For many decades, scientists have thought of cognition and emotion as two largely separate systems in the brain. Even as researchers began to find evidence of the interdependence of the two, this interaction was often seen in the light of emotions interfering with our higher level cognitive processes. As neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang describes it in Learning Landscapes, they have traditionally been treated like two players in a china shop: cognition the valuable glassware, emotions the toddler run amok, breaking the wares.
But recent findings in neuroscience have cast doubt on this traditional way of thinking. Or maybe, shattered it altogether.
“…the connection between emotion and cognition is being seen in a very different light”
Antonio Damasio and Mary Helen Immordino-YangBreakthrough Research on Emotions and Cognition
The roots of understanding this deep interconnection of cognition and emotion, like many breakthroughs in neuroscience, were found by studying patients with brain damage. The brain lesions these patients had suffered to a particular sector of the frontal lobe had not impacted their knowledge base or logical reasoning abilities. They understood what made a good business investment. They understood and could describe the social rules and convention that should guide one’s actions. Yet these previously upstanding men and women began to make disadvantageous decisions in many different aspects of their lives. Why?
It was found that what they could not do was use past emotional knowledge to guide the reasoning process. Even though they knew logically that a specific business deal was risky or that a certain decision could endanger their relationship with someone close to them, they could not access the past emotional knowledge and use that to guide the reasoning process.
Immordino-Yang and Damasio summarized this finding in Learning Landscapes:
“By compromising the possibility of evoking emotions associated with certain past situations, decision options, and outcomes, the patients became unable to select the most appropriate response based on their past experience. Their logic and knowledge could be intact, but they failed to use past emotional knowledge to guide the reasoning process… ”
In other words, emotions play a fundamental role in rational thought. Without the guidance of emotional learning and social feedback, rational thought and decision making are of little use.
The China Shop Analogy
This causes us to rethink our assumptions about the roles of emotion and cognition in the china shop. While cognition is still the valuable glassware, emotions are hardly the dangerous child run amok. They are more like the shelves, supporting and stabilizing the wares.
Without emotions, the higher level cognitive processes cannot function properly.
Implications for Learning
These findings on the fundamental role emotions play in our higher level cognitive processes should cause us to rethink how we value – or devalue – emotions in learning. Treating the acquisition of rational knowledge as the end goal of learning, while treating emotions as obstacles to be overcome in the process, is overly simplistic and robs us of the real gift of learning: to drive positive change in our lives.
It would be like having a car – a complex, sophisticated machine – and not knowing how to drive it. Cognition is the car, and emotions are the knowledge of how to drive it. Only when we recognize the essential role of emotion in rational thought will we really be able to learn – or teach – in a meaningful way.
If the purpose of learning is to drive positive change in our lives, emotions must play a central role.
“Yes, rational thought and logical reasoning do exist… but they cannot be recruited appropriately and usefully in the real world without emotion.”
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Antonio DamasioMary Helen Immordino-Yang on Emotions and Cognition
Watch this video of renowned neuroscientists Mary Helen Immordino-Yang discussing the importance emotions in learning.
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Michael Miller
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I have 43 students in my UP class.My problem is how to lead them to a same goal while the emotional change happens in different ways in each child ,at the same time I have only a few minutes to spent for them!I hope from you some remedies…
Hi Zeenath – I think the answer is inside your question! You can’t do 1-1 coaching with 43 students in a short time… so… what you can do is create more spaces for them to coach one another, and more spaces for reflection and “self-coaching.” Just for example, a really practical technique: You ask a powerful, open-ended question that blends emotion + cognition and say, “Turn to your partner and talk for 3 minutes about your views.”
Even better, the real Wow is you can do this in ANY content you’re teaching. Let’s suppose you are teaching about something very concrete… I don’t know… maybe: the difference between squares and rectangles.
Sometime in the lesson, you have explained the idea of sub-sets, maybe you said: “all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares.” (is that right?? I never taught math…)
Then, maybe you say: “Let’s take a moment of emotional intelligence here. Please turn to the person next to you, and together discuss for 3 minutes… what is something you two have in common that is not common to all the people in this room.”
Then, you walk around and listen to some answers, and, after they finish talking, you tell the students a few examples you heard.
Next, you very briefly (1-2 minutes) tell an example for yourself of a time you felt like you were similar in some ways… but different in other ways…. and how it felt. Then you ask them to draw either a rectangle or square, and to write how they feel either being in a larger set or a smaller set… and you post these on the wall under a sign: Sometimes we feel like rectangles, sometimes we feel like squares.
How does it sound? It’s not something to do once and done. The trick is to have this kind of moment every day and build a culture in your classroom of more openness, honesty, and emotional inquiry.
🙂
Geez…she would likely be reprimanded for undertaking this type of teaching. School is forv testing, not learning…havent you heard?
G
reat read. I’m a neurosurgery survivor with a massive right temporal lobe lesion.I live with memory impairment, partial blindness, and other symptoms. Emotion, music,and intelligence allow me to circumvent some of my handicaps. Thanks for the insight. -Mary Born
I found the video very interesting. Thank you for posting it.
I was on antipsychotics for many years, and I feel like it made me lose touch with my emotions. I began to frantically look up online advice for many of the decisions I faced, rather than partly relying on my gut feeling, as I had in the past. Incidentally, I had a bad feeling about taking antipsychotics, and many pointless and possibly damaging years on them tell me that feeling was probably right. I also struggle more with self-discipline than in the past. I sometimes wonder if my experience is anything like that famous railroad worker after he (physically) recovered from having a metal rod blasted through his frontal lobes. Allegedly, antipsychotics erode the frontal lobes.
I’ve always felt that I’m very sensitive to other people’s emotions and that I have emotional memory that helps me be compassionate but also is paralyzing and stress inducing. Does this make sense? I wish I wasn’t so affected by my emotions. I feel that as I become emotionally charged up wicheck is often, my cognitive capacity and decision making ability and memory decline. It becomes a vicious circle.
Hi Donna,
Control of our emotions becomes very easy if we are able to balance ourselves from within. Simple breathing exercises, focus and determination gives us complete control of all our actions. Suggest you lookup techniques of meditating and stay practicing. Slowly butt surely you will be able to control your emotions.