Antonio Damasio is a professor at the University of Southern California and a leading neuroscientist. His research involves the connections between emotions and the cognitive experience. 

"I propose that human reason depends on several brain systems, working in concert across many levels of neuronal organization, rather than on a single brain center. Both 'high-level' and 'low-level' brain regions ... cooperate in the making of reason.

The lower levels in the neural edifice of reason are the same ones that regulate the processing of emotions and feelings, along with the body functions necessary for an organism's survival. In turn, these lower levels maintain direct and mutual relationships with virtually every bodily organ, thus placing the body directly within the chain of operations that generate the highest reaches of reasoning, decision making, and, by extension, social behavior and creativity. Emotion, feeling and biological regulation all play a role in human reason."

- Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain