Not only in the brain: Cabanis and the Montpellierian tradition of localization

Journal/Book: Brain Cognition. 2000; 43: 525 B St, Ste 1900, San Diego, CA 92101-4495, USA. Academic Press Inc. 262-268.

Abstract: Antonio Damasio (1995) has recently presented evidence to the effect that we art, perhaps wrong in thinking that it is only the blain that thinks. Rational decision making involves emotional reactions as a necessary condition and background. And since emotions involve bodily reactions which are not limited to the brain but which embrace the autonomous nervous system and the viscera, one could say that we actually think with our bodies and not merely with our brains. According to Damasio the incapacity of patients with frontal lobe pathology in decision making could bi: explained by a disturbance in emotional reactions involving the whole organism. Philosophical discussions concerning brains in a vat have completely forgotten these aspects of our mental life. Despite the fact that the idea that we think exclusively with our brains has during the modern age been a rather widely held ''received view,'' there is a physiological and philosophical tradition which regarded mental functions as the result of the interaction of several organs, instead of seeing the ln a, the result of the activity of the brain alone.

Note: Article Kaitaro T, Univ Joensuu, Dept Social Policy, FIN-80101 Joensuu, FINLAND

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