Unconscious Emotions

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Unconscious Emotions, Conscious Feelings,

and Curricular Challenges

byRobert Sylwester

Although it may irritate the teacher, one of the most intelligent questions astudent can ask is "Why do we have to do this?" Students (and the rest of us, forall that) are loathe to expend cognitive energy unnecessarily, so assessing theimportance of a task is a key initial step in cognition.

We live in a complex space/time world replete with dangers and opportunitiesrelated to our survival and reproduction. Two internal systems recognize andrespond to such challenges:

1. our skull-centered brain, composed of hundreds of billions of highlyinterconnected neurons and glial support cells, integrates and responds tothe information from our sensory system, and

2. our diffused immune system, composed of an infinite number of (oftenfree-floating) cells spread throughout our body, responds to the severalpounds of invisible microbes and pollutants that inhabit our body.

So our very interconnected brain responds to the larger visible externalchallenges, and our very diffused immune system responds to the tiny invisibleinternal challenges. Scientists now realize that the two systems are highlyinterconnected. A successful response to many of life's challenges requires thetwo systems to collaborate, and illness can occur if they don't.

This article will focus on our brain's activation systems, on its unconscious andconscious ability to recognize important dangers and opportunities. Suchrecognition is admittedly a small part of a very complex cognitive system, but it'scritical to successful teaching and learning -- as teachers soon discover if theydon't implicitly or explicitly answer the question the student above raised.Further, recent developments, such as the publication of Antonion Damasio'sacclaimed book, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in theMaking of Consciousness (1999), are providing educators with an expanded viewof our recognition system and this poses important educational challenges.

UNCONSCIOUS EMOTIONS

Since our immediate environment is rich in dangers and opportunities that rangewidely in importance, our brain needs something akin to a thermostat to
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determine when a specific challenge reaches the threshold of being sufficientlyimportant to activate the several systems that focus attention and developappropriate responses. Emotion, centered principally in a small set of subcortical brain systems, is our biological thermostat, and so it's central to cognition(and educational practice). Although emotion is embedded in our language as a

somewhat vague concept, recent scientific developments are clarifying theterminology, and changing some previously held beliefs about its biology andfunction.

1. Emotion is an innate, powerful, and principally unconscious process. Ithas to alert us when we're asleep or attending to other things, but notbother us with problems and processes that don't require consciousattention. For example, emotion alerts us to an opportunity for food, butit doesn't continually report on the digestive process that follows eatingunless the food turns out to be indigestible. Further, we don't consciouslychoose to be emotionally aroused, and such arousal often interferes withwhat we're currently doing. In effect, our emotions tell us to stop doingwhat we're currently doing, and to attend this more important challenge.

That dominance is possible because far more neural fibers project from ourbrain's emotional centers up into the logical/rational areas than the reverse. Asudden emotional stimulus can thus easily and immediately stop classroomactivity -- and it's then neurologically difficult to get students so rationally shutoff their emotional arousal and resume what they were doing. Effective teachers,realizing that the disruptive emotional arousal will continue until the problem isresolved, simply take the time to resolve it before resuming what they werepreviously doing.

2. A click of the thermostat announces a furnace's imminent response to asudden drop in room temperature. Our mostly unconscious bodylanguage similarly reports our current emotional state. It's obviouslyuseful for a social species to have a means of heralding the thrust of animminent emotion-driven behavior -- and so it makes a lot of sense forteachers to become adept at reading and adapting to their students' bodylanguage.

3. Emotion tends to respond most vigorously to high contrast information,and to merely monitor or ignore steady states and subtle changes. This isgenerally biologically sensible. Stay the course rather than expend

cognitive energy on things that aren't currently problematic andfluctuating. Emotion can thus trick us into not recognizing the subtlebody language of a gradually encroaching problem until it suddenlybecomes menacing.

