I had lunch with a retired neurologist, a few weeks ago. We talked about his grandson’s research grant. He beamed when he explained the study of people was first and foremost the understanding of how they feel. His grandson is a neuroscientist whose laboratory is remote villages all over the world.
We talked about my head injury and how it changed my life…..How for a long time I was hollow, unable to feel . My memories were just beyond my grasp and I was numb. I described my reawakening in the last 18 months. My friend said it made perfect sense and he referred me to a Wall Street Journal article from a few months back. He told me about a USC scientist named Damasio.
The conversation triggered my research. It ended some of my confusion about what happened to me. And when I read an article in a newspaper I decided to write about it.
50 years ago, Noam Chomsky first published a radical series of ideas that began research into our interior lives. Cognitive psychology researched human thought, including memory, language, and perception.
From computers to robots this field of study was based on the idea that emotions were separate from thought. Actually emotions were considered a roadblock to reason. Most scientists assumed that emotions interfered with rational thought. A person without any emotions was in theory a better thinker, since their “computer” could process information without any distractions. Our brains were “thinking machines” Machines don’t have feelings.
Lately in a true paradigm shift, another science revolution is underway; researchers have discovered that it is impossible to understand how we think without understanding how we feel.
Damasio sought out patients who had suffered brain injuries that prevented them from perceiving their own feelings, and put this idea to the test. The lives of these patients quickly fell apart, he found, because they could not make effective decisions. Some made terrible investments and ended up bankrupt; most just spent hours deliberating over irrelevant details, such as where to eat lunch. In my case I made a series of similar bad decisions that confused my children and those closest to me. I had all the symptoms of a traumatic brain injury that is often a life sentence. The evidence suggests that proper thinking requires feeling. In my case pure logic without feeling is darkness not light..
Brain imaging has recently been used to demonstrate that our emotions play an essential role in ordinary moral decision-making. Whenever we contemplate hurting someone else, our brain automatically generates a negative emotion. This signal can end violence before it begins. Accumulating evidence suggests that psychopaths suffer from a severe emotional disorder..... they can't think properly because they can't feel properly.
"This lack of emotion is what causes the dangerous behavior," said James Blair, a cognitive psychologist at the National Institute of Mental Health. So the inability to feel is a disease.
I'm fairly confident that I am not a danger to anyone these days and probably never was......In my case it’s “I feel therefore I am.” And I am alive and awake! I no longer live on the darkside of the Moon.
I feel without logic that the stream of souls I reconnected to in this magic place has provided my second chance.
