The Interplay between Emotion and Reason
"And this is of course the difficult job, is it not: to move the spirit from it's nowhere pedestal to a somewhere place, while preserving its dignity and importance."
I cry. There is pressure behind my eyes, my skin turns blotchy and my lips tremble, and mucus clogs my airways, making it difficult to breath. I hate crying in front of others: not because I want to hide how upset I am, but because the second that most people perceive my emotional state as fragile, they assume my reasoning and mental functions are also not sound. The outward expression of an inward instability is something we save for those who we know and trust best. They do not view our emotionality as a weakness, they already know us to be strong. Crying is represented in our culture as a lack of control. When upset, the "ideal" is to keep a cool head (and a poker face), not allowing emotions to enter into the decision making process. However, I submit that without our emotional base, rationality would have no reason or foundation upon which to operate.
A multitude of opinions are found on the subject: are emotions more a function of the heart or of the head? According to Antonio Damasio (1), emotions and feelings are an integral part of all thought; yet we as humans spend much of our time attempting to disregard and hide them. In the view of source (2), experience is the result of integration of cognition and feelings. In either view, it remains indisputable that emotions are not what we typically make them out to be: the unwanted step-sister of our cultural sweetheart reason. Reason in our culture denotes intelligence, cognition, and control. Emotions seems such a "scary" concept to our collective m...
... middle of paper ...
...tenderness, and luster gone. Is this also reflective of some human insecurity? Not until we can bridge the illusioned gap between our emotions and our cognition can we understand fully the relationship between our brain and our behavior.
References
1) A.R. Damasio, Descartes' Error, 1994
2) Thinking, Emotions, and the Brain
http://www.drweitz.com/scientific/brain.htm
3) From Neurobiology to Psychopathology: Integrating Cognition and Emotion, on the NIMH website
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/diva/neuropsych.cfm
4) Laughing out Loud to Good Health.
http://library.thinkquest.org/25500/index2.htm?tqskip1=1&tqtime=0416
5) William Shakespeare (1564–1616). The Oxford Shakespeare. 1914. , on the bartleby website.
http://www.bartleby.com/70/2041.html
6 Theories of Emotion--Understanding our own Emotional Experience.
http://www.bartleby.com/70/2041.html
Phones use while driving is one of the worst habits to have. Drivers who text while driving are twice as likely to crash than some who is drinking and driving (New Approaches to End Texting While Driving). Teenagers believe they are the best drivers and can multitask while driving. In order to text while driving you have to be looking at your phone. If you are looking phone you are not taking precaution to what in front of you. People think looking down for one second will not hurt. In one second anything could happen such as hitting someone or even running off the road. Other people ar...
In 1776, Jefferson was a part of the five-man committee drafted to write the Declaration of Independence, which states why we demanded freedom and independence. He was appointed leader of the five-man committee because he had already established a reputation for himself. This reputation came after he published “A Summary View of the Right of British America”. It was proposed in 1774 and was a set of instructions addressed to the first Continental
Although there are many causes of Pancreatic Cancer, there are also various ways to prevent the risk of being diagnosed with this often preventable disease.
Most of the necessities humans need are provided in supermarkets, in fact supermarkets have become a necessity for our everyday life. They are now the main source of water, food, clothes and everyday tools. Therefore, the plastic bags demanded and supplied in this industry increase every day. In the past decade, we produced as much plastic as we did in the whole twentieth century (Freinkel, 2011). This exponential increase of a non-biodegradable material has negatively impacted our environment immensely. Plastic production requires our dwindling fossil fuel resources, robs away animal lives, litters our beautiful landscapes and even affects our very own well-being. Hence, if plastic production doesn’t diminish immediately, we will suffer great
His robust ideas and speeches guided the Union to freedom from the British Empire. The Declaration Of Independence is a renowned achievement in which he declared all men equal and promised Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. In the most consequential election to date, Jefferson prevailed and made many profound contributions to the US, essentially doubling the size of our nation with the Louisiana purchase. Thomas Jefferson is a respected and reproached man in almost equal measure in American History, inspiring heroic ideas for the founding of the United States, but also created some of its crucial forthcomings.
