NC ED in 2007 Damasio

MIND, BRAIN, AND EDUCATION
We Feel, Therefore We Learn:

The Relevance of Affective
and Social Neuroscience to
Education
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang1 and Antonio Damasio2
ABSTRACT—Recent advances in neuroscience are highlight- tions between decision making, social functioning, and moral
ing connections between emotion, social functioning, and reasoning hold new promise for breakthroughs in understand-
decision making that have the potential to revolutionize our ing the role of emotion in decision making, the relationship
understanding of the role of affect in education. In particular, between learning and emotion, how culture shapes learning,
the neurobiological evidence suggests that the aspects of and ultimately the development of morality and human ethics.
cognition that we recruit most heavily in schools, namely These are all topics of eminent importance to educators as
learning, attention, memory, decision making, and social func- they work to prepare skilled, informed, and ethical students
tioning, are both profoundly affected by and subsumed within who can navigate the world’s social, moral, and cognitive chal-
the processes of emotion; we call these aspects emotional thought. lenges as citizens. In this article, we sketch a biological and
Moreover, the evidence from brain-damaged patients suggests evolutionary account of the relationship between emotion
the hypothesis that emotion-related processes are required for and rational thought, with the purpose of highlighting new
skills and knowledge to be transferred from the structured connections between emotional, cognitive, and social func-
school environment to real-world decision making because tioning, and presenting a framework that we hope will inspire
they provide an emotional rudder to guide judgment and action. further work on the critical role of emotion in education.
Taken together, the evidence we present sketches an account Modern biology reveals humans to be fundamentally emo-
of the neurobiological underpinnings of morality, creativity, tional and social creatures. And yet those of us in the field of
and culture, all topics of critical importance to education. Our education often fail to consider that the high-level cognitive
hope is that a better understanding of the neurobiological skills taught in schools, including reasoning, decision mak-
relationships between these constructs will provide a new ing, and processes related to language, reading, and math-
basis for innovation in the design of learning environments. ematics, do not function as rational, disembodied systems,
somehow influenced by but detached from emotion and the
body. Instead, these crowning evolutionary achievements are
grounded in a long history of emotional functions, themselves
Recent advances in the neuroscience of emotions are high-
deeply grounded in humble homeostatic beginnings. Any com-
lighting connections between cognitive and emotional func-
petent teacher recognizes that emotions and feelings affect stu-
tions that have the potential to revolutionize our understanding
dents’ performance and learning, as does the state of the body,
of learning in the context of schools. In particular, connec-
such as how well students have slept and eaten or whether
they are feeling sick or well. We contend, however, that the
1
Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California relationship between learning, emotion and body state runs
2
Brain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern California much deeper than many educators realize and is interwoven
with the notion of learning itself. It is not that emotions rule
Address correspondence to Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, 3641 Watt
Way Suite B17, Los Angeles, CA 90089-2520; e-mail: mhimmordino-yang@ our cognition, nor that rational thought does not exist. It is,
post.harvard.edu. rather, that the original purpose for which our brains evolved
© 2007 the Authors

Volume 1—Number 1 Journal Compilation © 2007 International Mind, Brain, and Education Society and Blackwell Publishing, Inc. 3
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Relevance of Affective and Social Neuroscience to Education
was to manage our physiology, to optimize our survival, and underlying behavior and cognition was heavily dominated by
to allow us to flourish. When one considers that this purpose a top-down approach in which the processes of learning, lan-
inherently involves monitoring and altering the state of the guage, and reasoning were understood as high-order systems
body and mind in increasingly complex ways, one can appreci- that imposed themselves upon an obedient body. It is not that
ate that emotions, which play out in the body and mind, are emotions were completely ignored or that they were not
profoundly intertwined with thought. And after all, this should viewed by some as having a brain basis. Rather, their critical
not be surprising. Complex brains could not have evolved sep- role in governing behavior, and in particular rational thought,
arately from the organisms they were meant to regulate. was overlooked (Damasio, 1994). Emotions were like a tod-
But there is another layer to the problem of surviving and dler in a china shop, interfering with the orderly rows of
flourishing, which probably evolved as a specialized aspect of stemware on the shelves.
