The Invariant Gardener

Let’s come to deal with the first article’s abstract . It’s a gold mine with nice sprinkles. Immordino-Yang & Damasio make here two strong assertions. This is the first:

“the neurobiological evidence suggests that the aspects of
cognition that we recruit most heavily in schools, namely
learning, attention, memory, decision making, and social functioning,
are both profoundly affected by and subsumed within
the processes of emotion; we call these aspects emotional thought”.

Does this new concept of “emotional thought” has any value ? Do we need that ? Has a thought devoid of any affect whatsoever been isolated in some laboratory recently ? Have we any proof or, at least, any clue that such an emotionless thought could exist in some situation ? The answer is: no, no, no and no

There’s no need for the concept of “emotional thought”. All thoughts are emotional like all mammals have blood in their veins. The concept of “bloody mammals” won’t help.

The second assertion is the following :

“emotion-related processes are required for
skills and knowledge to be transferred from the structured
school environment to real-world decision making because
they provide an emotional rudder to guide judgment and action.”

This statement originates in Damasio’s beautiful book “Descartes’ error” where he explains at length that people who have lost their emotional capacity are no longer able to make judgments or decisions. Their intellectual capacity, even if apparently intact, is of no help when a choice has to be made.

This is an interesting result, sure enough, but what is its meaning from a psychological viewpoint.

Let’s use a metaphore. Do you remember these tournaments between knights that where used as judgments of God in Middle-Age? What would happen if no knights were willing to fight, each for one opposite version of a the “reality” waiting for the judgment of God? Well, no such judgment would ever occur. Indecision would remain, of course.

When there’s no energy invested in the process, no decision can be made. It’s obvious, almost trivial. It’s a logical consequence of the energetic conception of emotions which is now older than a century and which has been defended by many great authors of the XIXth and XXth centuries.

Nothing (really) new under the sun. That’ll be my provisional conclusion for tonight