Emotion and Reason in the Future of Human Life

Abstract

Emotion and reason have traditionally been considered polar opposites but modern neurobiological thinking suggests that they are not. In this chapter I present some of the findings that led to this idea, introduce a hypothesis, the somatic marker hypothesis, concerning the role of emotion in the process of reasoning and decision-making, and discuss some preliminary testing of the hypothesis. In this context, the reference to the future of human life should now be a bit more transparent. It is difficult to conceive of any future for human life without an abundance of collective human wisdom and such wisdom depends upon a well tempered machinery for decision-making within which emotion and reason are interwoven. All the reader will have left to wonder about is the connection of these topics to the environment. The future of human life is inseparable from a concern for the environment, in the broadest sense of the term. The collective wisdom required for the continuation of human life is the same as that required for maintaining a survivable physical and social environment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)