ANAT 321 Lecture 8: 9-MotivationandEmotion

• School: McGill University
• Department: Anatomy & Cell Biology
• Course: ANAT 321
• Professor: David S Ragsdale

Document Summary

Human decision-making, especially in the personal and social realms, requires communication between rationality and emotions/feelings. In humans, emotions and feelings are vestiges of a primitive past: the things that make us a human is that we still have those feelings, but it would be better if we didn"t have them. We would be able to make more rational decisions if we did not have them. For humans, it turns out that emotional component of our brain and cognition is essential for higher order cognitive functions such as decision making. People who have deficits in emotional processing don"t make good decisions, and some of the more complicated decisions that we make come intuitively and emotionally. Human"s emotions is an inextricable part of cognition. Studies of patients with lesions in ventromedial prefrontal cortex suggest that this region connects visceral responses and emotions to decision making.