ABSTRACT
This chapter explores emerging intersections between neuroscience, philosophy, and composition and rhetoric around the nature of plasticity. Challenging the classical neuroscientific subject, Lisa Feldman Barrett's theory shows that emotions are predictions made by the brain—but also, that emotions originate not in some primitive area of the brain, or in universal brain locations, but rather in society. The classical model of the brain theorizes emotions as emerging through natural selection to their seats in distinct brain regions. Emotional intelligence is essential for the dialectical advance of learning and self formation. The chapter argues that emotional granularity is important not only in neurorhetoric, but also in forming a set of tools for dealing with the inevitable disruption, destruction, and failure that characterizes the plasticity of learning, the structural leaps entailed in breaking habituated and automated response. One major discovery of contemporary neuroscience, a deconstruction of the biological and social around the nature of form, is that the brain is plastic.
