Upon getting over the shock my mirror neurons gave me after reading about Phineas Gage, I began to try and wade through the neurological terminology Damasio uses to try and find a rhetorical use for the tale he is telling (taking "rhetoric" in a more narrow sense, not how Kennedy would define it). Using the stories of Gage and Elliot, Damasio was able to illustrate, however grotesquely, that certain parts of the brain govern certain aspects of life, be it reason, personality, etc, and maybe more importantly, that said reasons are not perfectly defined. It is not the neuroscience that interests me though.
I am fine with the fact that certain emotions exist on certain levels (ch 7), but thinking back to the beginning chapters it can be observed that the brain is not the product of some higher assembly line, rather it is tailored to the specific person through learned practice. This is knowing your audience on a whole new level.
In Damasio's Aside on Phrenology, he said that "[t]he mind results from the operation of each of the separate components, and from the concerted operation of the multiple systems constituted by those separate components" (ch1). So in essence our mind is an orchestra, and our ideas and speech that spew forth is the symphony composed therein. My question is, assuming an understanding of the basic paradigm of brain function, can a person appeal just to the string section, then to the horns, and so on until the entire consciousness is playing the rhetor's song? Second question: did Leo just make a movie about that?
Maybe a better question is: Should, or, is it effective to, target individual emotions related to the ideal state on the overall continuum you want your audience to be at (say resentment for anger), to build to the target emotion gradually?
Hey Stewart, You make a good point about targeting certain emotions. Certainly, one can use anger or empathy as a tool to unify an audience, but does that unification remain strong after the audience has dispersed and gone back to their individual lives. Not all of us feel emotions the same ways-- where some may get really angry, others may not. We all fall into a different place on the continuum based not only on the physical structures of the brain, but also on our chemical make up...
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