{"id":3042,"date":"2021-06-02T12:43:53","date_gmt":"2021-06-02T16:43:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www2.law.temple.edu\/aer\/?p=3042"},"modified":"2022-01-06T19:26:48","modified_gmt":"2022-01-06T19:26:48","slug":"brain-lessons-the-consequence-of-excising-emotion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/law.temple.edu\/aer\/2021\/06\/02\/brain-lessons-the-consequence-of-excising-emotion\/","title":{"rendered":"BRAIN LESSONS: THE CONSEQUENCES OF EXCISING EMOTION"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two weeks ago, my wife propped open the door of our (too-long-for-any-reasonable-use) screened porch.\u00a0 She was shuttling plants in and out every night and got tired of latching and unlatching the porch door.\u00a0 Well, it\u2019s closed now\u2014for good\u2014because a hummingbird got into the porch.\u00a0 I can\u2019t seem to forget that little bird and I thought I should write about him.<\/p>\n

I saw him from the breakfast table.\u00a0 He was whizzing past the doors out to the porch, left and right, passing like a pendulum.\u00a0 Like every wasp and moth before him, he didn\u2019t know how screens work\u2014how they entice you with light and scenery but abruptly stop you with mesh.\u00a0 I went to try to herd him out the door.\u00a0 He just flew higher than my head and hands.\u00a0 Back and forth he went, missing the narrow porch door and smashing into the screens at each end.\u00a0 I got a pillowcase to try to catch him.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t work.\u00a0 At one point in my end-to-end pursuit, I thought his tongue was lolling out of him, from exhaustion, but I quickly realized that he had irreparably damaged his delicate black beak.\u00a0 I made a fast and inexorable decision and I sent my wife back inside.\u00a0 Nobody needed to see the place where the two of us were going\u2014fleeing and chasing.<\/p>\n

I eventually caught him in the pillowcase.\u00a0 As I held him folded in the pillowcase, his squeakings, so familiar to me while I photograph them at our feeders, increased in tempo and timbre. I quickly picked up the nearest rock\u2014and who knows why it was there on the deck outside\u2014and put the whole affair to an end.\u00a0 The rest of the day, however, I just re-lived it\u2026over and over.\u00a0 Our mutual helplessness.\u00a0 The sounds.\u00a0 The small red spot on the baby-blue pillowcase.<\/p>\n

The rock.<\/p>\n

I have been trying to ignore it.\u00a0 Ignore what?\u00a0 The emotion<\/em><\/strong> of the whole thing.\u00a0 Pushing it down, shooing it away and, finally, coolly rationalizing each of the events; or, to put it more honestly, my decisions within<\/em> those events.\u00a0 Even as I write about it now, my eyes feel swollen with the press of tears that I\u2019m blinking back.\u00a0 If I can\u2019t be free of the memory, can I at least be free of the emotion that always arrives with it? \u00a0Weeks have passed. \u00a0Then, just tonight, I read about a man suffering from a small brain tumor who, upon the excision of the tumor, had no apparent capacity for emotion left within him. He was rendered emotionless. But, the surgery didn\u2019t perfect him.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t turn him into a most-intriguing rational razorblade, like Spock.\u00a0 As I read about him, I thought of my hummingbird and I knew what I had to write my June blog about.<\/p>\n

