They were both left with high level intellectual functioning but little ability to experience emotion.

[Gage] seemed to be like a child, with no stable sense of what was important and what was not. He was fitful, intemperate, obscene. It was as if he didn’t care about one thing more than another. He seemed bizarrely detached from the reality of his conduct. So he could not make good choices, and he could not sustain good relationships .

Elliot had been a good role model, husband and father before his tumor. After the tumor, he was

weirdly cool, detached, and ironic, indifferent even to intrusive discussion of personal matters- as if such remarks were not really about him. He had not previously been this way; he had been an affectionate husband and father. He retained lots of cognitive functions: he could perform calculations, had a fine memory for dates and names, and the ability to discuss abstract topics and world affairs.” After surgery, “he was even less able to care about things or to rank priorities. He could stick obsessively to a task and perform it well; but on a whim he might shift attention and do something completely different. Intelligence testing showed him to be a superior intellect. His emotions were askew, though. He could no longer set priorities or make decisions. He had no sense of the relative importance of any situation.

Elliot could think but he couldn’t judge value. “[T]the cold-bloodedness of Elliot’s reasoning prevented him from assigning different values to different options, and made his decision-making landscape hopelessly flat.”

Gage and Elliot each became somewhat like “Mr. Spock.” Many people would think of this as a potentially good thing, because always-under-control Mr. Spock is one of their favorite TV characters. They also believe that emotions inevitably lead to “irrational” behavior. The conventional wisdom is that people lacking emotions would be more clear-headed and therefore capable. What happened, though, is that both Gage and Elliot suffered severe impairments of judgment. Though they both appeared intelligent after their injuries, they were completely incapable of making sensible personal and business decisions in the absence of emotions.

Damasio also studied other patients and found that people with flat affect were incapable of making decisions. He found that pure rationality is helpless to make decisions. Rational thought, devoid of emotion, paralyzes us. He found that emotions are a necessary condition to allow rational decisions to be made, even purely “logical” decisions. “Rationality” describes the way brain-damaged people make decisions. Even “our most refined thoughts . . . use the body as a yardstick.” He was convinced that the traditional views on the nature of rationality were therefore incorrect:

I had been advised early in life that sounds decisions came from a cool head … I had grown up accustomed to thinking that the mechanisms of reason existed in a separate province of the mind, where emotion should not be allowed to intrude, and when I thought of the brain behind that mind, I envisioned separate neural systems for reason and emotion … But now I had before my eyes the coolest, least emotional, intelligent human being one might imagine, and yet his practical reason was so impaired that it produced, in the wanderings of daily life, a succession of mistakes, a perpetual violation of what would be considered socially appropriate and personally advantageous.

Damasio was convinced that reason was “not be as pure as most of us think it is or wish it were, that emotion and feelings may not be intruders in the bastion of reason at all: they may be enmeshed in its networks, for worse and for better.” He found that a reduction in emotion correlates with irrational behavior. This “counterintuitive connection between absent emotion and warped behavior may tell us something about the biological machinery of reason.” The bottom line: pure reason is not sufficient for meaningful decision-making.

It is not only the separation between the mind and brain that is mythical: the separation between mind and body is just as fictional. The mind is embodied in the full sense of the term, not just embrained. The study of the mind is the study of the entire body: the neural processes that are experienced as the mind concern the representation of the body in the brain. Our minds critically depend on our human bodily existences.

Damasio asserts that “Somatic markers” comprise the emotional learning that we have acquired throughout our lives and that we then use for our daily decisions. These markers record emotional reactions to situations. Somatic markers work as emotionally-weighted indicators, steering us away from or toward choices, based on past experience. It’s not that we can necessarily recall the specific past experiences that formed our system of markers, but we feel them and they allow us evaluate some options over others. These emotion-laden markers help us to rank our options.

The brain does not merely record advance in the world but “also records how the body explores the world and reacts to it.” Even though these neurological processes may occur in various portions of the brain, people “experience and act on them in a unified coherent manner: the records that bind together all these fragmented activities “are embodied in ensembles of neurons” Damasio refers to as “convergence zones,” where

The axons of feedforward projecting neurons from one part of the brain converge and join with reciprocally divergent feedback projections from other regions. When a reactivation within the convergence zones stimulates the feedback projections, many anatomically separate and widely distributed neuron ensembles fire simultaneously and reconstruct previous patterns of mental activity.

“Brain and Language,” Scientific American, 89-91 (September 1992).

Far from being a limitation or distraction, then, emotion is an integral part of cognition. Emotion constructs and maintains the somatic markers that allow us to evaluate the desirability of our actions.

In Damasio’s view, our entire experienced world is thus filled with emotional peaks and valleys that constitute our map of what matters to us. There are no purely objective rational thoughts. Every thing on this inner map is infused with an emotional valence that pulls us toward it or pushes us away. Without this all-encompassing emotional map, no amount of analytical intelligence, not even a great intelligence, has the capacity to care about the world enough to employ logic or reasoning abilities. He makes the strong claim that not only does the intellect interweave complexly with our emotions. That is why pure rationality is helpless to make decisions and rational thought, devoid of emotion, paralyzes us.

Since I’m an attorney let’s imagine that Star Trek’s Mr. Spock went to law school, he would make a terrible lawyer because he would be at a loss to care about anything. He would further lack the capacity to know what anyone else cares about or even to care about what anyone else cares about. Even Spock’s great knowledge base and his sense of logic would leave him at a complete standstill. He would not know what to do next without an biologically-based emotion-sculpted landscape to push and pull him in various directions based on (oftentimes subconscious) survival needs.