The recent spate of school killings came as a surprise to many educators andclassmates who had worked daily with the perpetrators, and hadn't suspected athing. We're similarly surprised when an unnoticed former student turns out to


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be very successful. Recall our immune system -- tuned to tiny dangers andopportunities that are invisible to our brain (which focuses on the visible things).Do schools need a similar dual monitoring system that can recognize both themanifest and masked dangers and opportunities that crowd the corridors?Schools had such a system -- counselors and others whose principal assignment

was to move about the school (like immune cells prowling our body) on thelookout for potential problems. In a reckless search for economy at any cost,many schools dismissed them, or burdened them with assignments thatprecluded their ability to do what they were trained to do. A tiny unnoticed viruscan soon immobilize an entire body. That's why we have both a brain and animmune system. Institutions that ignore the little (but emerging) problems do itat their peril.

4. Emotional arousal doesn't define or solve the challenge, but rather itactivates attentional and problem solving processes that develop theresponse (our immune system, similarly separates the tasks of recognizingand responding to our body's microscopic invaders). We thus don'temotionally respond to a challenge, but rather, our emotions alert us to itsexistence -- a subtle but important distinction. So although our emotionsplay a necessary initial role in the shaping and eventual solution of aproblem (and may continue to arouse us throughout our response, becauseit's generally important to maintain interest in the challenge), they're not aproblem-solving system.

Consider an emotionally arousing classroom game (such as a spelling relay) thathas no relationship to the skill being taught. The game artificially hypes studentemotion in an activity that probably wouldn't of itself arouse enough interest toenhance learning. So even artificial emotion can activate attention, which

activates the cognitive systems that memorize the spelling of words. Ideally,though, a teacher's emotional trigger to an activity should be related to the natureof the activity, since this will provide a more easily remembered emotionalcontext for the future use of the learned material.

5. Although emotions don't solve our problems, they can bias the direction ofthe response. Temperament is a seemingly innate element of ouremotional system that unconsciously predisposes emotional arousaltowards danger or opportunity. A person's temperament typically centerssomewhere along a continuum between bold/uninhibited andanxious/inhibited (Kagan, 1994), with boldness being processed

principally in the left hemisphere, and anxiousness in the righthemisphere (Siegel, 1999). When emotionally aroused, the bold thus tendto be initially curious about a potential opportunity, and the anxious waryabout a potential danger. Temperament is thus a useful trait, since itenhances a quick and confident move towards a response. Because wefrequently follow our temperamental bias, we tend to become quitecompetent with it over time. Think of handedness, which similarlydevelops exceptional competence with the favored hand.


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Either temperamental bias can be useful, so students should be encouraged todevelop whatever nature has given them. But just as it's advisable to divide aninvestment portfolio between conservative (danger) and risky (opportunity)investments, so students should be given opportunities to experience salutationthat would move them away from their temperamental predisposition, and allow

them to practice their back-up system. Projects that effectively teambold/optimistic students with anxious/pessimistic students can create acooperative forum in which the best elements of both approaches can besynthesized into an effective solution. Indeed, people with differenttemperaments often marry and create a successful family team if mutual respectdefines the relationship.

6. Emotions (like temperament) are neither positive nor negative inthemselves. They all evolved to alert us to specific kinds of problems, soall are developmentally important. Just as theorists have proposed severaldifferent ways of categorizing intelligence, so scientists differ somewhat intheir classification of emotions. Damasio (1999) lists surprise, happiness,fear, anger, disgust, and sadness, as our primary emotions; andembarrassment, jealousy, and guilt among our secondary (or social)emotions. Note that most alert us to a negative situation. We've tended toconsider classroom emotional responses in negative misbehavior terms --but since all brain systems (including emotion) must be developed,educators should now design appropriate developmental environments foremotions tuned to negative situations. We'll return to this issue later.

CONSCIOUS FEELINGS

Damasio (1999) suggests thatfeelings emerge in our brain when we become

conscious of our unconscious emotional arousal to a potentialdanger/opportunity. As indicated above, emotions can often be publiclyobserved, but our feelings remain a private mental experience of the emotion.Feelings, which lead us to conscious thought and exploration of the currentchallenge, are thus useful, since they allow us to go beyond innate programmedbehaviors, to rationally design solutions to a variety of contemporary challengesthat evolutionary development didn't cover.

