Emotions as Lubricants of Reason

Neurobiologists Too

Neurobiologists have their side of the story. They believe (roughly) that we have three brains: the very old one, the reptilian brain that dictates heartbeat and that we share with all animals; the limbic brain center of emotions that we share with mammals; and the neocortex, or cognitive brain, that distinguishes primates and humans. While that theory of the Triune brain shows some over-simplification, it provides a framework for the analysis of brain functions.

Although it is very difficult to figure out which part of the brain does what exactly, neuroscientists have been doing environment mapping in the brain by, say, taking a patient whose brain is damaged in one single spot and deducing the function performed by such part. Other methods include brain imaging and electric simulations. Many researchers, like philosopher and cognitive scientist Jerry Fodor, remain skeptical about the quality of knowledge we can uncover by examining physical properties of the brain. The mathematician and cognitive scientist David Marr made the apt remark that one does not learn how birds fly by studying feathers but rather by studying aerodynamics.

Damasio’s Descartes’ Error

Descartes’ Error presents a simple thesis: You perform a surgical ablation on a piece of someone’s brain with the sole resulting effect of an inability to register emotions, nothing else (IQ and every other faculty remain the same). Now you have a purely rational human being unencumbered with feelings. The purely unemotional man was incapable of making the simplest decision. He could not get out of bed in the morning, and frittered away his days fruitlessly weighing decisions. This flies in the face of everything one would have expected: One cannot make a decision without emotion. Mathematics gives the same answer: If one were to perform an optimizing operation across a large collection of variables, even with a brain as large as ours, it would take a very long time to decide on the simplest of tasks. So we need a shortcut; emotions are there to prevent us from temporizing. Psychologists call them “lubricants of reason.”

LeDoux’s Emotional Brain

Joseph LeDoux’s theory about the role of emotions in behavior is even more potent: Emotions affect one’s thinking. He figured out that much of the connections from the emotional systems to the cognitive systems are stronger than connections from the cognitive systems to the emotional systems. The implication is that we feel emotions (limbic brain) then find an explanation (neocortex). Much of the opinions and assessments that we have concerning risks may be the simple result of emotions.