Thought and Feeling

Michael Brown in his book, Who Owns Native Culture, mentions that any decent democracy is concerned about the feelings of its citizens. He also mentions that U.S. and other societies have become more concerned about the feelings of citizens than in the past. Both points seem self evident, once Brown has pointed them out.

This blog focuses on knowledge. The acquisition of information, learning to turn that information into knowledge, and extrapolation of knowledge are within what we generally consider to be the realm of the mind.

Emotions too are within what we consider to be the realm of the mind. We know whether we feel angry or peaceful, happy or sad, emotional or calm. There are geographic patterns to emotions, and indeed there is a map of the distribution happiness around the globe. There seem to be cultural patterns of emotion.

• I remember a physician I knew who had practiced among the Navajos and then among Latin Americans. His description of the difference in behavior between birthing mothers from the two cultures suggested a very different emotional response to the experience.
• It seems that in Andean countries it is commonly perceived that people in the highlands are more somber, and people on the coast are "alegre".
• Orhan Pamuk in Istanbul: Memories and the City seems to me to describe a mood which characterizes people's experience in Istanbul, which is similar to moods characteristic of other cities but different from those.

It seems to me that people learn how to respond emotionally to situations, and that emotions can be socially constructed. That is, there are similarities to the way the mind deals with feelings and the way it deals with thoughts.

The brain is the organ of the mind. Of course, that is a simplification and the way we think and feel can be affected by many other parts of the human organism. However, let it stand for the point I am about to make.

It may be semantically useful to separate thinking and feeling when talking about the mind, but the brain which actually does both seems likely to do both simultaneously with considerable overlap. The way we feel influences the way we think; what we think influences the way we feel. When we learn something, I suspect we internalize both the nominal lesson and the feelings associated with that lesson.

I believe as we educate people we should consciously plan to deal with feelings, limiting the negative feelings engendered by the process and encouraging positive feelings toward the subject and is pursuit.

So too, in the realm of public policy, perhaps we should broaden our topicl perhaps Knowledge and Emotion for Development. As the blog focuses on the role of the mind in development, perhaps it should focus not only on thought but on feelings.