Following on yesterday’s post on the connections between research and philosophy, there is, more generally, an interesting relationship between science and emotion. Science tries to understand what is, in some approximation of objective truth. Yet to conduct science, you need to be motivated. Without passion the mind does not create. In fact, studies of people suffering from severe anhedonia (the inability to feel pleasure) have shown that such people can have difficulty solving even the simplest of problems. In humans at least, emotion is a precondition for a well functioning intellect.<\/p>\n
And so we have what appears to be a contradiction (but in fact is not): To pursue objective truth, we start with emotion. Perhaps people go into different fields of science not because of intellectual proclivities, but because we each feel an emotional connection with certain truths. Some people are drawn to chaos and randomness, and so they choose fields that study inherently chaotic systems, such as meteorology or oceanography. Others are drawn to perfection and harmony, and so they study crystallography or number theory.<\/p>\n
In each case, the research itself must be done honestly and without bias, but the excitement that leads to insight and discovery is fed by a pre-existing emotional resonance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Following on yesterday’s post on the connections between research and philosophy, there is, more generally, an interesting relationship between science and emotion. Science tries to understand what is, in some approximation of objective truth. Yet to conduct science, you need to be motivated. Without passion the mind does not create. In fact, studies of people … Continue reading “Science and emotion”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7009"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7009"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7009\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7010,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7009\/revisions\/7010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}