The author discussed two types of information processing: “affect” and cognition. Of course, these aren’t exact neuroscientific terms (as he mentions himself: “to avoid the technical debate … I use the reasonably neutral term of ‘affect'”), but I really appreciated his interpretation of this concept, as it reflects a very real biological mechanism that significantly impacts our day-to-day lives.
Neuroscientists understand that, to some extent, our reasoning can come after we make a decision. As animals first and foremost, we fundamentally operate on instinct and unconscious processes, especially in faster or emotionally salient situations.
Take a simple example — trying to escape a hazardous situation. Suppose that fleeing people encounter a door that wont open. The anxiety-produced response is to try again harder. When the first push doesn’t open the door, press harder, kick, and even throw the body against it
This is illustrated beautifully by studies on subjects with a severed corpus callosum: when one half of a subject’s brain is asked to explain an action that was triggered and carried out by the other half (thus completely outside its control and awareness), the subject may provide a reasonable rationale and experience the temporal illusion that this reasoning came first.
But all this thinking comes after the fact: the affective system works independently of thought. Your thoughts are occurring after the affective system has released its chemicals.
Affect, as described by the author, is an instinctual gut reaction, while cognition comes afterward. You can see this pattern emerge especially in fields such as philosophy. In fact, I think philosophy – particularly ethics – is a perfect example. There is an almost universal, intuitive sense of right and wrong among our species: a gut feeling that assigns value judgments, just as the author describes (this idea is controversial, but I’m referring to instinctual affect applied to and affected by our species’ advanced social environment.) Ethical philosophy emerges when someone attempts to construct a cognitive framework through which these gut value judgments can be derived. Of course, since these judgments are instinctual, there is no inherent logical framework underlying moral affect, which is why there is no universal agreement on which ethical philosophy is most reliable or “true” (as far as I know).
Each system impacts the other: some emotions — affective states — are driven by cognition, and cognition is impacted by affect.
