Thinking is really not separable from emoting. Thinking exists in an emotional context. We tend to try and call abstract scientific thinking impartial and “objective”, but of course it always happens in emotional spaces of relative comfort and discomfort. People who enjoy abstraction enjoy being the ones able to do certain sorts of math better than most. It is a domain where a lack of emotional skill and intelligence is not punished, and where in fact it is not just rewarded professionally but socially. Nerds of a feather flock together.
Here is the problem: people like this, faced with logically compelling abstract conclusions that are UNFAMILIAR TO THEM, which cause them anxiety, can and will find spurious reasons–seemingly logical–to reject them, if they lack the emotional openness and flexibility to integrate them into new, more accurate world views.
You cannot perform abstraction honestly and competently over a prolonged period of time without developing corresponding emotional skill. It cannot be done. You will hit flexion points where a lack of flexibility will push you into error.
This is why, as Schopenhauer pointed out:
“All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed; Second, it is violently opposed; and Third, it is accepted as self-evident.”
Edward de Bono pointed out that “arrogance is a mistake in the future”, and I would submit that arrogance is a form of rigidity, which is to say a lack of emotional intelligence.
What made me think about this was my daily Lumosity. I am in general quite good at it. I’m in the 99.3 percentile of my age, which is pretty good, particularly considering that I am only being compared to people also using Lumosity, which is likely the top third or so of IQ’s in the country and world.
But some games work for me at a more emotional level than a perceptual one. Some of the pattern matching ones, and short term memory ones, I find myself clinging to what just came and not attending to what is now present. I find emotions interfering. This makes Lumosity for me a sort of brain practice, but also a sort of meditation where I am probing and finding my points of emotional fixity–clinging would be a relevant word–and giving them a bit of a stretch.