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Reason Vs Emotion

Reason and emotion are intertwined and both necessary for decision making. A neurologist studied a patient, Elliot, who had brain damage impairing his ability to experience emotions. Without emotions, Elliot struggled to make even simple decisions. The study showed emotions play a key role in reasoning and choice. The passage argues against the traditional view that reason alone is sufficient, and that emotions must be controlled. It indicates reason relies on emotions, and is "the slave of the passions".

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93 views2 pages

Reason Vs Emotion

Reason and emotion are intertwined and both necessary for decision making. A neurologist studied a patient, Elliot, who had brain damage impairing his ability to experience emotions. Without emotions, Elliot struggled to make even simple decisions. The study showed emotions play a key role in reasoning and choice. The passage argues against the traditional view that reason alone is sufficient, and that emotions must be controlled. It indicates reason relies on emotions, and is "the slave of the passions".

Uploaded by

iAlex11
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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REASON VS EMOTION

1. According to the author, what is the relationship between reason and emotion?

Emotions help us analyze and justify our reasoning, and reason helps us refine our
emotions (Artz, n.d., #). To appreciate this more clearly, we must consider how both our
thinking and our emotions are tools for understanding the world around us, yet neither
alone is sufficient.

Antonio Damasio, a neurologist, studied a patient named Elliot who had a tumor
removed from his frontal lobe. After the surgery, Elliot was unable to make decisions, even
for routine tasks. This was because the surgery had damaged the part of Elliot's brain that
was responsible for generating emotions. As a result, Elliot was unable to feel emotions,
and this made it difficult for him to make decisions. Damasio's research showed that
emotions play a crucial role in the decision-making process and without them, even simple
decisions can become impossible.

At the beginning of the text, we can see how the author says that conventional
neuroscience assumed the irrationality of human emotions, so realizing that people
without emotions weren’t able to make any decision was a completely unexpected
discovery. Since the Enlightenment and the Rationalism era, humans were taught that
reason alone was sufficient for living, and that emotions had to be neglected in any ways,
but the author, in his book Descartes’ error, he proved this way of thinking wrong, and
showed that, in fact, without emotions there is no reason.

2. Why would a person, who no longer felt any emotions, have a hard time making
rational decisions?

I think that a person that has no feelings can have a very hard time when coming
down to making a decision, for many reasons.

First of all, I think that the base of life is emotions and that without that nothing can
be done. When coming down to making a decision, you should have some kind of feeling or
emotion about doing that action. So if you don’t have emotions, it's just like numb, and you
don't really care about what you are going to do and the consequences it involves.
REASON VS EMOTION

Therefore, when making a decision it can be really difficult for the patient because
that lack of feeling makes you have no sense of what you are doing and makes things a lot
more difficult. So if this happened to me, I would do the same thing the patient is doing. If I
have no feelings, I would have lo analyze every possible option there is in detail, and after a
long period of time make a decision.

3. What does the final line of the reading, “reason was ‘the slave of the passions”
mean? Consider the meaning of that line in the context of the whole passage.

I think that it is impossible to try and to make decisions without have feelings or
emotions. Everything that we talk about on a day to day is related to emotions in some way,
so it is impossible to reason without it. I think that that was the reason for which the
patient was so undecided because of the lack of emotions that makes reason the slave of
passion.

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