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Demasio’s work in the field of neuroscience is truly captivating because his work challenges the way we understand the human condition.  I have grown up under the impression that emotion should be left out of decision making, that emotions get in the way of “rational thought.”  However, in my time at Haverford, I have come to question our faith in rationality.  I certainly believe that rational thought is useful for creating “stories” that allow us to easily make sense of our world, but my concern has been with how much faith we are putting into those stories.  Essentially, my biggest problem with today’s faith in rationality is how much trust we put into our minds.  (See Grobstein, Writing Descartes) I do not think we should continue to put so much faith into our minds/thought process; we should not accept “rational thought” as something certain, as the pathway to objective truth.

The very fact that we have been so sure that emotions should be ruled out of rationality is an example of how misleading our stories can be.  Demasio gives strong evidence in Descartes’ Error and in this paper suggesting that emotion is actually a crucial aspect of reasoning, challenging our previous “rational” belief that emotions only taint our thinking.  It appears that the truth is none of our thoughts can be this pure, emotionless process.  Consequently, we should cease to think of our thoughts as something pure and free from being influenced by our environment in ways that may not be beneficial.  This “rational thought” that we as a generation have become enamored with cannot exist.

I apologize, I do not think I am expressing myself clearly and I will try state my points more coherently, but that may not come until future writing.  I only wish to express my belief that rational thought can be misleading, and to rule out emotion, to rule out our humanity, seems foolish to me.  A politician can present a rational story for why we should invade another country, for why we need to start a war.  However, this rational story can mislead individuals into supporting a war that one, may not even be a “rational” solution to whatever problem, and two, goes against our emotional intuitions of empathy.  To focus on rational thoughts is to lose sight of a much larger picture.

To move on, Demasio is proposing to us that emotions are far more important to our thought process than we have ever given them credit.  The implications for this are diverse and Demasio tries to tie them to education.  I believe Demasio is pursuing an important line of thought in doing so, but I was disappointed with the conclusions of this paper.  As Demasio would likely agree, there is still much to be said and thought about along these lines, and I was disappointed because Demasio did not pursue these thoughts further in this paper.  It is clear that Demasio’s direction is sound, as learning, memory and decision making, processes crucial to education, seem to be invariably connected to emotion.  However, this paper is more of a call for further investigation rather than an actual discussion as to the implications of emotion in education.  I do not mean to sound so critical, as Demasio is taking an important step, I am only anxious to see what comes of it. 

Demasio writes, “The more educators come to understand the nature of the relationship between emotion and cognition, the better they may be able to leverage this relationship in the design of learning environments.”  I was disappointed because Demasio did not speak to how one could “leverage this relationship” in the classroom.  But perhaps it is better he didn’t, as this leaves the question open for us to consider ourselves.  So how can we take this knowledge of emotion’s role in cognition and restructure the institution of learning?

These are only a couple thoughts – I have much more thinking to do and am somewhat slow at piecing my thoughts together into a coherent proposal.  Bear with me.