Since my last journal, I’ve read around thirty more pages of The Righteous Mind. After making more progress, I can’t help but notice how interesting humans and the way we think are! I just thought I’d like to say how much I’m enjoying this book so far.
Beginning soon after where I left off from my last journal, Haidt immediately posed a similar question to the one I asked everyone back during the August meeting: Is human moral thinking innate or conscious reasoning? Plato believed reasons should be mastered over the “emotions (innate)” while Hume (Enlightenment thinker) believed the reasons are a servant of the emotions. Yet, Jefferson believed that the processes each dominated their own hemisphere where the thinking depends on the type of task.
Upon first thought, I suspected we humans think according to Jefferson’s idea, but in reality, the Hume model is more accurate. To prove this, Haidt cited a study on humans who suffered brain damage to the vmPFC — a region of the brain essential for combining emotional and rational thinking. Subjects could still determine right from wrong but now their decisions weren’t affected by emotions. For example, if they were told to murder their parents, they wouldn’t feel immediate horror; instead, they would likely weigh the pros and cons. As a result of this brain damage, the subjects’ social relationships and jobs completely collapsed, proving that emotional thinking is absolutely necessary to support rational thinking.
Upon reading the above example, I was shocked beyond belief because I — and I’m sure many others would be as well — couldn’t even begin to comprehend what that would feel like. But then I was able to draw a parallel. In my grade, there is a person (who I won’t name for obvious reasons) who exhibits a slightly similar behavior to what I feel would be like someone with his/her vmPFC damaged. Often times in social settings, he abruptly says weird things that don’t really fit in context of the situation and ends up slightly alienating people. A lot of times, they’re slightly insensitive to specific people too, making it similar (in my mind) to the test subject in Haidt’s book that had his/her social relationships ruined. Now, obviously, there is a virtually nonexistent chance that this person I have in mind actually has a damaged vmPFC. I just thought it was interesting that I may have seen a possible glimpse of a diluted version of the symptoms Haidt was describing.