EMOTIONS AND LANGUAGE
From an evolutionary standpoint, emotions preceded language. The limbic system, where emotion originates, is thousands of years older than the neo-cortex, where rational thought and language exist. Simply put, we were emotional beings long before we had language. Lewis, Amini, and Lannon state in A General Theory of Love that “Emotions reach back one hundred million years, while cognition is a few hundred thousand years old at best. Despite their youth, the prominent capacities of the neocortical brain dazzled the Western world and eclipsed the mind’s quieter limbic inhabitant. Because logic and deduction accomplish so plainly, they have been presumed the master keys that open all doors” (2000, p. 228).
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