出版社：LEARN (Leading English Education and Resource Network)
摘要：As Antonio Damasio and I discuss in the article, “We Feel, Therefore We Learn: The Relevance of Affective and Social Neuroscience to Education” (MBE, 2007), all human thoughts and actions, and especially creative or innovative thoughts and actions, bear the shadow of the brain’s original, evolutionary purpose— to keep one’s body alive and functioning comfortably, efficiently, and appropriately in the world. Although neuroscience may simply confirm what experience has taught us, the evidence is plain. Our brains sense the insides of our bodies not only to regulate their mechanics, for example to adjust blood pressure and digestion appropriately to maintain our health, but also to play out the subjective, experiential dimensions of our social and emotional lives. We think something, consciously or not, and sometimes our brains adjust our physiology to reflect the emotional implications of that thought. Then, we may feel back the results of those embodied changes, as a source of information about our own reaction. Neuroimaging experiments show us that we use the very same neural systems to feel our bodies as to feel our relationships, our moral judgments, and our creative inspiration. We really do live by “gut feelings,” and of course these gut feelings are induced and felt by our brains in accordance with our beliefs, experience, and knowledge.