Feelings allow us to step into the arcane world of consciousness, the mysteriousmental process that abandons us when we go to sleep, and magically reappearswhen we awaken. Consciousness identifies the first-person-singularselfthat

philosophers, psychologist, and theologians have long tried to define. Not onlydo I know something, but I know that I know it. So who is the "I" who is doing allthis knowing (and feeling)? Damasio draws on decades of neuroscience researchand the recent advances in brain imagine technology to suggest how consciousprocesses could have emerged in our brain out of the unconscious systems thatregulate emotion. Since school activities focus principally on conscious learningand behavior, an understanding of the biology of consciousness will be essentialto the development of credible theories of teaching and learning.


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Protoself In Damsio's theory, the biology of consciousness begins with aneuronal arrangement that maps every part of an organism's body into one ofvarious interconnected brain areas. This mapping is necessary in all animalsbecause brain and body must constantly communicate in order to maintain acontinuously revised sense of what's happening throughout the organism.

A collection of automated brain systems that Damasio calls the protoself use thiscontinuous flow of information to manage various life processes, such ascirculation and respiration. The protoself maintains the stability it needs acrossits lifetime by operating body systems within genetically established relativelynarrow regulatory ranges.

Core Consciousness: The Present But we're conscious of more than ourown self. Our protoself is imprisoned within the geography of its body, butsensory/motor and related brain systems also allow a conscious organism toexplore the world. A stable body thus confronts a constantly shifting andexpanding external environment.

So not only does a brain contain a map of its body, but a conscious brain mustalso have a mechanism for mapping and connecting to the external world.Damasio believes that consciousness emerges when the mapped relationshipbetween organism and an external object (which may be another organism) hasrisen to the level of a feeling of what's currently happening.

Core consciousness (which we share with many animals) is thus theconsciousness of the here-and-now -- a nonverbal imaged running account of theobjects an organism confronts in a series of successive instants as it movesthrough and interacts with its immediate environment. Think of being both actorand spectator in a movie within our brain (a film being a sequence of still picturesthat give the illusion of movement as they quickly pulsate through our brain).

Many catch-phrases in our culture speak to the important of recognizing andrespecting the her-and-now in the quickly moving stream of consciousness thatdefines much of life. Stop the world, I want to get off. Slow down and smell thedaisies. Seize the moment. Core consciousness is primal in that it continuouslyfocuses the organism on the immediate which

Extended Consciousness: The Past and Future. We may live in thepresent, but we have lived in the past and we will probably live in the

future. Damasio suggests that organisms must have a large cortex in order toconsciously move beyond the here-and-now -- to profit from past experiencesand to avoid potential problems. The cortex must be sufficiently large to containa vast and powerful autobiographical memory that can quickly identify the largestpossible range of information relevant to a novel challenge. Humans, and thegreat apes to a lesser extent, have such a cortex.


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Intelligence emerges out of this ability to embellish and temporally extend coreconsciousness. It allows our brain to manipulate recalled information in themental design and analysis of potential responses. The practical applications ofconscious intelligence include imagination, creativity and conscience -- which ledto language, art, science, technology, and a variety of cultural and political

systems (such as the shared government of a democratic society).

In laying out many of the specifics of the neurobiology of consciousness, Damasiohas established a credible framework that other theorist and researchers willfurther explore. Indeed, as I write this, Gerald Edelman, who won the NobelPrize for his immune system discoveries, and neuroscientist Giulio Tononi havejust published their Darwinian exploration of consciousness (2000). Expectother books by renowned scientists to follow, consciousness being the Holy Grailof the neurosciences. This short functional synthesis of Damsio's book couldn'thope to communicate the richness of his theory, and the depth of his supportingscientific evidence. Read the book and be amazed.

