rational and experiential - thinking vs. feeling
I’ve been meaning to write this for a while.
Today’s lecture : Where in your brain will you find your mind? Which is just a lead-in to OTHER NEAT STUFF, people
The old central debate in neuroscience is the mind-body question. Is your mind a product of your brain or is it something separate?
Monism is the idea that: mind = f(brain)
That your mind is a function of your brain, and a physical or physiological basis underlies even the most ineffable human experiences, such as love or a sense of spirituality and everything you call your personality. That everything you attribute to your mind (or soul - cortical blindness, in which the eyes work fine but the occipital cortex is damaged, was once called “soul blindness”) is done by your brain, is done by cells.
Capgras syndrome was briefly discussed in my Psych of Personality and Neuroscience courses last spring. In one case, a 20 year old man who had received a severe blow to the head believed that his parents and siblings had been taken out and shot by Chinese communist spies, and that the people who were caring for him and worrying about him were imposters. In another case, a man who had a severe head injury came home from the hospital to a wife and 4 kids that he insisted were from an entirely different family, although he did admit they seemed very similar.
In these cases, the patients had some kind of injury to the right frontal lobe, which is muy importante in emotional responses. So they might see someone they know and know they care about, someone who they recognize… But then they fail to feel any emotional response. They see their parents, siblings, bf or gf and feel nothing emotional at all.
Well, what would you think if that happened to you?
Perhaps that your friends & family aren’t actually the people they seem to be, and that’s why you don’t feel an emotional connection to them. The only possible interpretation, conjured up by the uninjured left frontal lobe, is that they must have been replaced by nearly identical doubles.
When she was talking about the physiological basis of personality, Dr. Hall mentioned a patient in our textbook called “Elliott”. He had a large brain tumor right above the nasal cavities at the midline, below the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and surgery to remove the tumor took out a lot of that tissue. Afterward, Elliott showed no obvious cognitive defects. He could move and speak normally. His memory was fine. But it became apparent there was something really wrong with his judgment.
At a restaurant, he’d sit for an hour trying to decide between different dishes, weighing the advantages and disadvantages of each. At work, he’d sort through papers for a client and then stop to read each one and spend the rest of the day deeply analyzing that single paper instead of completing what he was supposed to. He couldn’t allocate his time & effort appropriately or act prudently in his own self interest. Elliott lost his job and eventually his family too.
Right frontal lobe damage gave rise to these flattened emotional landscapes. And emotions motivate thinking and guide decision making. Emotional reactions may allow people to tell the difference between what is important and what isn’t, between a good outcome of an action or a bad one. Without it, everything seems equally important or not important, all outcomes are equally valued.
Capgras cases, Elliott, and Phineas Gage (the railroad worker with the spike through his brain) all show that cognition and emotion are inextricably intertwined. Understanding is important for full emotional experience, and emotional experience is important for real understanding. Which might be why people who are very good at what they do tend to be involved with their work, not just intellectually but emotionally.
For people who don’t care about what they do (like Gage and Elliot), work is just a job - the important and trivial parts of it are all the same, and so nothing they accomplish will ever be very creative or remarkable. To continue paraphrasing our awesomely purple Psych of Personality text,
Epstein tried to explain unconscious processing and seemingly irrational, emotional driven parts of the mind (things like this example with the phone call) with his Cognitive Experiential Self Theory. He proposed that people use two major systems at the same time:
The rational system
Kinda neat, eh?
Apologies to anyone who's had Psych of Personality or a Neuropsych course.
Today’s lecture : Where in your brain will you find your mind? Which is just a lead-in to OTHER NEAT STUFF, people
The old central debate in neuroscience is the mind-body question. Is your mind a product of your brain or is it something separate?
Monism is the idea that: mind = f(brain)
That your mind is a function of your brain, and a physical or physiological basis underlies even the most ineffable human experiences, such as love or a sense of spirituality and everything you call your personality. That everything you attribute to your mind (or soul - cortical blindness, in which the eyes work fine but the occipital cortex is damaged, was once called “soul blindness”) is done by your brain, is done by cells.
