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Good progress on 2nd emotion paper and other stuff 2004-10-03 - 9:59 p.m. 
Mostly finished with the statistics homework. I'll work on Section B tomorrow. Hopefully that'll only take a few or three hours.I read through the first of three emotion articles for the tuesday class. It was exceptionally brilliant and easy to read--two things that are not found easily in the science literature, let alone together. The one after it reads decently too, so I'm not as fucked as I thought when I printed out the 50+ pages o' stuff. I've been concentrating my efforts today on writing the emotions paper due for the monday meeting of the class tomorrow. I had alot of trouble figuring out two novel insights I had into emotion. I mean, "novel" suggests that noone has ever thought of what you're thinking--and all I could think of was obvious shit. I finally decided on two things: 1) You need emotion for most kinds of cognition, from goal-pursuing to social reasoning. When you get brain damage in two areas I describe, you can still feel emotion--but you can't generate an emotional response. Because you can't generate an emotional response, you get fucked up on specific kinds of cognitive functions. In short: Emotion isn't touched and it stays constant, but cognition can get screwed. 2) There are areas where you can get brain damage and have blunted emotional feelings. The key is that emotion is only blunted, not extinguished. In short: Emotion is constant, even if it's blunted. I'm not thrilled about #2. It's obvious to anyone who reads the articles. But I'm just looking to write a good 2-page non-graded paper, not a fabulous 2-page non-graded paper. I've got priorities elsewhere and put way more thought into this than most. I'm thinking that Emotions Prof. won't care much for it, though, since it doesn't read much like a 'thought piece'. I just can't write flowery shit from my imagination when it comes to a science paper. I need to prove every one of my points and prove them well. It's the way I was trained, yeah? As a personal note, my thighs are freezing sitting by this window of Dung Brothers, but I feel a hell of alot better than I did earlier today and especially late last evening. I haven't had a day off in over a month, but I'm holding up well. It's just like college but with slightly less free time. Back to the paper. |
