One can have arguments about Cartesian thinking, but all I really needed to know about Descartes is that in order to "prove" that animals were only machines which could not feel and only responded in instinctive, machinistic ways, he first nailed his wife's living dog to a board and then dissected it--while it was still alive, and then repeated this little experiment by nailing other dogs to barn walls and eviscerating them. Over their screams of pain, he assured his audience that the dogs felt nothing.
Which brings me to a great article in the times about a part of the brain known as the insula. The insula was, for some time, thought to be either a) useless or b) part of the primal brain or c) both. One of the reasons why Cartesian thinking fails us on so many levels on so many different occasions is that it leads us to believe that if we cannot see a function for something, it must not have a function. Even if we are highly trained neuroscientists who presumably believe in evolution and should know better.
About a decade ago, a neuropsychologist (Antonio Damasio, now at USC and, coincidentally, my brother's supervisor) proposed the somatic marker hypothesis, in which he postulated that reason and emotion could not, in fact, be separated. Emotions and feelings are intertwined with rational thinking. The development of fMRIs (functional magnetic resonance imaging) has supported this hypothesis.
What other scholars have also found is that while we commonly believe that we first have a rational/mental response to a stimulus which then triggers a bodily response, in fact it is often the other way around. Our bodies respond, and then our mind makes up a story for our bodily responses. Our thoughts then are colored by our physicality. If we pay enough attention, perhaps we can see how our thoughts are colored by our emotions--and always will be. The idea that we can have a rational thought free of emotion or body, that we can be no more than walking brains, is an illusion.
P.S. The picture that accompanies this post doesn't have much (if anything) to do with this post. I just like it.
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