ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses false beliefs: people, who believe things that are patently not true about the external world and whom, when confronted on these beliefs, argue against the evidence of external reality. It suggests that a possible role for affect in false belief, and affect is really much more important for cognition than many people believe—certainly than most cognitive neuroscientists believe. The chapter presents several lines of evidence in order to support this argument and also discuss a group of neurological patients who have focal lesions in the ventromesial frontal lobes. Emotion is an absolutely central feature of the human mental apparatus, and attempts to maintain that ‘‘rationality’’ has little to do with emotion seem misguided. In addition for normal development, one needs more than that the basic neurobiology should be present in the developing brain. Simultaneously, psychotherapists have been interested in an entirely different aspect of the mental apparatus, stressing the importance of affect, irrationality, and intuition.