Capgras syndrome was briefly discussed in my Psych of Personality and Neuroscience courses last spring. In one case, a 20 year old man who had received a severe blow to the head believed that his parents and siblings had been taken out and shot by Chinese communist spies, and that the people who were caring for him and worrying about him were imposters. In another case, a man who had a severe head injury came home from the hospital to a wife and 4 kids that he insisted were from an entirely different family, although he did admit they seemed very similar.
In these cases, the patients had some kind of injury to the right frontal lobe, which is muy importante in emotional responses. So they might see someone they know and know they care about, someone who they recognize… But then they fail to feel any emotional response. They see their parents, siblings, bf or gf and feel nothing emotional at all.
Well, what would you think if that happened to you?
Perhaps that your friends & family aren’t actually the people they seem to be, and that’s why you don’t feel an emotional connection to them. The only possible interpretation, conjured up by the uninjured left frontal lobe, is that they must have been replaced by nearly identical doubles.
When she was talking about the physiological basis of personality, Dr. Hall mentioned a patient in our textbook called “Elliott”. He had a large brain tumor right above the nasal cavities at the midline, below the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and surgery to remove the tumor took out a lot of that tissue. Afterward, Elliott showed no obvious cognitive defects. He could move and speak normally. His memory was fine. But it became apparent there was something really wrong with his judgment.
At a restaurant, he’d sit for an hour trying to decide between different dishes, weighing the advantages and disadvantages of each. At work, he’d sort through papers for a client and then stop to read each one and spend the rest of the day deeply analyzing that single paper instead of completing what he was supposed to. He couldn’t allocate his time & effort appropriately or act prudently in his own self interest. Elliott lost his job and eventually his family too.
Right frontal lobe damage gave rise to these flattened emotional landscapes. And emotions motivate thinking and guide decision making. Emotional reactions may allow people to tell the difference between what is important and what isn’t, between a good outcome of an action or a bad one. Without it, everything seems equally important or not important, all outcomes are equally valued.
Capgras cases, Elliott, and Phineas Gage (the railroad worker with the spike through his brain) all show that cognition and emotion are inextricably intertwined. Understanding is important for full emotional experience, and emotional experience is important for real understanding. Which might be why people who are very good at what they do tend to be involved with their work, not just intellectually but emotionally.
For people who don’t care about what they do (like Gage and Elliot), work is just a job - the important and trivial parts of it are all the same, and so nothing they accomplish will ever be very creative or remarkable. To continue paraphrasing our awesomely purple Psych of Personality text,
- “They may have all the IQ points one could want but something in them - in some cases, maybe a deficiency in the right frontal lobes - prevents them from really feeling anything about what they’re doing, and this apathy stands in the way of their ever accomplishing anything truly great.”
Epstein tried to explain unconscious processing and seemingly irrational, emotional driven parts of the mind (things like this example with the phone call) with his Cognitive Experiential Self Theory. He proposed that people use two major systems at the same time:
The rational system
- logical, driven by what is sensible
- behavior is affected by conscious appraisal of events
- thinks in terms of abstract symbols, words and numbers
- designed for deliberate action
- slow and deliberate, effortful
- requires justification via logic and evidence
- includes language and systematized factual knowledge
- analytic, breaks a situation into its constituent parts
- can change rapidly, at the speed of rational thought
- tied closely to emotion
- driven by what feels good
- effortless, occurs when we don’t want it to (“can’t help but think that…”)
- holistic, tends to react to a whole situation at once
- fast and almost instantaneous
- behavior driven by vibes from past experience
- slow to change, needs repetitive or intense experiences for change
- thinks in terms of vivid images ,metaphors and stories
- self-evidently valid (“seeing is believing”)
Kinda neat, eh?
Apologies to anyone who's had Psych of Personality or a Neuropsych course.