2. HOW WAS THIS DISCOVERY MADE?

GAZZANIGA

Split-brain surgery is a procedure in which the nerve connections between the two sides or hemispheres of the brain are severed in an attempt to control very severe epilepsy.
In the 1960s and 70s psychologist Michael S. Gazzaniga worked with patients who had undergone this surgery.
As a result he made a number of discoveries regarding the way the left and right hemispheres of the brain process information differently.

The discovery by LeDoux of the separate pathways for emotions and thoughts

Working with Gazzaniga in the 1970s Joseph LeDoux became hooked on studying the emotional brain when they discovered that emotions where still getting through to both hemispheres even though the hemispheres were disconnected.
This discovery suggested emotions were processed by another part of the brain using separate pathways. LeDoux then spent many years studying these pathways using rats.
In 1998 LeDoux published his findings in The Emotional Brain, the mysterious underpinnings of emotional life.
I quote from the Preface of his 1998 book “At that time (the late 70s) very few brain scientists were interested in emotions. In the intervening years, and especially recently, the topic has begun to be fairly heavily investigated, and a good deal of progress has been made. I thought it was time to share some of this information with the general public.

“The Emotional Brain provides an overview of my ideas about how emotions come from the brain. It is not meant as an all-encompassing survey of every aspect of how the brain produces emotions. It focuses on those issues that have interested me most, namely issues about how the brain detects and responds to emotionally arousing stimuli, how emotional learning occurs and emotional memories are formed, and how our conscious emotional feelings emerge from unconscious processes.”

Multiple Intelligences

We’ll hear more about Gazzaniga and LeDoux later but first a word about multiple intelligences
In 1983 Howard Gardner wrote a book called Frames of Mind in which he proposed that there was not just one monolithic kind of intelligence that was crucial for life success, but rather a wide spectrum of intelligences, with seven key varieties.
His list includes the two standard academic kinds, verbal and mathematical-logical alacrity, but it goes on to include spatial capacity, kinesthetic competence, musical ability and the personal intelligences divided into inter-personal and intra-personal.
I haven’t read this work but this summary has been taken from Daniel Goleman’s book – Emotional Intelligence.

Emotional Intelligence – Goleman

In 1996 psychologist Daniel Goleman’s book, “Emotional Intelligence – Why it can matter more than IQ” was published by Bloomsbury and became a number one best seller.
The paperback version is still prominent in bookstores today along with his more recent books. In Emotional Intelligence Goleman tells the following story under the heading of “Our Two Minds”
“A friend was telling me about her divorce, a painful separation. Her husband had fallen in love with a younger woman at work, and suddenly announced he was leaving to live with the other woman. Months of bitter wrangling over house, money, and custody of the children followed. Now, some months later, she was saying that her independence was appealing to her, that she was happy to be on her own. “I just don’t think about him anymore – I really don’t care” she said. But as she said it, her eyes momentarily welled up with tears.
“That moment of teary eyes could easily pass unnoted. But the empathic understanding that someone’s watering eyes means she is sad despite her words to the contrary is an act of comprehending just as surely as is distilling meaning from words on a printed page. One is an act of the emotional mind, the other of the rational mind. In a very real sense we have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels.”
As a result of Goleman’s books millions of people have been able to get a better fix on their emotional nature and have been able to develop into more aware and empathetic people. Business people now use his work in management training courses.

Publication of “The Emotional Brain” LeDoux

Daniel Goleman’s book Emotional Intelligence was published in 1996 before LeDoux’s book The Emotional Brain in 1998. LeDoux had published quite a lot prior to this and Daniel Goleman had interviewed him often. Much of Goleman’s book is based on the work of LeDoux
It would be impossible to cover the whole of LeDoux’s work here but Jacobs in The Ancestral Mind summarizes the significant findings. Jacobs first comments here on the growing scientific awareness of the impact of unconscious processes on our thoughts.
“But it was the work of neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, building on these earlier studies, that provided the physiological evidence for the key role played by unconscious processing in our emotional life. ….
“But LeDoux’s critical finding was that input arrives at the amygdala before it reaches the cortex. What this means is that the amygdala allows us to intuitively “read” emotional stimuli and respond to them instantly, before we are consciously aware of precisely what we are responding to. …
“In fact, some emotional stimuli may never even reach the neocortex or conscious awareness because the reticular formation does not always generate sufficient arousal to activate thalamocortical transmission or registration in working memory.
“Extrapolating his finding into human terms, LeDoux demonstrated that natural selection placed its trust primarily in the unconscious processes of the Ancestral Mind, not the processes of the conscious Thinking Mind. It knew that in critical situations, the Ancestral Mind could be counted on as the wiser, more experienced observer and reliable guardian to keep us from harm.”

This new awareness of the functioning of the emotional brain is gradually filtering through the scientific establishment, particularly the brain sciences. This year the topic even made the local paper.

DEREK DENTON

In this year’s Australia Day Honours, the 80 year old Australian scientist, Professor Derek Denton, was made a Companion of the Order of Australia. The Age of 26 January 2005 reported on page 6 as follows.

“Buried just under the surface of our conscious mind are the basic primal urges: the need to breathe, drink and the desire for sex. It was while studying another of these needs, the hunger for salt, that Derek Denton encountered a great scientific question – how did the conscious mind evolve in the first place?

Nearly 400 years earlier, another scientist facing this question came up with the philosophical observation: “I think, therefore I am.” Rene Descartes was trying to highlight what he believed was the uniqueness of the human species. It was his belief that our mind is separate from our body.

Professor Denton disagrees. He believes human consciousness can be traced through the evolution of our species, as with any physical attribute. “Consciousness, as we know it, evolved progressively from those basic primal urges.” He said that what we refer to as the mind is something we gained because it gave us a survival advantage. When history examines his legacy, it might be for his aphorism: “The mind is what the brain does.”

Here Denton refers to the subconscious primal urge generation function of the brain as well as the conscious thinking function of the brain and defines the terms “Brain” and “Mind”. I use the term brain to include the mind. Jacobs obviously prefers to use “Mind” but I suspect that is because many religious people can’t come to grips with their minds being a bodily organ and not a magic soul type of thing.