We thus begin a new century with optimism -- knowing that a majoreducationally significant biological mystery is moving decidedly towardssolution. Einstein's theories established the 1900's as the century of physics.Biology should dominate at least the early part of this century -- and educatorsare basically biologists. We can revolutionize educational policy and practice, butonly if we inform ourselves of the explosive educationally important cognitiveneuroscience developments that are occurring now, on our watch.

CURRICULAR CHALLENGES

This discussion has focused principally on our emerging understanding of ourcritically important recognition and arousal systems -- from unconscious emotionto conscious feelings. What do such biological developments have to say to thosewho seek practical educational applications from such theory and research?Three related issues seem promising -- and especially for imaginative youngeducators in search of a career research agenda that's focused on the search forappropriate educational applications in this area:

The Arts. I have argued that the arts play and important role in thedevelopment and maintenance of our motor system, which processes theconcluding stage of most cognitive sequences (Sylwester, 1998). What role mightthe arts play in the initiatory stages of cognition (recognition, arousal)?

Unconscious emotions and conscious feelings alert us to biologically importantdangers and opportunities. We're a social species, so it would be advantageousfor a society to have similar alerting systems forculturally important dangersand opportunities that many people might otherwise not recognize. Animportant segment of the arts, mass media, and cultural organizations play sucha social arousal role. This suggests that the not-necessarily-nice-and-pretty artsare an integral part of the social equivalent of our very importantemotion/attention system. If so, it's folly to reduce school programs that help


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students to understand the often critical role of social arousal systems, such asthe arts. It also suggests that if the arts are important to the development andmaintenance of the systems that initiate and conclude cognitive activity, they'reprobably also important to the robustness of the systems that process the severalintervening stages. The arts, like consciousness, have been an enigmatic element

of human life -- and like consciousness, they now appear to be researchable inways not possible during the past century.

Play. Extended consciousness requires a large cortex, and this creates a birthcanal problem (that all mothers understand). Humans are consequently bornwith a very immature brain (13 its adult size) which develops over a longsheltered childhood. Most animals are born with a substantially developed brain,and so they're on their own shortly after birth. Their survival is thus dependenton a large number of innate (rather than learned) brain systems that respondautomatically to the dangers/opportunities their species typically confronts.

Sheltered from the need to protect and support themselves, juvenile humans arefree to use play to consciously explore the dynamics of and alternate solutions topretend problems that they devise -- typically childhood versions of various adultproblems they will later confront. But how does a brain unconsciously generatethe requisite emotional arousal without the presence of real danger oropportunity? Good games do that at a pretend level that extended consciousnesspermits, and so much informal childhood motor, language, and social learningdevelops easily and without much adult instruction through play/games/conteststhat can spark emotional arousal (which then activates our attention, problemsolving, and behavioral response systems).

Further, we continue to use play and games throughout life to maintain the

robustness of our emotional arousal system. Cognitive systems that aren'tcontinuously used weaken through a use-it-or-lose-it principle, and the reality isthat our primary emotions (surprise, happiness, fear, anger, disgust, andsadness) typically aren't frequently activated in a consciously controlled real life.But a game, such as basketball, will frequently and unpredictability (and perhapsartificially) activate all emotions of players and spectators over its course, andthat accounts for much of the appeal of the game.

Play and games are thus joyfully important emotion/attention machines that canenhance the quality of a sheltered child's extended learning. It's only in schoolthat we refer to learning as work. In an era obsessed with assessment and

standards, educators must rediscover the power that play has to activate andenhance learning. Teachers have always used learning games, but emergingelectronic technologies are creating amazing new instructional possibilities thatare replete with both danger and opportunity. For example, theFast ForWordprogram successfully uses variable speed video game technology to eliminatespecific auditory attentional deficits that negatively affect language developmentin young children. Play poses truly exciting challenges for imaginativeeducational theorists and researchers.
http://www.brainconnection.com/http://www.brainconnection.com/http://www.brainconnection.com/http://www.brainconnection.com/


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Classroom Management. The ability to recognize inappropriate socialbehavior is a key developmental skill. Misbehavior is to a classroom what pain isto a body -- a useful status report that something isn't working as it should.Damasio suggests that pain isn't an emotion, but rather a local tissue dysfunctionthat may or may not activate an emotion. Teachers and students similarly

respond to or ignore a variety of behaviors during a school day.

