Hearts & Minds
how we think without understanding how we
feel.
Since Plato, scholars have drawn a
clear distinction between thinking
and feeling. Now science suggests
that our emotions are what make
thought possible.
"Because we subscribed to this false ideal of
rational, logical thought, we diminished the
importance of everything else," said Marvin
Minsky, a professor at MIT and pioneer of
artificial intelligence. "Seeing our emotions as
distinct from thinking was really quite
disastrous."
By Jonah Lehrer | April 29, 2007
Just over 50 years ago, a group of brash
young scholars at an MIT symposium
introduced a series of ideas that would forever
alter the way we think about how we think.
In three groundbreaking papers, including one
on grammar by a 27-year-old linguist named
Noam Chomsky, the scholars ignited what is
now known as the cognitive revolution, which
was built on the radical notion that it is
possible to study, with scientific precision, the
actual processes of thought. The movement
eventually freed psychology from the grip of
behaviorism, a scientific movement popular
in America that studied behavior as a proxy
for understanding the mind. Cognitive
psychology has fueled a generation of
productive research, yielding deep insights
into many aspects of thought, including
memory, language, and perception.
Tomorrow, Harvard University is celebrating
this intellectual achievement with a discussion
featuring Chomsky and other luminaries of
the revolution. But even as Harvard, and the
field, celebrate the 50th anniversary of a true
paradigm shift, another revolution is
underway.
Ever since Plato, scholars have drawn a clear
distinction between thinking and feeling.
Cognitive psychology tended to reinforce this
divide: emotions were seen as interfering with
cognition; they were the antagonists of
reason. Now, building on more than a decade
of mounting work, researchers have
discovered that it is impossible to understand
This new scientific appreciation of emotion is
profoundly altering the field. The top journals
are now filled with research on the connections
between emotion and cognition. New academic
stars have emerged, such as Antonio Damasio
of USC, Joseph LeDoux of NYU, and Joshua
Greene, a rising scholar at Harvard. At the
same time, the influx of neuroscientists into the
field, armed with powerful brain-scanning
technology, has underscored the thinkingfeeling connection.
"When you look at the actual anatomy of the
brain you quickly see that everything is
connected," said Elizabeth Phelps, a cognitive
neuroscientist at NYU. "The brain is a category
buster."
The field has largely welcomed the new
emotion studies, according to scientists. They
have yielded discoveries that are widely
acknowledged as important. And they have
even generated enthusiasm among the leaders
of the cognitive revolution, as emotion studies
have helped ground cognitive psychology -which has had a penchant for the abstract -- in
the real world, uncovering important science
behind everything from how people decide
what to buy in a supermarket to how they make
weighty moral decisions.
"People were coming up with all these lovely
theories that don't relate to anything that's
going on in the real world," said Jerome
Bruner, a psychologist at NYU and luminary of
the cognitive revolution who will speak at the
Harvard symposium. "If we can get back to a
sense of cognition that's more grounded in
reality, then that's a good thing."
From its inception, the cognitive revolution
was guided by a metaphor: the mind is like a
computer. We are a set of software programs
running on 3 pounds of neural hardware. And
cognitive psychologists were interested in the
software. The computer metaphor helped
stimulate
some
crucial
scientific
breakthroughs. It led to the birth of artificial
intelligence and helped make our inner life a
subject suitable for science.
For the first time, cognitive psychologists
were able to simulate aspects of human
thought. At the seminal MIT symposium, held
on Sept. 11, 1956, Herbert Simon and Allen
Newell announced that they had invented a
"thinking machine" -- basically a room full of
vacuum tubes -- capable of solving difficult
logical problems. (In one instance, the
machine even improved on the work of
Bertrand Russell.)
Over time, these simulations grew
increasingly sophisticated. By "reverseengineering"
the
mind,
cognitive
psychologists gained important insights into
how some basic mental processes, like
learning and memory, might actually
function. Much of the work developing the
field was done at the Harvard Center for
Cognitive Studies, which was founded in
1960 by Bruner and George Miller, who is
now an emeritus professor of psychology at
Princeton.
