Are Emotional Structures the Foundation of Intelligence?



Consider if the “something happens as a child grows” might in fact be critical. And not just critical, but the major source of information. What exactly is that “nurture” part of nature vs. nurture?



Interactive emotional experience required for thinking and language

Interactive emotional experience required for thinking and language

Interactive emotional experience is not just development precedence. It’s also the foundation of the architecture of the mind, at least as far as grounding symbols. This type of mental symbol—and having a lot of them generated during development—is required for meaning and language, according to Greenspan and Shanker.

But why isn’t it enough to just separate action from perception to get a symbol and ground it some other way? In other words, are all concepts grounded—if you go down enough—with an emotionally-linked symbol?

Greenspan and Shanker also point out the important development of conversation skills. Normal people like dialogue. They like reading it and they like hanging out and chatting with fellow humans. If you, gentle reader, do not like conversing with other humans, then you may want to consider how normal your upbringing really was. The human rhythmic capacity seems to be developed during infant-caregiver interactions. That’s certainly easy to believe, but is it fundamentally tied into emotions? From their examples, it would seem that emotional interactions are the enabler. Likewise with planning and sequencing abilities. The key thing there, I think, is that emotional interactions enable the development—the mechanisms for planning and conversations—even if the concepts are eventually divorced from the childish emotional links.


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