Before his brain tumor, writes Jonah Lehrer, \u201cElliot\u201d was a rather intelligent and successful man with a near genius IQ.\u00a0 Surprisingly, and despite losing a part of his brain to the surgery, he suffered no loss of intellect.\u00a0 He remained rational and high functioning in most respects.\u00a0 However, after his surgery those around him at work and home noticed two major differences: First, nothing seemed to touch him or move him. Not love, nor anger, nor fear.\u00a0 That\u2019s expected when one loses one\u2019s emotional senses.\u00a0 Now here\u2019s the stunning part: Along with the absence of emotion, he seemed to utterly lose the ability to make even the simplest decisions.[1]<\/a> \u00a0If he tried to decide something as perfunctory as where to have lunch, he would drive to various restaurants, weigh their menus, evaluate seating, and check their wait times, but struggle to choose where to eat.\u00a0 His life crumbled around him.\u00a0 His wife left.\u00a0 He lost his job.\u00a0 He had to move back in with his parents.\u00a0 The more closely linked to things personal or social the decisions were, the harder it became for Elliot to make them.[2]<\/a>\u00a0 After watching Elliot weigh for 30 minutes the pros and cons of two different appointment times, the researcher working with Elliot said, \u201cIt took enormous discipline to listen to all of this without pounding on the table and telling him to stop.\u201d[3]<\/a><\/p>\n

Based on his work with Elliot and other similar patients, Antonio Damasio was able to isolate the small bundle of nerves in the brain, just behind the eyes, that \u201cintegrat[es] visceral emotions into decision-making.\u201d[4]<\/a> The excision of Elliot\u2019s small tumor damaged this area, the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), just enough to remove Elliot\u2019s emotions and<\/em> his capacity to decide.<\/p>\n

It should go without saying that connecting law to fact has been a rational business. We, as lawyers and educators, have made it that way.\u00a0 In neither semester of my torts class were we ever asked by our professor\u2014a good and empathetic man\u2014\u201cClass, have you stopped to think what it must be like to have participated in the crippling of your own child because you yelled at him in order to stop him from drinking from a container of baby oil?<\/em>\u201d[5]<\/a>\u00a0 And, if you\u2019ll forgive my hyperbole here, I think it\u2019s a sin if we don\u2019t ask that question in torts, and if we teach our trial advocacy students, or foist on our jurors, a cool and completely rational opening or closing. Who knows?\u00a0 We may be participating, in some small way, in the crippling of their decision-making.<\/p>\n

The great trial lawyer, Gerry Spence, says of effective trial lawyering, \u201cTo move others, we must first be moved.\u00a0 To persuade others, we must first be credible.\u00a0 To be credible, we must tell the truth and the truth always begins with our feelings.\u201d[6]<\/a>\u00a0 However, it\u2019s hard to feel<\/em> sometimes and even harder to adjust to the idea that others, jurors for instance, can or even should be let into our own feelings. There are so many things about law school that condition us against the instinct to share our emotions, don\u2019t you think? \u00a0Well, may I just say to you, as an encouragement, that I think it\u2019s a terrible idea for you to catch your feelings up in a pillowcase and reach for the nearest rock.\u00a0 I hope none of us ever asks our students or jurors to do it.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Jonah Lehrer, Feeling our way to decision, <\/em>The Sydney Morning Herald (Feb. 18, 2009), https:\/\/www.smh.com.au\/national\/feeling-our-way-to-decision-20090227-8k8v.html.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Id.<\/em><\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Id.<\/em><\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Id. <\/em><\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> A rough summary of a failure-to-warn case that hasn\u2019t left me in 23 years.\u00a0 Ayers v. Johnson & Johnson Baby Products Co., <\/em>147 Wash.2d 747 (1991).<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> Gerry Spence, Win Your Case 32 (2005).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two weeks ago, my wife propped open the door of our (too-long-for-any-reasonable-use) screened porch.\u00a0 She was shuttling plants in and out every night and got tired of latching and unlatching the porch door.\u00a0 Well, it\u2019s closed now\u2014for good\u2014because a hummingbird got into the porch.\u00a0 I can\u2019t seem to forget that little bird and I thought<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"coauthors":[203],"class_list":["post-3042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brain-lessons"],"yoast_head":"\nBRAIN LESSONS: THE CONSEQUENCES OF EXCISING EMOTION - Advocacy and Evidence Resources<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/law.temple.edu\/aer\/2021\/06\/02\/brain-lessons-the-consequence-of-excising-emotion\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"BRAIN LESSONS: THE CONSEQUENCES OF EXCISING EMOTION - 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