We've tended to view classroom management as an institutionally directedmeans to a compliant efficient teaching/learning environment. The assumptionis that the students are the problem, and yet there's often as much institutional asstudent misbehavior in a classroom. So why do the educators get to make all themisbehavior and management decisions? Is it possible to think of classroommanagement as a key collaborative element of the social curriculum? It wouldcertainly be a revolutionary challenge, but I believe that our emergingunderstanding of cognition and consciousness suggests that imaginative teacherscan and should attempt it (Sylwester 2000).

Most curricular information comes from beyond the classroom. Conversely,classroom management must recognize and respond to internal social dynamicsand tensions, and so it provides students with marvelous opportunities toconsciously confront and solve real social problems in an institutionalenvironment that differs from the informality of their home and neighborhood.

We're a conscious, social species, and we're 200+ years into the creation of ademocratic society that depends on the mastery of social skills and collaborativebehavior. And yet, by defining classroom management as something teachers doto students, we've ignored the best available laboratory for helping students toconsciously and collaboratively develop social and democratic skills. Many adult

social problems have classroom parallels. When the perspective shifts frombehavior management to curricular laboratory, misbehavior shifts from beingonly a negative danger to also being a positive opportunity for teacher andstudents to recognize and collaboratively solve real current classroom problems.How much current misbehavior emerges from student anger at having no voice inwhat occurs in a classroom?

One obvious problem is that the social behavior of immature students isn'texemplary. But neither is anything else when they begin the learning process.We realize that crawling leads to toddling leads to walking leads to running, andso allow the process to develop naturally (and not by posting rules and giving

lectures on how to do it). Conversely, schools unrealistically expect exemplaryinstitutional behavior from day one. Outside of school, children learn social skillsthrough the emotionally stimulatingpretend problem that play engenders, andthey gradually and informally resolve the problems that emerge. The classroom-as-laboratory would enhance that informal process by explicitly andexperientially developing the requisite social skills.


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A social skills curriculum grounded in collaborative classroom managementwould develop behavior recognition, data-gathering, analysis, and negotiationskills. Conceptually, the social management of a classroom involves the sameelements as those involved in the biological management of one's body: decisionson energy expenditure, space, time, movement, the biologically possible and

culturally appropriate range of behavior. It's nothing really complicated, andnothing that students should not explore and master. But, it's a scary paradigmshift in an era obsessed with school efficiency and assessment -- and possessed ofan irrational belief that if we tightly control the behavior of K-12 students for12,000 hours, the result will be the sudden mastery at 18 of the social skills ademocratic society requires of its adult citizen.

John Dewey began the 20th century with a philosophic plea that schools getserious about becoming laboratories for the development of the democratic skillsour society requires (1916). He was ignored. Another century has now passed,and we know much more about development, cognition, and consciousness thanDewey could have imagined. What we now know suggests strongly that Deweywas also biologically correct. So will we wait another 100 years?

References

Damasio, A. (1999) The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making ofConsciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace.

Dewey, J. (1916)Democracy and Education. New York: Macmillan.

Edelman, G. and G. Tononi (2000)A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter BecomesImagination. New York: Basic Books.

Kagan, J. (1994)Galen's Prophesy: Temperament in Human Nature. New York: Basic Books.

Siegel, D. (1999) The Developing Mind: Towards a Neurobiology of Interpersonal Experience.New York: Guilford.

Sylwester, R. (2000)A Biological Brain in a Cultural Classroom: Applying Biological Researchto Classroom Management. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Sywlester, R. (1998, November) Art for Brain's Sake. Educational Leadership, 56 (3) 31-35.

About the Author:

Robert Sylwester is an Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Oregon in Eugene,Oregon. You can reach him [email protected].
http://www.corwinpress.com/mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]://www.corwinpress.com/mailto:[email protected]


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Unconscious Emotions