the relationship between emotion and learning. As brains and And then an interesting problem emerged. In a research
the minds they support became more complex, the problem atmosphere in which cognition ruled supreme, it became
became not only dealing with one’s own self but managing apparent that the irrational behavior of neurological patients
social interactions and relationships. The evolution of human who had sustained lesions to a particular sector of the fron-
societies has produced an amazingly complex social and cul- tal lobe could not be adequately accounted for by invoking
tural context, and flourishing within this context means that cognitive mechanisms alone. After sustaining damage to the
only our most trivial, routine decisions and actions, and perhaps ventromedial prefrontal cortex, these patients’ social behav-
not even these, occur outside of our socially and culturally con- ior was compromised, making them oblivious to the conse-
structed reality. Why does a high school student solve a math quences of their actions, insensitive to others’ emotions, and
problem, for example? The reasons range from the intrinsic unable to learn from their mistakes. In some instances, these
reward of having found the solution, to getting a good grade, patients violated social convention and even ethical rules,
to avoiding punishment, to helping tutor a friend, to getting failing to show embarrassment when it was due and failing
into a good college, to pleasing his/her parents or the teacher. to provide appropriate sympathetic support to those who
All of these reasons have a powerful emotional component and expected it and had received it in the past.
relate both to pleasurable sensations and to survival within These patients’ ability to make advantageous decisions
our culture. Although the notion of surviving and flourishing became compromised in ways that it had not been before. In
is interpreted in a cultural and social framework at this late fact, there was a complete separation between the period that
stage in evolution, our brains still bear evidence of their origi- anteceded the onset of the lesion, when these patients had
nal purpose: to manage our bodies and minds in the service of been upstanding, reliable, and foresightful citizens, and the
living, and living happily, in the world with other people. period thereafter, when they would make decisions that were
This realization has several important implications for often disadvantageous to themselves and their families. They
research at the nexus of education and neuroscience. It points would not perform adequately in their jobs, in spite of hav-
to new directions for understanding the interface of biology, ing the required skills; they would make poor business deals
learning, and culture, a critical topic in education that has in spite of knowing the risks involved; they would lose their
proven difficult to investigate systematically (Davis, 2003; savings and choose the wrong partners in all sorts of rela-
Rueda, 2006; Rueda, August, & Goldenberg, 2006). It prom- tionships. Why would patients suffering from compromised
ises to shed light on the elusive link between body and mind, social conduct also make poor decisions about apparently
for it describes how the health and sickness of the brain and rational matters, such as business investments?
body can influence each other. And importantly, it under- The traditional way to explain these patients’ symptoms
scores our fundamentally social nature, making clear that the had been that something had gone wrong with their logical
very neurobiological systems that support our social interac- abilities or their knowledge base, such that they could no
tions and relationships are recruited for the often covert and longer make decisions in a rational way. But, in fact, with fur-
private decision making that underlies much of our thought. ther testing, it became apparent that these patients did not
In brief, learning, in the complex sense in which it happens have a primary problem with knowledge, knowledge access,
in schools or the real world, is not a rational or disembodied or logical reasoning, as had previously been assumed. To the
process; neither is it a lonely one. contrary, they could explain cogently the conventional social
and logical rules that ought to guide one’s behavior and future
planning. They had no loss of knowledge or lowering of IQ
REASONING, DECISION MAKING, AND EMOTION: in the traditional sense. Instead, it gradually became clear
EVIDENCE FROM PATIENTS WITH BRAIN DAMAGE that disturbances in the realm of emotion, which had been
viewed as a secondary consequence of their brain damage,
To understand why this is so, we begin with some history, could provide a better account of their poor decision making.
and a problem. Well into the 1980s, the study of brain systems Those emotional aspects included a diminished resonance of
4 Volume 1—Number 1
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Antonio Damasio
emotional reactions generally as well as a specific compromise To recap, the prefrontal patients we have described have
of social emotions, such as compassion, embarrassment, and social deficits. We have argued that these are fundamentally
guilt. By compromising the possibility of evoking emotions problems of emotion and therefore manifest as well in the
associated with certain past situations, decision options, realm of decision making. The relationship between these
and outcomes, the patients became unable to select the most symptoms is very informative, in that it suggests that hidden
appropriate response based on their past experience. Their emotional processes underlie our apparently rational real-
logic and knowledge could be intact, but they failed to use world decision making and learning. Furthermore, this rela-
past emotional knowledge to guide the reasoning process. tionship underscores the importance of the ability to perceive
Furthermore, they could no longer learn from the emotional and incorporate social feedback in learning.
