If education is about the pursuit of truth, then it becomes necessary to consider the very nature of truth. Is truth a feeling in your gut or a fact in your head? Is truth found in the experience of love and beauty, or in the logic of an argument?
Throughout history, individuals and cultures have come to different conclusions concerning the nature of truth. The Enlightenment era rationalists of the 18th century valued reason above all else, and vigorously asserted that reason, rather than emotion, is the most trustworthy guide to truth and well-being. The early 19th century was dominated by poets, philosophers, and theologians who, in reaction to this worldview, passionately declared that emotion, feeling, intuition, and longing are the true ways in which humans could perceive Ultimate Reality.
While the 18th-century rationalists believed in subjecting emotion to reason, the 19th-century Romantics rejected the supremacy of reason over emotion, trusting, rather, in the intuitions of subjective experience.
That, at least, is the oversimplification that your average English major walks away with after taking a course on the Romantic poets. This oversimplified categorization of two complex periods of literary history, however, illustrates a question that has intrigued me since high school:
To what extent should emotion or reason be relied upon to ascertain truth?
Last summer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education Future of Learning Institute, I was introduced to some fascinating new research in the field of neuroscience that has given me a new perspective on not only this question, but the very nature and purpose of learning (or, ascertaining truth) itself.
Neuroscientists have recently identified a portion of the brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (located somewhere in your forehead) as responsible for our experience of emotions. Studies of patients who have suffered damage to this part of the brain show that, although their intelligence as measured by IQ tests was unaffected by the damage, their “social behavior was compromised, making them oblivious to the consequences of their actions, insensitive to others’ emotions, and unable to learn from their mistakes. In some instances, these patients violated social convention and even ethical rules, failing to show embarrassment when it was due and failing to provide appropriate sympathetic support to those who expected it and had received it in the past” (Immordino-Yang, 2007).
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, the educational neuroscientist whose lecture I attended at the Institute, summarizes the researchers’ conclusions with the assertion that “without the ability to adequately access the guiding intuitions that accrue through emotional learning and social feedback, decision-making and rational thought became compromised, as did learning from their mistakes and successes. While these patients can reason logically and ethically, they cannot use emotional information to decide between alternative courses of action” (Immordino-Yang 2007).
In other words, uncontrolled environments and social situations (the real world) could no longer generate emotional reactions in the patients, leaving the reasoning faculties without an “emotional rudder” from which to think and make logical connections. These findings give us a new perspective on the reason versus emotion binary. As Immordino-Yang explains, “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.” By cognition, Immordino-Yang means our logical reasoning and learning capabilities.
We can no longer think of learning and reasoning as separate from or antithetical to our emotions; rather, our ability to learn and reason are dependent on and rooted in emotion. Without an initial emotional stimulus, logic drifts into nebulous obscurity and learning cannot take root. The student who feels the injustice of extreme inequality will have a better chance of understanding the cause and effect relationships between the events leading up to the French Revolution than the student who cannot empathize with the plight of a French peasant.
So how exactly is this research relevant to students and teachers of English?
1. Literature provides an emotional stimulus.
I have a new perspective on why the study of literature is so important for human development. I obviously already knew that studying literature was pretty much the most important thing anyone could do with his or her life, but now I have some scientific data to substantiate that intuition. When we read fiction, we are immersed in a new social context with characters and events that make us feel a wide variety of emotions. This emotional stimulus in itself is incredibly valuable for an adolescent who is learning empathy, but this evocation of feeling also lays the foundational “emotional rudder” that is necessary to exercise critical thinking in a meaningful way.
When I teach Romeo and Juliet, students must decide which character is most responsible for the tragic ending. They start with a gut-level, emotional response and work out their logic from there. The social context of the play makes them feel angry at Capulet or frustrated with Friar Laurence. Without this initial emotional stimulus, they cannot meaningfully engage in the type of critical thinking that transfers to real-world use.
2. Literary characters model wisdom, creativity, and critical thinking.
Stories are peopled with characters who must interpret, reason from, and ultimately act on their emotions. Students vicariously live through this process with the character and are forced to evaluate whether the character reasoned and acted wisely in response to an emotional stimulus. Reading essentially becomes practice in reasoning from an emotion in a way that produces wise, creative, and ethical responses to emotion. Dr. Immordino-Yang puts it this way:
The chief purpose of education is to cultivate children’s building of repertoires of cognitive and behavioral strategies and options, helping them to recognize the complexity of situations and to respond in increasingly flexible, sophisticated, and creative ways. In our view, out of these processes of recognizing and responding, the very processes that form the interface between cognition and emotion, 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 special kind of human innovation: the social creativity that we call morality and ethical thought. (Immordino-Yang 2007)
Literature not only teaches wisdom, but it invites readers to vicariously participate in the very critical thinking processes that cultivate wisdom.
We can admire the wisdom of Atticus Finch and watch his thought process in arriving at this wisdom. Likewise, we can be critical of Creon’s response to Antigone’s disobedience and see the tragic consequences play out.
Great literature gives us the opportunity to exercise our highest cognitive faculties in a meaningful way, preparing us to reason wisely and creatively in response to the various social contexts we face in our lives. Literature makes us feel, and we reason from and with these feelings. Reason and emotion are inextricably bound together in the neurological hardware of the human brain. In order to seek out truth, we will need them to function as one.
Click here to read another blog about the experiences of the six faculty that attended the Future of Learning Institute, made possible by the Carla and Leonard Wood Distinguished Faculty Fellowship Award.
Immordino-Yang, M. H. and Damasio, A. (2007), We Feel, Therefore We Learn: The Relevance of Affective and Social Neuroscience to Education. Mind, Brain, and Education, 1: 3–10. doi: 10.1111/j.1751-228X.2007.00004.x
