somehow, the new york times op-ed page has become the journal of empty brain research.
The part of the brain where the instinctive “fight or flight” signal is first triggered — the amygdala — is situated such that it receives incoming stimuli before the parts of the brain that think things over. Then, in our ongoing response to potential peril, the way the brain is built and operates assures that we are likely to feel more and think less. As Professor LeDoux puts it in “The Emotional Brain”: “the wiring of the brain at this point in our evolutionary history is such that connections from the emotional systems to the cognitive systems are stronger than connections from the cognitive systems to the emotional systems.”
look you've just imported the most primitive old-time dualisms into your interpretation of the imagery. human beings are torn between rationality and animality, between reason and passion. it might as well be spirit and flesh. 'the part of the brain that thinks things over': are you sure this is the clearest way to espress what you're saying? i am telling you that 'emotional' and 'cognitive' systems are just not going to turn out to be distinct. try to persuade me that you didn't just presume this dualism as a completely unjustified conceptual structure within which you conducted your resarch.
now you want to know why rational animals like ourselves believe and behave so irrationally. does it strike you that 'the irrational part is stronger than the rational part' is just a restatement of the problem, not any sort of solution? it's exactly as though i explained why people fail to be rational by pointing out that it's because they are seized by irrationality. why is michael jordan so good at basketball? because the good-at-basketball part of him is stronger than the sucks-at-basketball part.
the fact that you call the animal in us 'amygdala' only gives a slight patina of obscurantist authority for your entire augustine-style picture of human psychology, complete with original sin. you want to account for the fact that people behave irrationally. the answer: it is the beast within. even aristotle had a more sophisticated moral psychology. but what i love about it is that no work at all is devoted to questions like: is rationality distinct from the emotions? is that distinction where we want to start, as opposed to a bunch of other possible distinctions? if you don't start by really working through the definitional questions, you'll have no idea whether you're seeing the irrational bit or not. i don't doubt that y'all are pretty sophisticated in generating data. what i doubt is that you have any ability even to become aware of your own most obvious assumptions. possibly your higher cognitive module is being seduced by your amygdala.
as hume put it, the pre-frontal lobe is and ought only to be the slave of the amygdala. or kant's theory was that we could be motivated by pure application of the executive region, which should subdue the amygdala entirely. robert louis stephenson illustrated the brain research in his novella dr. pre-frontal cortex and mr. amygdala.