repercussions of their decisions or respond emotionally to the While the relevance of these insights to educational con-
reactions of their social partners. Their reasoning was flawed texts has not yet been empirically tested, they lead us to
because the emotions and social considerations that under- formulate two important hypotheses. First, because these
lie good reasoning were compromised (Damasio, Grabowski, findings underscore the critical role of emotion in bringing
Frank, Galaburda, & Damasio, 1994; Damasio, Tranel, & previously acquired knowledge to inform real-world decision
Damasio, 1990, 1991). making in social contexts, they suggest the intriguing possi-
In retrospect, these patients provided a first glimpse into bility that emotional processes are required for the skills and
the fundamental role of emotion in reasoning and decision knowledge acquired in school to transfer to novel situations
making. Missing a brain region that is now understood as and to real life. That is, emotion may play a vital role in help-
needed to trigger a cascade of neurological and somatic ing children decide when and how to apply what they have
events that together comprise a social emotion, such as learned in school to the rest of their lives. Second, the close
embarrassment, compassion, envy, or admiration, their social ties between these patients’ decision making, emotion, and
social functioning may provide a new take on the relation-
behavior suffered. This is significant in itself, but even more
ship between biology and culture. Specifically, it may be via
intriguing was the realization that, without the ability to
an emotional route that the social influences of culture come
adequately access the guiding intuitions that accrue through
to shape learning, thought, and behavior.
emotional learning and social feedback, decision making
While more work on the educational and cultural implica-
and rational thought became compromised, as did learning
tions of these findings is warranted, interestingly, and sadly,
from their mistakes and successes. While these patients can
some further insights into the biological connections between
reason logically and ethically about standard cognitive and
learning, emotion, and social functioning, especially as they
social problems in a laboratory setting (Saver & Damasio,
relate to our hypothesis about culture, can be gleaned from
1991), out in the real world and in real time, they cannot use
another group of patients that has been discovered over the
emotional information to decide between alternative courses
past few years. In this group, patients sustained comparable
of action. They can no longer adequately consider previous prefrontal damage in early childhood, rather than as adults. As
rewards and punishments or successes and failures, nor do they developed, these children were cognitively normal in the
they notice others’ praise or disapproval. These patients have traditional IQ sense, able to use logical reasoning and factual
lost their ability to analyze events for their emotional con- knowledge to solve the kinds of academic problems expected
sequences and to tag memories of these events accordingly. of students. However, while smart in the everyday sense of
Their emotions are dissociated from their rational thought, the word, these children slowly revealed themselves as having
resulting in compromised reason, decision making, and varying degrees of psychopathic and antisocial tendencies.
learning. They were insensitive to punishment and reward and did not
What does this mean for our argument about relevance seek approval or social acceptance as typical children do. As
to education? In addition to these patients, further evidence adults, they were unable to competently manage their lives,
from psychophysiological and other studies of brain-damaged wasting time and squandering resources and engaging in
and normal people has allowed us to propose specific neural dangerous, antisocial, and aggressive behaviors. By outward
mechanisms underlying the role and operation of emotional appearances, these patients behaved in most ways similarly
signaling in normal and abnormal decision making (Bechara, to the patients described above, who sustained prefrontal
2005; Bechara & Damasio, 1997; Damasio, 1996). While the damage as adults (Anderson, Bechara, Damasio, Tranel, &
details of these neural mechanisms and evidence are beyond Damasio, 1999; Damasio, 2005).
the scope of this article, taken as a whole, they show that Additional investigation of adult patients with childhood
emotions are not just messy toddlers in a china shop, running onset of brain damage, though, revealed an intriguing dif-
around breaking and obscuring delicate cognitive glassware. ference between childhood and adult-onset prefrontal brain
Instead, they are more like the shelves underlying the glass- damage. While both groups can reason about traditional cog-
ware; without them cognition has less support. nitive problems in the structure of the laboratory setting and
Volume 1—Number 1 5
both have normal IQs in the traditional sense, unlike patients morality to be a special case of social behavior (see Damasio,
with adult-onset prefrontal damage, childhood-onset patients 2005, for a more complete treatment of this argument). The
appear never to have learned the rules that govern social and neurological systems that support decision making generally
moral behavior. While adult-onset patients know right from are the same systems that support social and moral behav-
wrong in the lab but are unable to use this information to ior. Without adequate access to emotional, social, and moral
guide their behavior, childhood-onset patients have appar- feedback, in effect the important elements of culture, learning
ently not learned right from wrong or the proper rules of cannot inform real-world functioning as effectively.
social conduct. They do not know the social and ethical rules
that they are breaking.
