2/20/2023 0 Comments No emotion![]() If you work, it is because you feel connected to others – to your colleagues, but also to your family – through your work, the fact that it brings you some sense of satisfaction – a set of emotional rewards, in fact. Such is the fundamental misunderstanding of pure cognitivists, but also of many in our Western society who are so influenced by Cartesianism: we imagine that reason is a sufficient mechanism to meet the challenges of everyday life and to determine appropriate behaviours in given situations. You also need to feel a certain internal push. Being intelligent and alert is not sufficient. What? Actually, to do a job, to perform a task well, you need incentives. They are like you or me, and yet, they are missing something. Yes, even though they do well on intelligence tests. ‘It is because of our emotions and feelings that we get up in the morning, not because of reasoning’Īnd they’re unable to hold down a job for very long. As a result, these patients go around in circles, they describe circles of some kind, incapable of deciding. So, they reason well, yet are incapable of “modulating” their reasoning based on given positive or negative emotions. What is particular about them is that their knowledge is intact – they are perfectly capable of reasoning, that is – but they lack affective resonance. Indeed, there exists a category of patients, which, in our laboratory, we call “Elliot-type patients,” who show lesions in certain regions of their prefrontal cortexes. ![]() You also came across some clinical cases of patients who are cut off from their emotions and systematically make the wrong decisions. How could this be? Our working hypothesis was that there existed a form of pre-reflective and precognitive intelligence that was fundamental to survival, and that the study of emotions and feelings, of affect, let’s say, was the key to understanding it. ![]() ![]() This suggests that many organisms have long responded well to adaptive challenges and have made intelligent decisions without thoughts, ideas, images or minds. If you approach the living from a broader evolutionary perspective, you realize that life is 4 billion years old, while brains have existed for only 500 million years, approximately. But to us, this vision of things seemed incomplete and misguided. What was in vogue at the time was comparing the human brain to a computer with algorithms in charge of reasoning. The 1980s were marked by the explosion of cognitive science and the progress of artificial intelligence. Why did you become interested in the psychology of emotions, a subject that was not at all in vogue in the 1980s?Īntónio Damásio: When my wife Hanna and I began this research in the laboratory we ran, several of our colleagues thought we had gone mad. ![]()
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