Classical Rhetoric and current Neuroscience: emotions and persuasion

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to show that some current neuroscience research related to the study of decision making and mirror neurons confirm two of the intuitions that the ancient writers of Rhetoric had. First, the mixture of emotion and argumentation is essential in persuasion, because both emotions and rational arguments are needed to make decisions, as well as the arrangement of the parts of the speech, which places emotion at the beginning and end of the speech and argument in its central part, strictly conforms to the decision-making processes described by neuroscience. On the other hand, the discovery of mirror neurons confirms that classical rhetoricians were not wrong to give great importance to the operation of actio or pronuntiatio. Thus, when we witness the pronunciation of a speech, we automatically simulate gestures and expressions of the speaker in our brain and therefore, easily and unconsciously, understand how the speaker feels and what is meant to be conveyed.