What is happening with these patients and how is it rel- A PHYSIOLOGICAL AND EVOLUTIONARY
evant to the argument at hand? Unlike the often remarkable ACCOUNT OF EMOTION AND COGNITION: FROM
compensation for linguistic and other capacities after early AUTOMATIC RESPONSES TO MORALITY,
childhood brain damage, so far the system for social conduct CREATIVITY, HIGH REASON, AND CULTURE
and ethical behavior does not show this kind of compensation.
It is not that access in an abstract sense to the rules of social In the perspective of the insights described earlier, and of
conduct requires intact frontal cortices, as the adult-onset much research in neurobiology and general biology in the two
patients show, and it is not that a social or moral conduct intervening decades, the connection between emotion and
center in the brain has been irreparably damaged, as this sce- cognition is being seen in a very different light. To outline the
nario would not explain changes in general decision making. current position, we shall present a simple scenario. Think of
Instead, the situation is both simpler and more grave. These an ant crawling along a sidewalk, carrying a piece of food back
early-onset prefrontal patients may be suffering from the loss to its nest. The ant scurries into a sidewalk crack to avoid
of what we might term the emotional rudder. Without the abil- being stepped on, then continues industriously on its way.
ity to manipulate situations and to mark those situations as What motivates this ant to preserve its own life? How did it
positive or negative from an affective point of view, these decide, albeit nonconsciously and automatically, to carry the
children fail to learn normal social behavior. In turn, they piece of food and to turn toward its nest? Clearly, the deci-
lose the commensurate decision-making abilities described sions to hide to avoid being crushed, to carry the food, and to
earlier. Insensitive to others’ responses to their actions, these continue in the direction of the nest are primitive instances of
children fail to respond to educators’ and others’ attempts to cognition, composed of complex packages of innate responses
teach them normal behavior. that enable the ant to react advantageously to particular
But there is another intriguing piece to be learned from classes of situations. But what is essential to understand is
these children regarding the relationship between cognition that these and myriads of other primitive examples of cogni-
and emotion and the role of the emotional rudder in learn- tion, even in the lowly ant, act together in the service of an
ing. As in the adult-onset patients, it is still possible for these emotional goal: to maintain and promote homeostasis and
patients to have an operating cognitive system that allows thus fitness. In short, the ant behaves the way it does because
them to be smart on certain measures and in certain contexts, those behaviors promote its survival and efficiency. (Humans,
solving standard cognitive tasks in a laboratory or structured as conscious beings, perceive that efficiency as well-being and
educational setting without difficulty. In these contexts, pleasure.) Every action the ant takes is inherently biased
their lack of knowledge is confined to the social and moral toward helping the ant, or its group, do well.
domains. Taking an evolutionary perspective, even the simplest
And yet, once outside of the structured school setting, their unicellular organism has within the nucleus of its cell a mas-
social deficits manifest as a much broader problem. They have ter controller that permits that living organism to maintain
the nonsocial knowledge they need, but without the guiding itself for a certain span of life and to seek during that period
effects of the emotional rudder, they cannot use this informa- the conditions that will allow it to thrive. Emotions and
tion to guide their everyday living, even in nonsocial contexts. the mechanisms that constitute them as behaviors, which
What these patients confirm is that the very neurobiological humans experience as resulting in punishment or reward,
systems that support emotional functioning in social interac- pain or pleasure, are, in essence, nature’s answer to one cen-
tions also support decision making generally. Without ade- tral problem, that of surviving and flourishing in an ambiva-
quate access to social and cultural knowledge, these children lent world. Put simply, the brain has evolved under numerous
cannot use their knowledge efficaciously. As Vygotsky pos- pressures and oppressions precisely to cope with the problem
ited more than three quarters of a century ago, social and cul- of reading the body’s condition and responding accordingly
tural functioning actually does underlie much of our nonsocial and begins doing so via the machinery of emotion. This coping
decision making and reasoning. Or, more precisely, social shows up in simple ways in simple organisms and in remark-
behavior turns out to be a special case of decision making and ably rich ways as brains get more complex. In the brains of
higher animals and people, the richness is such that they can can be reduced to simple, nonspecific packages that unfold
perceive the world through sensory processing and control purely nonconsciously in response to particular situations.
