Affective Neuroscience and Adult Education

ABSTRACT The expanding field of affective neuroscience is redefining the role of emotions in cognition, reasoning, and judgment. This contradicts long‐standing assumptions about cognition that consider emotions antithetical to learning. Emotions arose early in human brain development as essential to survival by directing the embodied brain toward life‐sustaining and away from life‐threatening environments. Metaphorical language, which emerges from embodied experience, is also necessary for thinking, reasoning, and learning. The brain's right hemisphere (RH) is the primary site for understanding figurative and symbolic language. Educational environments emphasize the left hemisphere's capacity for syntactic language and direct, linear thought. Though the RH has a more comprehensive view of reality, its contributions may be ignored or dismissed because it communicates metaphorically and symbolically. Drawing on elements of affective neuroscience, embodied emotions, and hemispheric difference may provide educators with new awareness in reconstructing adult learning environments with the embodied brain in mind.