I while ago I was waiting for the Reading to Heathrow bus and I got chatting to a very interesting lady called Suzanne from Germany whose son also has Aspergers Syndrome. For some reason I mentioned the Buckminster Fuller quote which goes something like:
It is is easier to act your way into thinking differently than to think your way into acting differently.
She said that thinking is a frontal cortex activity which is a relatively recent part of our brain, and that acting is done by much older parts of the brain. She also said that when there is fear the frontal cortex shuts down - we act using the older parts of our brain.
Even the English word "emotion" (which comes, via French, from the Latin, "emovere") has the word "motion" embedded in it. It literally means "to move out" - and the word "motivation" comes from the same root.
ReplyDeleteSo, yes, the older, emotion-driven, parts of the brain (especially the amygdala) are more directly connected to our actions - and the influence runs both ways. Our actions effect the way we feel, which affects the way we think.