their behavior in a way that includes what is traditionally Although some aspects of human behavior and emotion could
called the mind. Out of the basic need to survive and flourish be characterized in this way, such reductionism would be
derives a way of dealing with thoughts, with ideas, and even- grossly misplaced, especially in an essay about connections to
tually with making plans, using imagination, and creating. At education. Instead, we aimed to illustrate that most, if not all,
their core, all of these complex and artful human behaviors, human decisions, behaviors, thoughts, and creations, no mat-
the sorts of behaviors fostered in education, are carried out in ter how far removed from survival in the homeostatic sense,
the service of managing life within a culture and, as such, use bear the shadow of their emotive start.
emotional strategies (Damasio, 1999). In addition, as the prefrontal patients show, the processes of
Emotion, then, is a basic form of decision making, a reper- recognizing and responding to complex situations, which we
toire of know-how and actions that allows people to respond suggest hold the origins of creativity, are fundamentally emo-
appropriately in different situations. The more advanced tional and social. As such, they are shaped by and evaluated
cognition becomes, the more high-level reasoning supports within a cultural context and, as we described in the previous
the customization of these responses, both in thought and section, are based upon emotional processing. No matter how
in action. With evolution and development, the specifica- complex and esoteric they become, our repertoire of behavio-
tions of conditions to which people respond, and the modes ral and cognitive options continues to exist in the service of
of response at their disposal, become increasingly nuanced. emotional goals. Neurobiologically and evolutionarily speak-
The more people develop and educate themselves, the more ing, creativity is a means to survive and flourish in a social and
they refine their behavioral and cognitive options. In fact, cultural context, a statement that appears to apply from the
one could argue that the chief purpose of education is to relatively banal circumstances of daily living to the complex
cultivate children’s building of repertoires of cognitive and arena of ethical thought and behavior. In beginning to eluci-
behavioral strategies and options, helping them to recognize date the neurobiological interdependencies between high rea-
the complexity of situations and to respond in increasingly soning, ethics, and creativity, all of which are fundamentally
flexible, sophisticated, and creative ways. In our view, out of tied to emotion and critically relevant to education, we hope
these processes of recognizing and responding, the very proc- to provide a new vantage point from which to investigate the
esses that form the interface between cognition and emotion, development and nurturance of these processes in schools.
emerge the origins of creativity—the artistic, scientific, and
technological innovations that are unique to our species.
Further, out of these same kinds of processing emerges a spe- EMOTIONAL THOUGHT: TOWARD AN EVIDENCE-
cial kind of human innovation: the social creativity that we BASED FRAMEWORK
call morality and ethical thought.
As the childhood-onset prefrontal patients show, moral- In general, cognition and emotion are regarded as two inter-
ity and ethical decision making are special cases of social and related aspects of human functioning. However, while it is
emotional functioning. While the beginnings of altruism, perfectly reasonable and in fact necessary to distinguish
compassion, and other notions of social equity exist in sim- between these two aspects in studying learning and develop-
pler forms in the nonhuman primates (Damasio, 2003; Hauser, ment (Fischer & Bidell, 1998), the overly stringent preserva-
2006), human cognitive and emotional abilities far outpace tion of this dichotomy may actually obscure the fact that
those of the other animals. Our collective accomplishments emotions comprise cognitive as well as sensory processes.
