Outside reading -2

On NPR, there was a biologist named Robert Sapolsky who in an interview stimulated some interesting questions for me to address in religious studies. In class, I accused myself of being a reductionist. When Dr. Redick was talking about emotion, I was silently  wearing my “biology hat” thinking about endocrine and neurological functions as the effectors of these feelings. In class, I dismissed this notion with some discussion considering the notion that I may be discounting these incontrovertibly complex biological functions as being a bunch of chemicals. But then, I heard something very interesting on NPR from Dr. Sapolsky; he was speaking from research as a neuroendocrinologist and he said that people who become paralyzed report “feeling less emotion." They feel less happy, but also less sad. It presents, to me, an interesting way to look at our bodies as ways to detect emotion. I don’t yet know how I feel about this research, but it certainly gives me a lot to think about.