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I see a lot of connections between this paper and some of the others we’ve read this summer, especially in “Childhood Origins of Adult Resistance to Science” and “The Many Faces of Inductive Teaching and Learning”, and my ongoing inquiry into mental health. When a person, particularly a child, comes up against a criticism of a view of the world they’ve learned from an authoritative figure, that experience must be highly emotional. If people get emotional over personal criticism, it’s frightening to imagine (and almost daily the headlines of news.bbc.co.uk and nytimes.com are evidence) the emotions a person experiences when his or her personal metanarrative, or fundamental understanding of how the universe works/is/came to be is challenged. This observation might enhance our understanding of “resistance” as it’s a word used differently in both papers.

To me, the usefulness of this paper was that it fleshed out two types of learning we’ve touched on in our weekly discussions.
1. Emotionless Learning: People who absorb stories well enough to spit them back out, but fail to connect in a deeper way to the material. In this paper, I see this type of learning as represented by the brain-damaged patients. From what I understood, these adults, whether the damage was adult-onset or child-onset, did well enough on standardized tests and similar forms of assessment, though they failed to extend and apply that knowledge to other areas of their lives.
2. “Emotionfull” Learning: People who connect with “a loopy story telling perspective” and can relate material learned in the classroom to other areas of their lives. As I interpreted it, emotions are central to this connecting learned material across the board. Because students are emotionally motivated from a variety of different angles, they connect material learned in the classroom in a variety of different ways.

While I think the distinctions between these different learning styles is useful, I also think that the conclusion made in “Educational Implications: A Call For Further Research” is a bit of a stretch. It seemed to me that the authors were trying to draw parallels between the type of learning of the brain-damaged adults and the type of learning that would result were educators to “minimize the emotional aspects of [the students’] academic curriculum (9)”. Descriptions of the emotionless and “emotionfull” learning are useful in a discussion like this one, but I’m not convinced that it’s appropriate to draw parallels closely linking the brain-damaged adults and potential outcomes from non-brain-damaged students.

Additionally, though I thought the examination of learning in the brain-damaged adults was useful, specific examples, particularly in the descriptions of the brain-damaged adults, would have been helpful. I’m left wondering what knowledge the adults tested well on but were unable to connect to a larger picture in a sociocultural world. What does that look like? What type of knowledge were they referring to? Was it a math problem or a character analysis or something entirely different?

As a technical criticism, I found many of the terms and phrases in this article to be confusing. Examples include using the word “happily” in the context of evolution, and the phrase “complex packages of innate responses” to describe lower-order emotion and behavior. These are two separate confusions and I’ll comment on them separately. First of all, while I’m convinced that emotions have played an important role in evolution, I’m uneasy with equating happiness and evolutionary fitness. The authors suggested this relationship in the quote, “… our brains still bear evidence of their original purpose: to manage our bodies and minds in the service of living, and living happily, in the world with other people (4)”. As for the other phrase, I’ve no idea what “complex packages of innate responses (6)” actually means at all.

Despite my unease about the word “happiness”, I really liked the attitude of the researchers regarding emotions and evolution. In intro Biology classes, homeostasis is a topic that much time is spent on, but all the classic examples I can think of (endocrine system, excretory system, etc) don’t directly reference the mind. After reading this article, I had something of an “aha!” moment when I realized that of course emotions are a homeostatic system, and of course they must have played a huge role in differential reproductive success. One example that comes readily to mind is positive feedback mechanisms and negative feedback mechanisms in depression. It's refreshing to read so many of Damasio's publications that treat emotions as real things that affect and structure our lives. How long until other members of the scientific community join in the dialogue either stacking evidence for or against emotions instead of just ignoring them?