If
there is one meme that occurs
in the Emotional Intelligence world it is that the centre of our emotional
drives is in the limbic system and in particular the amygdala. This Youtube video and others on the
same page are typical examples of the meme in action. The Amydala Hijack was first popularised by
Daniel Goleman in his defining book Emotional
Intelligence.
There
have been some dissenting views including this blog
by yours truly. One question raised in
the blog still holds: While it is easy
to see that the various sciences: biology, chemistry, geology, physics,
mathematics, etc., are products of the rational neo-cortex brain it is
difficult to see how the arts: poems, novels, plays, dances, paintings, etc.,
are products of the amygdala. I can
understand how the fight or flight response is generated there but not vast
range of artistic creations
Finally
I have read a neuroscience paper that supports the countervailing view. The paper
is Distributed
neural system for emotional intelligence revealed by lesion mapping and
the authors are Aron K. Barbey, Roberto Colom, and Jordan Grafman. To quote from the paper: “Together
with cognitive intelligence, emotional and social intelligence form important
components of general intelligence. One of the major differences between the
two is that the former is thought to relate primarily to higher order mental
processes like reasoning, while the latter focuses more on perceiving,
immediate processing and applying emotional and social content, information and
knowledge. It has also been suggested that another fundamental difference
between the two may be that cognitive intelligence depends primarily on the
prefrontal cortex, whereas emotional and social intelligence is more limbically
tactical for immediate behavior suited more for survival and adaptation However,
thus far these theories are supported more by supposition than by empirical
findings.” (my italics).
For their study the authors used 152 American Vietnam War veterans
who had suffered brain damage from penetrating brain damage (shades of Phineas Gage). The
authors used a comibination of neuro-imaging lesion analysis, IQ testing, and
EQ testing to develop a model of where our emotional drives are located. The conclusion of the authors was that while
historically, cognitive and emotional processes have been viewed as separate
constructs their present study provides neuropsychological evidence that
emotional and psychometric intelligence share neural systems and networks and
that the orbitofrontal
cortex plays a critical role.
This conclusion solves the problem of the location of the
artistic drives noted above. It also
supports the Humm Wadsworth model. This
model proposes that our temperament is driven by our position on the spectrums
of seven common mental illnesses (autism, depression, mania, neuroticism obsessive-compulsion,
paranoia, and psychopathy) which would occur in the cerebral cortex and not the
limbic system.
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