WORK
We Feel, Therefore We Learn
Immordino-Yang and Damasio's 2007 paper establishing that emotion is not peripheral to learning but constitutive of it — the neurological refutation of the Enlightenment model of dispassionate cognition.
The paper argued that the brain does not store information neutrally but encodes it in relation to its emotional significance — its relevance to the organism's goals, its connection to the learner's developing sense of self, its felt importance within the project of being alive. Learning that lacks emotional engagement produces a qualitatively different kind of knowledge: information stored but not integrated, accessible but not understood. The title inverts Descartes's cogito to signal the paper's ambition: to replace the model of cognition as dispassionate calculation with a framework in which feeling and thinking are dimensions of a single process, woven together at the level of neural architecture. The finding carries direct implications for AI-augmented education, where frictionless information delivery threatens to eliminate the emotional engagement that transforms information into understanding.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The Enlightenment model of cognition — still dominating most educational institutions and most technology companies — holds that the best thinking is dispassionate thinking.