Working in Movement

This morning brought shocking news of an American worker who had been brutally executed by terrorists. I felt my sense of horror and disgust as I listened--my stomach tightened, my eyes widened, breath halted, all the things that our bodies do in these sorts of situations. But before I could process this experience, the news announcer was on to another story, and then another after that, etc. Seemingly, there was no time to pause and process any of the stories or images: the news had to go on.

It's not that I couldn't register the facts of the stories as fast as they could be read. Our cognitive systems can certainly keep up and even go faster if we have to. But what about the emotional parts of the nervous systems? Cognition mostly moves through nerve circuits that are mylenated--covered with goo that lets them process stuff very, very quickly, maybe 100 milliseconds The emotional parts mostly don't have this mylenated property, and so can take a second or more to do their work. When people find their emotional centers compromised can still operate by relying on their cognitive systems. But the responses to situations will be flat, without the input from their emotional centers.

Thinking Faster on Steven Johnson's web log takes on this concern by pointing to a feature article he wrote for the May 2004 issue of Discover magazine. (Unfortunately, the Discover site is subscription-based, so the article isn't freely available.) Johnson spent time talking with neuroscientist Antonio Damasio for the article.

It's easy to process lots of ideas quickly, but also easy to feel overwhelmed by them. One of Damasio's key ideas is that our nervous systems use a clever way around this fast/slow contrast between the cognitive and emotional. As we face and process situations involving emotion (and what doesn't?), the nervous system learns to recognize the "somatic markers" that accompany a specific emotional state. A somatic marker is a body response like a tense stomach associated with, say, anxiety. Once noticed, the cognitive parts of the brain can deal quickly with the context of the somatic marker instead of having to slow down to do the emotional processing proper. So we learn to incorporate emotional components into everyday decision-making on a rapid basis.

So far, so good. But what if things are moving so fast that the nervous system can't even form the somatic markers, like viewing one horrifying story after another on the news? Then the somatic markers may not form. We again face the prospect of decision-making without benefit of any form of emotional input. When this begins at an early age, according to Damasio, "you could potentially become ethically less grounded. You’d be in an emotionally neutral world." And that probably ain't so good. It's good to make rational decisions, but maybe not at the cost of no emotional input for those decisions.

Maybe it's a good idea to take the news in small chunks and not be in such a hurry to get on with it.