Cognitive research begins to catch up with St. Augustine

I believed Dr. Bates and Augustine, but I guess I didn't believe that other people would say the same thing. I was wrong.

Yesterday was the school's first Faith and Reason seminar, in which Dr. Bates read a paper on Augustine of Hippo on the relationship between love and knowledge.

All objects that are known are both known and loved. Indeed, the perfecting moment of the mind is love, and true knowledge comes in proportion to the love of what is known.1

That thought took some digesting, but I now opine Augustine is on to something. Nevertheless, love was the last thing on my mind as I read my text for tomorrow morning's Nonfiction class.

Cognitive research indicates that humans remember best what enters the brain in an envelope of "emotion." If it is true that facts and details are stored along with attendant emotions in a system of cross-files throughout the brain, we writers must recognize it and use it to our advantage.2

Love isn't precisely the same as emotion, but there's a distinct similarity there. I do like seeing him vindicated. :-)


1. Dr. Todd Bates, "Duplex Cognitio: What I Need to Know and How the Liberal Arts Can Help Me Know It," Patrick Henry College, September 13, 2005, page 3.

2. Theodore A. Rees Cheney, Writing Creative Nonfiction, Ten Speed Press, 2001, page 37.