ABSTRACT
The 1990s was a decade of phenomenal scientific and technological progress; innovations such as the internet, e-commerce, mobile phones and DVDs have all changed the ways in which we live our twenty-first century personal and working lives. Alongside these technological leaps forward George Bush declared it ‘The Decade of the Brain’. In the cognitive and neurosciences the 1990s saw the publication of two highly influential works: Joseph Le Doux’s The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (1996), and two years previously Antonio R. Damasio’s Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. At the end of the decade Lakoff and Johnson in Philosophy in the Flesh (1999) summarized the position that cognitive science had reached
with the stark assertion that ‘the mind is inherently embodied; thought is mostly unconscious; [and] reason is not dispassionate, but emotionally engaged’.1
