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A review by slferg
Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain by Antonio Damasio
4.0
This is fairly heavy going. I don't understand everything, but enough to have an idea of what is going on - more or less...
The author draws a connection between feelings and rationality. Just cold rationality without the involvement of feelings is defective. People with a specific braing injury retain their rationality, but it does not involve feelings, so they made some odd choices and have "rational" reactions without emotion. They also have trouble visualizing the future of choices. The brain is not just thoughts - feelings and thought are bound together to result in the essential being.
Some things I found interesting:
"What worries me is the acceptance of the importance of feelings without any effort to understand their complex biological sociocultural machinery. The best example of this attitude can be found in the attempt to explain bruised feelings or irrational behavior by appealing to surface social caues or the action of neurotransmitters, two explanations that pervade the social discourse as presented in the visual and printed media; and in the attempt to correct personal and social problems with medical and nonmedical drugs. It is precisely this lack of understanding of the nature of feelings and reason (one of the hallmarks of the "culture of complaint") that is cause for alarm."
"On a practical note, the role outlined for feelings in the making of rationality has implications for some issues currently facing our society, education and violence among them. This is not the place to do justice to those issues but let me comment that educational systems might benefit from emphasizing unequivocal connections between current feelings and predicted future outcomes, and that children's overexposure to violence, in real life, newscasts, or through audiovisual fiction, downgrades the value of emotions and feelings in the acquisition and deployment of adaptive social behavior. The fact that so much vicarious violence is presented with a moral framework only compounds the desensitizing action."
The author draws a connection between feelings and rationality. Just cold rationality without the involvement of feelings is defective. People with a specific braing injury retain their rationality, but it does not involve feelings, so they made some odd choices and have "rational" reactions without emotion. They also have trouble visualizing the future of choices. The brain is not just thoughts - feelings and thought are bound together to result in the essential being.
Some things I found interesting:
"What worries me is the acceptance of the importance of feelings without any effort to understand their complex biological sociocultural machinery. The best example of this attitude can be found in the attempt to explain bruised feelings or irrational behavior by appealing to surface social caues or the action of neurotransmitters, two explanations that pervade the social discourse as presented in the visual and printed media; and in the attempt to correct personal and social problems with medical and nonmedical drugs. It is precisely this lack of understanding of the nature of feelings and reason (one of the hallmarks of the "culture of complaint") that is cause for alarm."
"On a practical note, the role outlined for feelings in the making of rationality has implications for some issues currently facing our society, education and violence among them. This is not the place to do justice to those issues but let me comment that educational systems might benefit from emphasizing unequivocal connections between current feelings and predicted future outcomes, and that children's overexposure to violence, in real life, newscasts, or through audiovisual fiction, downgrades the value of emotions and feelings in the acquisition and deployment of adaptive social behavior. The fact that so much vicarious violence is presented with a moral framework only compounds the desensitizing action."