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emotional barriers to rational dialogue
Feb. 8th, 2006 04:11 pmOur ability to understand and make judgments about our environment evolved out of the need to know what is going on around us in order to find food or keep from becoming food. It is linked to some of the 'oldest' parts of the brain such as the amygdala, a portion of the brain that sifts through sensory data for threats and governs emotional responses like fear and fight-or-flight.
The human capacity for thought is still connected to the amygdala. The need to understand is fundamentally an emotional need. Failure to come up with an answer to an important question is deemed a threat.
The brain is capable of holding myriad complex and even contradictory thoughts at once, because it is not a CPU but is more like a house with several rooms. One room can hold one thought and another room can hold another thought which is in direct contradiction to the first.
This kind of inconsistency does not always cause dissonance. When it does, though, the dissonance creates an emotional dilemma, activating the amygdala which adds an exclamation point to demands for a resolution to the crisis.
When this happens, the brain looks for a quick answer it can apply to make the distress stop. There is even a biosociological theory of religion rooted in this observation. A while ago i built on this and suggested that it creates an opportunity for memetic parasites to thrive in human culture.
There is another way in which emotion can get in the way of logic, and that is the emotional investment which most (if not all) people put into thoughts, concepts, ideas, or cultural labels. These things become a part of our identity, and so information that contradicts what we have invested in is perceived as a threat to our well-being.
It was because of all this that i was not surprised by results which i cited a couple of weeks ago about the way in which emotion prevents some information from being processed logically or rationally.
Now, let me be clear that this does not mean that we are totally helpless in the face of our emotional response. One of the beauties of the human mind is that we have the capability to override our emotions with force of will. But this emotional response makes it difficult, and also makes it possible for memes to override logic or rationality.
[By the way, awareness of this does not make one automatically immune to it, which leads to some interesting sensations when you realizing you're reacting in ways you 'know' are "irrational" but which still make sense, because they reflect your experiences rather than the concepts you are able to parrot back on demand.]
I bring this up now because there is also a dimension of restriction that comes with the experience of trauma related to oppression. It is very difficult to communicate beyond this trauma, especially if someone associates a certain kind of language with the mistreatment they received.
For example, it is very hard for me (and many of the people i know and/or love) to remain rational when we hear certain kinds of religious language which we came, during the course of our lives, to associate with mistreatment. When this happens, the words are not "communication of ideas" but "signal of impending threat."
I make the effort to see things rationally, but do not always succeed.
These are all powerful impediments to peaceful co-existence and rational dialogue between people, which it should be a cultural priority to address.
The human capacity for thought is still connected to the amygdala. The need to understand is fundamentally an emotional need. Failure to come up with an answer to an important question is deemed a threat.
The brain is capable of holding myriad complex and even contradictory thoughts at once, because it is not a CPU but is more like a house with several rooms. One room can hold one thought and another room can hold another thought which is in direct contradiction to the first.
This kind of inconsistency does not always cause dissonance. When it does, though, the dissonance creates an emotional dilemma, activating the amygdala which adds an exclamation point to demands for a resolution to the crisis.
When this happens, the brain looks for a quick answer it can apply to make the distress stop. There is even a biosociological theory of religion rooted in this observation. A while ago i built on this and suggested that it creates an opportunity for memetic parasites to thrive in human culture.
There is another way in which emotion can get in the way of logic, and that is the emotional investment which most (if not all) people put into thoughts, concepts, ideas, or cultural labels. These things become a part of our identity, and so information that contradicts what we have invested in is perceived as a threat to our well-being.
It was because of all this that i was not surprised by results which i cited a couple of weeks ago about the way in which emotion prevents some information from being processed logically or rationally.
Now, let me be clear that this does not mean that we are totally helpless in the face of our emotional response. One of the beauties of the human mind is that we have the capability to override our emotions with force of will. But this emotional response makes it difficult, and also makes it possible for memes to override logic or rationality.
[By the way, awareness of this does not make one automatically immune to it, which leads to some interesting sensations when you realizing you're reacting in ways you 'know' are "irrational" but which still make sense, because they reflect your experiences rather than the concepts you are able to parrot back on demand.]
I bring this up now because there is also a dimension of restriction that comes with the experience of trauma related to oppression. It is very difficult to communicate beyond this trauma, especially if someone associates a certain kind of language with the mistreatment they received.
For example, it is very hard for me (and many of the people i know and/or love) to remain rational when we hear certain kinds of religious language which we came, during the course of our lives, to associate with mistreatment. When this happens, the words are not "communication of ideas" but "signal of impending threat."
I make the effort to see things rationally, but do not always succeed.
These are all powerful impediments to peaceful co-existence and rational dialogue between people, which it should be a cultural priority to address.
