Rene Descartes is known as the father of modern philosophy and is most well known for his quote, “I think, therefore, I am.” I love how the title, Descartes’ Error, refers to what we have learned from Descartes regarding mind/body dualism.
Chapters 1-4 of Descartes’ Error give a lot of insight into the relationships between emotion, reason, and the brain. However, this reading was very technical and made me feel like I was just learning about the brain all over again. I had difficulty writing this blog post because I felt as though I didn’t really have any insight with which I could wow readers. The chapters along with Gage and Elliot’s stories are very compelling and insightful alone. Gage and Elliot’s stories surprised me though because I had expected more damage to be done after experiencing such serious brain injuries. For example, any sudden violent movement, such as whiplash, or blow to the head can cause brain damage. Don’t get me wrong. What they experienced is very sad, but I feel as though things could have been much worse for them.
As I was reading the first four chapters, I got wrapped up in the narrative and found myself thinking, toward the end of ch. 4, how does this all apply, I was too absorbed in the subjects and didn't pay enough attention to how it;s going to apply in class... then I thought back to one of our early readings, the one on affect, interpretation, and behavior and started to put the puzzle together. Once I started considering Gage and Elliot as people who had lost their affect I realized how that had a domino effect on their behavior which affected thier interpersonal relationships and on and on. smith and Hyde also point out that without emotions you cannot make a decision, and this, too, was a huge problem for both Gage and Elliot. And then, of course, I thought of how Plato and Socrates dismissed emotion and how this book established emotion as a real, neurological thing. So, having been in the place it sounds like you are, I thought I'd share some of the thoughts that got me more fired up about the subject... Sorry If I just completely rambled...
ReplyDeleteI agree with both you and Suzi in the fact that Damasio’s message can be difficult to grasp. But the message becomes clearer when you read the real life examples of cases where lack of emotions have inhibited decision making and rational thinking. By giving us actual people and describing how their lives were affected, he brings the issue closer to us. In Smith and Hyde, the authors talk about bringing the issue up and close to the audience and I see this is as the strategy that Damasio is using. Sure he could have just presented the facts to us, but by adding narratives he makes the situation more real and personal. You are able to identify with the characters because it wasn’t like they were born with these malfunctions. They were everyday people, like us, who suffered a extreme misfortune. I felt pity for the lives that Gage and Elliot lived after their damages. So in an interesting way Damasio uses pathe to get the reader to realize the power emotions have on a indvidual's thinking.
ReplyDeleteI have to agree with you on the difficulty of understanding Damasio's more biologically-based claims. The stories of Gage and Elliot are fascinating in their own right, but reading the descriptions of how the brain works was a bit difficult despite having a fair bit of background knowledge on how the human brain works. However, it's important to understand that this knowledge as to how the brain influences both reason and emotion is key in manipulating an audience's pathos - as Suzi points out, you can't really have one without the other.
ReplyDeleteI sympathize with you totally on the density of Damasio and how it is difficult to wade through the biology to determine how it is pertinent to our discussion as a class. I would point to what Suzi T said, in that understanding emotion is an integral part of manipulating, or less cynically, guiding the emotions of an audience. This book just goes a lot deeper into the interworkings of emotions than most of us are used to going.
ReplyDeleteI just thought of it as useful to know that each person is different on a biological level, although that is not a stunning revolution either. So it makes it all the more important to try and identify with the individual to be most effective to them, or when addressing a large audience, hit the commonalities of the emotion that would have definitely been damaged by both the spike and the pressing tumor.
I'm commenting on this blog post late--sorry!
ReplyDeleteI think many of us in this class have had difficulty grasping the reading and applying it to class concepts. It's almost laughable how dense some of this material has been.
Actually in retrospect, Damasio (who seemed hard at the time), is mild compared to Brennan and Massumi, wouldn't you say. Damasio talks about neurobiology in precise language--the challenge for us readers was to apply that information to class material. Brennan and Massumi talk about affect in extremely convoluted language--the challenge for us readers was to understand what they were saying.