Abstract
In recent years an appreciation for the emotional dimension of life has asserted itself in all of the major disciplines of the liberal arts. There is a good reason for this. While the dangers of passion are well known to all, this chapter will demonstrate neuroscience’s contributions toward making the case for the necessity of emotion for effective cognition. As Socrates implies above, cognition alone and by itself lacks the capacity to move us to action or to grant a critical component to understandings and “realizations” that only experience can give. While an emotionally distanced attitude may be essential to science, as Scheffler (1982) observed, even the notion of the un-emotional scientist is incomplete. One can be passionately devoted to objectivity. If the “unexamined life is not worth living” certainly experience without emotion is pathologically empty.
Thought by itself moves nothing (Socrates as quoted by Irwin 2007:161)
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Notes
- 1.
The modular theory of the brain was a creation of evolutionary psychologists and has come under a great deal of criticism. They present modules as being laid down far in the evolutionary past. It is hard to imagine that the human brain has not changed fundamentally in the last 100,000 years or more (See Small 2008).
- 2.
Brodmann’s area 25 is in the brain’s cerebral cortex and the region called the subgenual cingulate. This is a map of the brain’s cytoarchitectural structure used to determine different cellular tissues in the brain and their functions by staining the tissue to distinguish nerve cells.
- 3.
For a further highly technical critique of the somatic-marker hypothesis see Rolls (1999). He sees the somatic-marker hypothesis as a weakened James–Lange theory.
- 4.
This section relies heavily on David Franks (2008).
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Franks, D.D. (2010). The Neuroscience of Emotion and Its Relation to Cognition. In: Neurosociology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5531-9_6
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