Speaking at that same 1956 symposium,
Miller described how, at any given moment,
our working memory could contain only
about seven bits of information. According to
Miller, the mind dealt with this limited
"channel capacity" by constantly grouping our
sensations into "chunks." This suggested that
crucial aspects of cognition were done,
without our awareness, by the unconscious
brain.
But the computer metaphor was misleading,
at least in one crucial respect. Computers
don't have feelings. Feelings didn't fit into the
preferred language of thought. Because our
emotions weren't reducible to bits of
information or logical structures, cognitive
psychologists diminished their importance.
"They regarded emotions as an artifact of
subjective experience, and thus not worthy of
investigation," said Joseph LeDoux, a
neuroscientist at NYU.
In part, this was a necessary omission.
Behaviorists attacked cognitive psychology as
lacking rigor. Because our inner mental
processes couldn't be measured, the
behaviorists, eager to expunge anything that
smacked of Freud or introspection, disregarded
them as irrelevant and unscientific. Although
cognitive psychologists aggressively defended
their approach -- Chomsky quipped that
defining psychology as the science of behavior
was like defining physics as the science of
meter reading -- they were inevitably forced to
focus on the facets of cognition they could best
understand. At the time, emotions just seemed
too mysterious.
"These were nerdy guys interested in the nerdy
aspects of cognition," said Steven Pinker, a
psychologist at Harvard and moderator of
tomorrow's panel. "It's not that our emotions
aren't interesting topics of study, but these
weren't the topics that they were interested in."
Instead, early cognitive psychologists focused
on the features of mind that seemed most
machine-like, such as the construction of
grammatical sentences.
Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist at USC, has
played a pivotal role in challenging the old
assumptions and establishing emotions as an
important scientific subject. When Damasio
first published his results in the early 1990s,
most cognitive scientists assumed that
emotions interfered with rational thought. A
person without any emotions should be a better
thinker, since their cortical computer could
process information without any distractions.
But Damasio sought out patients who had
suffered brain injuries that prevented them
from perceiving their own feelings, and put this
idea to the test. The lives of these patients
quickly fell apart, he found, because they
could not make effective decisions. Some
made terrible investments and ended up
bankrupt; most just spent hours deliberating
over irrelevant details, such as where to eat
lunch. These results suggest that proper
thinking requires feeling. Pure reason is a
disease.
Scientists are now finding more examples of
emotional processing almost everywhere they
look. A study led by Brian Knutson of
Stanford University, published last January,
demonstrated that our daily shopping
decisions depend on the relative activity of
various emotional brain regions. What we end
up buying is largely dictated by these instant
feelings, and not by some rational calculation.
In 2004, Harvard psychologist Joshua Greene
used brain imaging to demonstrate that our
emotions play an essential role in ordinary
moral decision-making. Whenever we
contemplate hurting someone else, our brain
automatically generates a negative emotion.
This visceral signal discourages violence.
Greene's data builds on evidence suggesting
that psychopaths suffer from a severe
emotional disorder -- that they can't think
properly because they can't feel properly.
"This lack of emotion is what causes the
dangerous behavior," said James Blair, a
cognitive psychologist at the National
Institute of Mental Health.
This new science of emotion has brought a
new conception of what it means to think,
and, in some sense, a rediscovery of the
unconscious. In the five decades since the
cognitive revolution began, scientists have
developed ways of measuring the brain that
could not have been imagined at the time.
Researchers can make maps of the brain at
work, and literally monitor emotions as they
unfold, measuring the interplay of feeling and
thinking in colorful snapshots. Although we
aren't aware of this mental activity -- much of
it occurs unconsciously -- it plays a crucial
role in governing all aspects of thought. The
black box of the mind has been flung wide
open.
The increasing use of sophisticated imaging is
clearly the direction in which the field is
moving, scientists say. And yet some cognitive
psychologists worry that this "trend to integrate
with neuroscience" means that some aspects of
cognition will be neglected.
"Everybody is now looking at these very big
mental processes, like attention or emotion,"
said Pinker. "But I think that one of the great
things about the cognitive revolution is that it
went all the way down to the detailed rules and
algorithms used by the mind. I hope we don't
lose that."
Pinker hopes the Harvard commemoration will
lead people to reflect on the cognitive
revolution, to think about "what it got right and
what it got wrong."
