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I'm a long time admirer and fan of the work in which the Damasio's and their colleagues have created a new understanding of how the human brain is organized to make use of both "rational" and "emotional" processing to support complex and adaptive behavior. And I very much share a sense that "affective and social neuroscience" is directly and importantly relevant to both "the science of learning" and "the practice of teaching". For all these reasons, I'm happy that the Immordino-Yang and Damasio paper is available, and hope it will receive the wide attention it deserves. The following thoughts are intended to facilitate that.

For me, a key to the relevant new understanding is that "emotions are not just messy toddlers in a china shop, running around breaking and obscuring delicate cognitive glassware. Instead, they are more like the shelves underlying the glassware; without them cognition has less support." Both "emotion" and "cognition" are, however, words likely to mean different things to different people, so let me try to restate this key idea to make it as clear and accessible as possible.

What the Damasio research program has importantly established is that adaptive every day human behavior is not solely the result of "thinking" in the sense of having conscious access to an appropriate set of rules and relevant set of observations. Both persist following some kinds of brain damage, and yet the patients' ability to function is clearly compromised, apparently because the kinds of intuitions and feelings that normally contribute to our behavioral decision making is no longer being used.

Another way to say this is that we normally behave not simply because of a set of conscious rules applied to circumstances we are conscious of but rather out of the interactions of that with a background set of intuitions and feelings, the product of an elaborate array of unconscious analyses the details of which are generally unknown to us but which frequently yield influences on our behavior as adaptive as our conscious thinking. Because of the adaptive and sophisticated character of this unconscious processing, well illustrated in Malcom Gladwell's Blink, it is sometimes referred to as the "cognitive unconscious". What we experience as emotion, and what Immordino-Yang and Damasio mean by "emotion" is, I'm pretty sure, the output of the cognitive unconscious.

"Cognition" then is not just conscious "thinking" but the interplay between that and the cognitive unconscious. And "emotion" doesn't mean, as people might think, that which is not "rational", but rather that which is expressive of sophisticated analyses done by the nervous system in terms of rules of which we are normally unaware.

The rules by which the cognitive unconscious operates are heavily influenced by our evolutionary history, and so, as Immordino-Yang and Damasio point out, relate largely (though not exclusively, see Variability in Brain Function and Behavior) to "homeostasis", to preservation and maintenance of the individual. But those rules are, rather than being fixed, modifiable in individuals during individual lifetimes. Indeed, Immordino-Yang and Damasio suggest that social experience does so, so that we normally acquire the ability to have feelings and intuitions relevant to social interactions early in life, and fail to acquire them with certain forms of brain damage (see Childhood Origins of Adult Resistance to Science for a related, perhaps different perspective). The same damage compromises other sorts of adaptive behavior as well, closing a loop between social and other kinds of learning.

There is more than a little food for thought here. But how immediately relevant is it to classroom practice? Immordino-Yang are appropriately cautious (see Brain and Education: Thinking About New Directions), but I agree both brain research and the experiences of most teachers suggest that we need to pay more attention to the conclusion that "neither learning nor recall happen in a purely rational domain", that more attention needs to be paid to the activities of the cognitive unconscious (cf Parallel Changes in Thinking about Brain and Education, and Story Telling in Three Dimensions). I share as well a sense that we already know enough to stop trying to get students to "minimize the emotional aspects of their academic curriculum and function as much as possible in the rational domain". Doing so not only makes it less likely that they will learn in a way that doesn't transfer well to the real world but also neglects the importance of the development of social skills (cf Emergent Pedagogy).