Dracula kills Lucy who is a sweet, victorian woman that did not deserve to be bit by Dracula. Killing people, to most people, would be an action only a purely evil person would do “Lucy’s eyes in form and colour; but Lucy’s eyes unclean and full of hell-fire, instead of the pure, gentle ors we knew” (226). Lucy getting bit not only hurt Lucy, but it caused all the people near and dear to her hurt also. Vampire-Lucy still looks pure and sweet which is even harder on the people she loves because they see that she looks beautiful and like herself but she is not herself. When something evil is being hidden as something good it is extremely evil and hurts the people that love and care for her. He does not act how a civilized and well manored man should act. He hurts other people to benefit himself. Clearly such actions are incredibly evil and no sane person would think to do such a
Getting a result from a process of logical thinking does not mean that I cannot be emotional. I can also feel, to love someone or hate someone but I insist that emotions should be led by logical facts and the other way around. When it comes to real business, we should not let emotion clouds our judgments and we should get happy or furious by the facts that presented to us.
...l. After discovering this, Van Helsing, Dr. Seward, Quincey, and Arthur hunted her, and killed the evil soul that had taken over her body. She then truly dies and is left in her natural, humane state. Also, Jonathan facing Dracula is another example of good versus evil, as seen when Jonathan wrote that “when the Count saw [his] face, his eyes blazed with a sort of demoniac fury, and he suddenly made a grab at [his] throat. [Jonathan] drew away, and [the Count’s] hand touched the string of beads that held the crucifix.” (21). Jonathan unknowing put himself in danger by entering the Count’s castle, in which there was only evil. He could only protect himself by possessing religious objects, of which the Count, a demonic character, was afraid of. Good and evil was also demonstrated through the relationship between kind and purely good characters opposing evil characters.
Can emotions sometimes get the best of a person? Can one ever get too emotional? In William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, multiple ways one can go about characterizing Hamlet. Soliloquy Two and Soliloquy Five characterize Hamlet as a man driven by his emotions showing that one's emotional state can alter one's decisions drastically.
This country was founded on very prominent thinking. Before our founding fathers had even conceived the thought of birthing a new country, higher thinking had occurred before hand. The people had stopped, evaluated, and analyzed their own principals in a philosophical manner, thus the Age of Reason had begun. Today, there are many different values in today’s American society in contrast with ones from the Age of Reason.
In the article it is clear what the argument is about as presented in the title “Why College Freshman Need to Take Emotions 101”. These experts studied many ways of how college students have many reasons to be in the mind set they are in from the beginning of early life. The two Yale Center authors Diana Divecha and Robin Stern who performed a research to determine the cause and effect of college students who was dealing with my problems including anxiety, emotional, health, and even living without the dependency of there parents.
were used in nature and strong and weak were used in quality. In the procedure
Everyone has heard a cashier one time or another mumble, “Paper or plastic?” as he put their groceries in a bag, but do shoppers know the effects of each vessel in which they carry their comestibles? There are many issues and benefits to both paper and plastic. The making and recycling of both paper and plastic bags can harm the environment. One must also look at the costs of making each bag. The convenience of each is also something to look at. Many people jump to conclusion that paper bags are better for the environment without knowing the facts. Since plastic bags are preferred by customers and plastic bags actually do not hurt the environment as much as paper ones do, consumers should feel at ease when choosing plastic.
In the 1870’s, plastic was discovered in the United States when John Wesley Hyatt was trying to create a different material to make billiard balls (Manrich, 3). Little did he know it would majorly evolve into material we use everyday. However, plastics are now taking over our landfills. The average American throws away one-hundred and eighty-five pounds of plastic a year (Popescu, 121). The answer to decrease this statistic is easy: recycling. I believe that recycling will help eliminate littering and the growth of landfills, while also creating jobs for the unemployed. Not only does recycling plastic help eliminate littering, but also reuses the plastic so there is not a production of additional unneeded plastics. The
One scientist, Damasio, provided an explanation how emotions can be felt in humans biologically. Damasio suggested, “Various brain structures map both the organism and external objects to create what he calls a second order representation. This mapping of the organism and the object most likely occurs in the thalamus and cingulate cortices. A sense of self in the act of knowing is created, and the individual knows “to whom this is happening.” The “seer” and the “seen,” the “thought” and the “thinker” are one in the same.” By mapping the brain scientists can have a better understandi...