The lasting influence of the cognitive
revolution is apparent in the language used by
neuroscientists when describing the mind. For
example, the unconscious is often described as
a massive computer, processing millions of bits
of information per second. Emotions emerge
from this activity. Feelings can be seen as
responses to facts and sensations that exist
beyond the tight horizon of awareness. They
can also be thought of as messages from the
unconscious, as conclusions it has reached after
considering a wide range of information -- they
are the necessary foundation of thought.
As Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the
University of Virginia, recently wrote, "It is
only because our emotional brains work so well
that our reasoning can work at all."
Minsky talks about
life, love in the age of
artificial intelligence
better at controlling the world than animals
are? The argument is: because they have far
more different ways to think than any
competitor.
Q What, then, is the most important thing for
us to understand about our own thinking?
December 4, 2006
Computer science professor Marvin Minsky
of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
is known for feats that range from inventing
the ultrahigh-resolution confocal microscope
to helping found the field of artificial
intelligence, which aims to create computers
that mimic the human mind.
After 20 years of publishing silence, he has
just come out with a new book. Called "The
Emotion Machine," it argues that, contrary to
popular conception, emotions aren't distinct
from rational thought; rather, they are simply
another way of thinking, one that computers
could perform. He spoke with Globe reporter
Carey Goldberg.
Q So here you are, a pioneer of artificial
intelligence, writing a book about emotions.
What's going on?
A Somehow, most theories of how the mind
works have gotten confused by trying to
divide the mind in a simple way.
My view is that the reason we're so good at
things is not that we have the best way but
because we have so many ways, so when any
one of them fails, you can switch to another
way of thinking. So instead of thinking of the
mind as basically a rational process which is
distorted by emotion, or colored and made
more exciting by emotion -- that's the
conventional view -- emotions themselves are
different ways to think. Being angry is a very
useful way to solve problems, for instance, by
intimidating an opponent or getting rid of
people who bother you.
The theme of the book is really
resourcefulness and why are people so much
A Your mind can work on several levels at
once so, when you think about any particular
subject, you also can think about the way
you've been thinking -- and then use that
experience to change yourself. Similarly, when
you admire some teacher or leader, you can try
to imitate their ways to think -- instead of just
learning the things that they say.
Q What, in your view, is love?
A There's short-term infatuation, where
someone gets strongly attracted to someone
else, and that's probably very often a turningoff of certain things rather than something
extra: It's a mental state where you remove
your criticism. So to say someone is beautiful
is not necessarily positive, it may be something
happening so you can't see anything wrong
with this person. And then there are long-term
attachments, where you adopt the goals of the
other person and somehow make serious
changes in what you're going to do.
Q And what is the self?
A We often imagine that there's a little person
inside ourselves who makes our important
decisions for us. However, a more useful idea
is that you build many different models of
yourself for dealing with different situations -and each of those self-images can add to your
resourcefulness.
Q Are people machines? And how should we
feel about that?
A We don't like to think of ourselves as
machines because this evokes an outdated
image of a clunky, mechanical, lifeless thing.
We prefer the idea that inside ourselves is some
sort of spirit, essence, or soul that wants and
feels and thinks for us. However, your laptop
computer has billions of parts, and it would
be ridiculous to attribute all its abilities to
some spirit inside its battery. And a human
brain is far more complex than is any
computer today.
Q So a machine can be made to have
emotional states if it is programmed with the
right ways to think?
A Yes, that is the view I take in this book, but
to actually build machines like ourselves,
we'll need to develop more theories about the
kinds of resources that human minds use.
Researchers in the field called artificial
intelligence have already developed ways to
make separate machines that can do various
things that people can do. What's new in this
book is that it suggests a new way to combine
those older ideas.
However, there still is much more that we'll
need to do before we can make machines that
are as resourceful as we are, so this project will
need some more years of support.
Q So, if your ideas about this could be carried
out, how might that affect my everyday life?
A Soon the world will face a shortage of labor
as people live longer and have fewer children.
Our standards of living will sharply decline
unless we can manage to make machines that
have the common-sense human abilities that
our industries will need.
Also, if we succeed at this, we'll develop new
ideas about what happens inside our own minds
-- and this should show us ways to improve
some of our own ancient ways to think, as well
as to enhance and extend the abilities of the
machines we make.