May 15, 2004

» Steven Johnson talks to Antonio Damasio about our two-speed minds

"We really have two systems that are totally integrated and work perfectly well with each other, but that are very different in their time constants. One is the emotional system, which is the basic regulatory system that works very slowly, with time scales of a second or more. Than you have the cognitive system, which is much faster, because of the way it's wired, and because a lot of the fiber systems are totally myelinated -- which means it works much faster. So you can do a lot of reasoning, a lot of recognition of objects, remembering names, in just a few hundredths of a second."