range from the elevating and awe inspiring to the evil and gro- Furthermore, the aspects of cognition that are recruited most
tesque. Human ethics and morality are direct evidence that heavily in education, including learning, attention, memory,
we are able to move beyond the opportunistic ambivalence decision making, motivation, and social functioning, are both
of nature; indeed, the hallmark of ethical action is the inhibi- profoundly affected by emotion and in fact subsumed within
tion of immediately advantageous or profitable solutions in the processes of emotion. Emotions entail the perception of
the favor of what is good or right within our cultural frame an emotionally competent trigger, a situation either real or
of reference. In this way, ethical decision making represents imagined that has the power to induce an emotion, as well as
a pinnacle cognitive and emotional achievement of humans. a chain of physiological events that will enable changes in
At its best, ethical decision making weaves together emotion, both the body and mind (Damasio, 1994). These changes in
high reasoning, creativity, and social functioning, all in a cul- the mind, involving focusing of attention, calling up of rele-
tural context (Gardner, Csikszentmihaly, & Damon, 2001). vant memories, and learning the associations between events
Returning to the example of the ant, our purpose in includ- and their outcomes, among other things, are the processes
ing this example was not to suggest that human emotions with which education is most concerned. Yes, rational
are equivalent to those of the ant or that human behavior thought and logical reasoning do exist, although hardly ever
truly devoid of emotion, but they cannot be recruited appro- to the process by which emotional thoughts gain additional
priately and usefully in the real world without emotion. significance through the application of rational evidence and
Emotions help to direct our reasoning into the sector of knowledge. In the other direction, rational evidence can be
knowledge that is relevant to the current situation or imposed upon certain kinds of emotional thought to produce
problem. the sort of automatic moral decision making that underlies
In Figure 1, we provide a graphical depiction of the neu- intuitive notions of good and evil (Greene, Nystrom, Engell,
rological relationship between cognition and emotion. In the Darley, & Cohen, 2004; Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom,
diagram, we have used the term emotional thought to refer to Darley, & Cohen, 2001; Haidt, 2001). For example, in evalu-
the large overlap between cognition and emotion. Emotional ating the morality of incest, experimental evidence suggests
thought encompasses processes of learning, memory, and that people decide quickly at the subconscious and intuitive
decision making, in both social and nonsocial contexts. It is level and later impose ad hoc rational evidence on their deci-
within the domain of emotional thought that creativity plays sion (Haidt, 2001). Conversely, complex moral dilemmas such
out, through increasingly nuanced recognition of complex as whether to send a nation to war are (one hopes) informed
dilemmas and situations and through the invention of corre- by an abundance of rational evidence.
spondingly flexible and innovative responses. Both the recog- On the left side of the diagram, the bodily aspects of emo-
nition and response aspects of creativity can be informed by tion are represented as a loop from emotional thought to the
rational thought and high reason. In our model, recognition body and back. Here, emotional thoughts, either conscious or
and response processes are much like the concepts of assimi- nonconscious, can alter the state of the body in characteris-
lation and accommodation proposed by Piaget (1952, 1954). tic ways, such as by tensing or relaxing the skeletal muscles
However, Piaget focused almost exclusively on cognition and or by changing the heart rate. In turn, the bodily sensations
the development of logic, and although he recognized a role of these changes, either actual or simulated, contribute
for emotion in child development (Piaget, 1981), he did not either consciously or nonconsciously to feelings, which can
fully appreciate the fundamentally emotional nature of the then influence thought. (Simulated body sensation refers
processes he described. to the fact that sometimes imagining bodily changes is suf-
In the diagram, high reason and rational thought also ficient; actually tensing the fists, for example, is not neces-
contribute to high-level social and moral emotions to form sary.) This is the route by which rational deliberations over,
the specialized branch of decision making that is ethics. say, a nation’s wartime decisions can produce high-level
Motivated reasoning works in a similar manner and refers social emotions such as indignation, as well as the bodily
EMOTION COGNITION
Emotional thought
Processes related The platform for learning, High Reason/
memory, decision-making, and Rational thought
to the body creativity, both in social and non-
social contexts.
Rational thought can inform

emotional thought. This is the
Body sensations, actual or pathway of high-level social and
simulated, contribute to moral emotions, ethics, and of
feelings, which can in turn motivated reasoning. Creativity
influence thought. can also be informed by high
reason.
Thoughts can trigger emotions, Ad hoc imposition of rational

which play out in the mind and on evidence on a decision formulated
the body. within “emotional thought.”
Much of our moral decision-
making happens via this route.
