Sometimes irony can be so sharp it is agonising. And so it is with the case of the dichotomy that's been at the heart of Western thought for around two and a half millennium: man equals rational; woman equals emotional (and no prizes for identifying which was good and which bad). It’s a trope that's battled with Eve and the apple as the primary cause by which to do women down, to oppress and repress them.
The irony comes from our growing knowledge of brain function, and the fact that this dichotomy is entirely false, and, moreover that emotion is the dominant factor in pretty well every decision that we, human beings, make. Most of the time when we produce a rational explanation of why we've made a choice, it is created only after the choice has already been made.
The simplest proof comes from brain injury. People who have lost a tiny section of their brain, the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), which sits just behind the eyes, as a result of malignancy or injury, can apparently fully recover, score at the same level on IQ tests as before, and show no obvious sign of disability. But what they lose is all emotional reaction to anything. And as a result, without that emotional reaction, they find making decisions about the simplest things — what time to arrange an appointment, what to choose from a restaurant menu — almost impossible to make.
This is reported in Jonah Lehrer's The Decisive Moment: How the Brain Makes Up Its Mind. This is a decisively, self-consciously, sometimes annoyingly popular science book - the actual science being so heavily interweaved with entertaining anecdote, some illuminating and relevant, some less so, that you'd really like to find a pure science alternative. But still, the science is lucidly explained in the gaps between anecdotes, and the story it tells is compelling.
Article comments
1 - Tony
I just heard the author interviewed on ABC radio (RN)- ie Australian Broadcasting Corporation- Sound like a great book.