Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain

by António Damásio

James made no provision for an alternative or supplementary mechanism to generate the feeling that corresponds to a body excited by emotion. In the Jamesian view, the body is always interposed in the process. Moreover, James had little to say about the possible roles of emotion in cognition and behavior.

I am in fuĺl agreement with James' reported view in the 2nd sentence here except for the abstact or meta patterns that can result.

James

nonautomatic mental process.

there seem to be other neural means to achieve the body sense that James considered the essence of the emotional process.

Primary Emotions

wired to respond with an emotion, in preorganized fashion, when certain features of stimuli

All that is required is that early sensory cortices detect and categorize the key feature or features of a given entity (e.g., animal, object), and that structures such as the amygdala receive signals concerning their conjunctive presence.

feeling of the emotion

the nexus between object and emotional body state.

feeling your emotional states, which is to say being conscious of emotions, offers you flexibility of response based on the particular history of your interactions with the environment. Although you need innate devices to start the ball of knowledge rolling, feelings offer you something extra.

Primary emotions (read: innate, preorganized, Jamesian) depend on limbic system circuitry, the amygdala and anterior cingulate being the prime players.

secondary emotions, which occur once we begin experiencing feelings and forming systematic connections between categories of objects and situations, on the one hand, and primary emotions, on the other.

Secondary Emotions

“experience an emotion”?

there are changes in a number of parameters in the function of viscera (heart, lungs, gut, skin), skeletal muscles (those that are attached to your bones), and endocrine glands (such as the pituitary and adrenals). A number of peptide modulators are released from the brain into the bloodstream.

This range of functional balance should not be seen as static; it is a continuous succession of profile changes within upper and lower limits, in constant motion.

Thus my term 'homeodynamic'

hypothetical experience of emotion,

conclusion,

damage to the limbic system impairs the processing of primary emotion; damage to prefrontal cortices compromises the processing of secondary emotion.

Current research in my laboratory generally supports the idea of asymmetry in the process of emotion, but also indicates that the asymmetries do not pertain to all emotions equally.

background feelings those that do not originate in emotions

feelings of emotions,.

What gives the body landscape its character at a given moment is not just a set of neural signals but also a set of chemical signals that modify the mode in which neural signals are processed. Think of this as the reason why certain chemical substances have played a major role in so many cultures; and consider that the drug problem that our society currently faces—and I refer to both illegal and legal drugs—cannot be solved without understanding in depth the neural mechanisms we are discussing here.

The problem with the assertion is that virtually nobody is capable, interested, or motivated with that level of specificity. Add to that the fact that hegemonic solutions to most complex phenomena considered descriptively or prescriptively typically fail on multiple levels.

what I call a feeling.

feeling depends on the juxtaposition of an image of the body proper to an image of something else, such as the visual image of a face or the auditory image of a melody.

I think the image of the body proper appears after the image of the “something else” has been formed and held active, and because the two images remain separate, neurally,

psychological

essence of sadness or happiness

with negative body states,

with positive body states

a further condition

body maps,

the fact that our focus of attention is usually elsewhere, where it is most needed for adaptive behavior, does not mean the body representation is absent,

background body sense is continuous, although one may hardly notice it, since it represents not a specific part of anything in the body but rather an overall state of most everything in it.

THE BODY AS THEATER FOR THE EMOTIONS

feelings are just as cognitive as any other perceptual image, and just as dependent on cerebral-cortex processing as any other image. To be sure, feelings are about something different. But what makes them different is that they are first and foremost about the body, that they offer us the cognition of our visceral and musculoskeletal state

By dint of juxtaposition, body images give to other images a quality of goodness or badness, of pleasure or pain.

Because the brain is the body’s captive audience, feelings are winners among equals.

The question of how we feel rests on our understanding of consciousness, something about which it pays to be modest,

falsely satisfactory has to do with the neuro-chemistry of emotion. Discovering the chemicals involved in emotions and moods is not enough to explain how we feel.

realize, however, that knowing that a given chemical (manufactured inside or outside the body) causes a given feeling to occur is not the same as knowing the mechanism for how this result is achieved.

reducing depression to a statement about the availability of serotonin or norepinephrine in general-a popular statement in the days and age of Prozac-is unacceptably rude.

I would sbstitute most mental illness for depression here!

overassociating positive emotions with people, objects, or places, too often and indiscriminately, we may feel more positive and relaxed about many situations than we should,

The players in my proposed arrangement

two basic processes:

enactment of a body state or of its surrogate within the brain.

Could neurotransmitters be those 'surrogates in the brain'?

The result of the neurotransmitter responses is a change in the speed at which images are formed; discarded, attended, evoked, as well as a change in the style of the reasoning operated on those images.

That 'style' being the 'body surrogates' communicated by the neurotransmitters I'm guessing.

The ensuing wealth promotes ease of inference, which may become overinclusive.

contrast the cognitive mode

I do not see emotions and feelings as the intangible and vaporous qualities that many presume them to be. Their subject matter