Fig. 1. The evolutionary shadow cast by emotion over cognition influences the modern mind. In the diagram, the solid ellipse represents emotion; the dashed
ellipse represents cognition. The extensive overlap between the two ellipses represents the domain of emotional thought. Emotional thought can be conscious
or nonconscious and is the means by which bodily sensations come into our conscious awareness. High reason is a small section of the diagram and requires
consciousness.
manifestations of these emotions, such as tensed fists, Moreover, people’s thoughts and feelings are evaluated within
increased heart rate, or loss of appetite. The feeling of these a sociocultural context and serve to help them survive and
bodily sensations, either consciously or not, can then bias flourish in a social, rather than simply opportunistic, world.
cognitive processes such as attention and memory toward, in While the idea that learning happens in a cultural context
this case, aggression. The end result may be an unprovoked is far from new (Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, & Moll,
argument with one’s friend over a topic totally unrelated to 2005), we hope that these new insights from neurobiology,
the war, the creation of a bleak and angry abstract painting, which shed light on the nested relationships between emo-
or a generally tense mood. tion, cognition, decision making, and social functioning, will
In addition to the evidence discussed above, support for provide a jumping-off point for new thinking on the role of
these relationships between the body, emotion, and cognition emotion in education. As educators have long known, it is
comes mainly from neurobiological and psychophysiological simply not enough for students to master knowledge and
research, in which the induction of emotion, either directly logical reasoning skills in the traditional academic sense.
by a stimulus in the environment or indirectly via thoughts They must be able to choose among and recruit these skills
or memories, causes mental changes as well as physiological and knowledge usefully outside of the structured context of
effects on the body. In turn, feelings of emotion rely on the a school or laboratory. Because these choices are grounded in
somatosensory systems of the brain. That is, the brain areas emotion and emotional thought, the physiology of emotion
associated with interoception (the sensing of body states) are and its consequent process of feeling have enormous reper-
particularly active as people feel emotions such as happiness, cussions for the way we learn and for the way we consolidate
fear, anger, or sadness (Damasio et al., 2000). and access knowledge. The more educators come to under-
To conclude, in presenting this model, our goal is not to stand the nature of the relationship between emotion and
devalue established notions of cognition and emotion but to cognition, the better they may be able to leverage this rela-
provide a biologically based account of this relationship and tionship in the design of learning environments.
to begin to specify the nature of the overlap between cogni- In conclusion, new neurobiological evidence regarding the
tion and emotion in a way that highlights processes relevant fundamental role of emotion in cognition holds the potential
to education. These processes include learning, memory, for important innovations in the science of learning and the
decision making, and creativity, as well as high reason and practice of teaching. As researchers struggle with new direc-
rational thinking. They also include the influence of the mind tions and techniques for learning about these connections,
on the body and of the body on the mind. a biological framework may help to constrain possibilities
and generate new hypotheses and research directions. Just
as neuroscience is coming to inform other education-related
EDUCATIONAL IMPLICATIONS: A CALL FOR topics and problems (Goswami, 2006), the study of emotions,
FURTHER RESEARCH creativity, and culture is ripe for interdisciplinary collabora-
tions among neuroscientists, psychologists, and educators.
In teaching children, the focus is often on the logical reason- After all, we humans cannot divorce ourselves from our
ing skills and factual knowledge that are the most direct indi- biology, nor can we ignore the high-level sociocultural and
cators of educational success. But there are two problems cognitive forces that make us special within the animal king-
with this approach. First, neither learning nor recall happen dom. When we educators fail to appreciate the importance
in a purely rational domain, divorced from emotion, even of students’ emotions, we fail to appreciate a critical force in
though some of our knowledge will eventually distill into a students’ learning. One could argue, in fact, that we fail to
moderately rational, unemotional form. Second, in teaching appreciate the very reason that students learn at all.
students to minimize the emotional aspects of their academic
curriculum and function as much as possible in the rational Acknowledgments—This work was supported by a grant from
domain, educators may be encouraging students to develop the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University
the sorts of knowledge that inherently do not transfer well to of Southern California and by a grant from the Mathers
real-world situations. As both the early- and late-acquired Foundation.
prefrontal damage patients show, knowledge and reasoning
divorced from emotional implications and learning lack
meaning and motivation and are of little use in the real world.
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MIND, BRAIN, AND EDUCATION

We Feel, Therefore We Learn:

© 2007 the Authors

Rational thought can inform

Thoughts can trigger emotions, Ad hoc imposition of rational

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