Emotions

Recently I read a comment on Twisty's blog that said the following:

. . . it always seems to me like the argument that reason and logic are themselves specifically male falls into the age-old trap of assigning “good” characteristics (rationality) to men and “bad” characteristics (emotional nature) to women. Seems to me that when I sit down and carefully logic my way through a physics problem, I’m not a woman pretending to be a man so I can do physics. I’m simply a woman doing physics. I’ve never had the experience of my emotional nature impairing my ability to solve physics problems. But I’ve definitely observed that my choice to exclusively focus on logical training left me for a long time incapable of recognizing and managing my own emotional states. (Anne Nonymous)

I was thinking about emotionality, about the soupcon of defensiveness I hear in Anne's otherwise sanguine comment, and about my slightly effusive essay below on how I feel about my work.

I'm not going to lie: I get very emotional about my work. My emotions are big tidal waves, not little sloshes, which can be fun or terrifying. My emotions affect my science and vice versa. It's all tied up together. (As I said below.)

It occurred to me that the infamous VoxDay or his ilk might smirk at my lurid confession and see it as proof that the chicas are awash with sappy sentiment and ruled by irrational emotions, rather than being clear-headed logicians of the Spock variety.

My refutation is this - Rather than being ruled by irrational emotionality, my intellectual and emotional faculties are in fact more fully integrated than the Spock archetype's! The hemispheres of my female cerebellum are highly connected, such that there are not seperate little boxes for problem-solving vs gestalt. Emotionality is only a problem if you, the researcher, can't analyze and integrate the emotional inputs along with the logical inputs. Fortunately, I am a pretty smart cookie and have been able to learn to do this with more or less success. My mom is a champion at this sort of higher/lower level integration. But it makes more sense in social work than it does in science, at first glance.

Besides emotions are actually not irrational, for the most part; they provide immediate feedback about present situations based on previous experiences. E.g. dangerous person --> bad feeling about person --> avoidance of dangerous person. Of course, false correlations can give bad data, and lead to neuroses.

So when I look at a graph and feel a sexual thrill of satisfaction, my brain is telling me, by way of my body, that it's a pretty fucking awesome graph. I am willing to bet that Anne doesn't use pure logic to attack physics problems, either. After all, physicists are always talking about elegant or aesthetically pleasing solutions. What does that mean but a visceral (emotional) response to a stimulus? Just because you feel it doesn't make it not true.

Oooh, I fear I have argued my way into a trap with that last sentence, because now my agnostic/atheist cred might come under attack! So let me qualify that . . .

Just because you feel something doesn't make it true or untrue. The feeling - the physical output of unconscious operations in the brain - may or may not correspond to an accurate assessment of the situation, the same way that the image processed in the cortex from visual inputs may or may not be an accurate representation of the physical world. Your brain is often wrong. That's where logic helps. But note that logic is coming subsequent to the initial response!

So I ask you, imaginary Vox-like critics of my emotional nature: how can you expect to be a competent researcher when you can't even integrate your own primary analytical response(feeling) with your secondary analytical response (logic)?

Ha-ha! Take that!!!

(I know I'm tilting at a windmill, here, but do indulge me, please. It's my blog.)