Affective Neuroscience Quotes

“Skepticism is certainly a beneficial tool, to the extent that it yields a dialectic of ideas that can progress toward empirical resolution of difficult issues, but at present it is too commonly an attitude, a well-cultivated academic pretense, that leads to the neglect of important problems.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“Descartes’ s faith in his assertion “I think, therefore I am” may be superseded by a more primitive affirmation that is part of the genetic makeup of all mammals: “I feel, therefore I am.”34 Evolutionary”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“When children play, they exercise their senses, their intellect, their emotions, their imagination—keenly and energetically.… To play is to explore, to discover and to experiment. Playing helps children develop ideas and gain experience. It gives them a wealth of knowledge and information about the world in which they live—and about themselves. So to play is also to learn. Play is fun for children. But it’s much more than that—it’s good for them, and it’s necessary. … Play gives children the opportunity to develop and use the many talents they were born with. Instruction sheet in Lego® toys (1985) CENTRAL”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“The inhibition of behavior provoked by cat odor is remarkably powerful and long-lasting. As summarized in Figure 1.1, following a single exposure to cat odor, animals continued to exhibit inhibition of play for up to five successive days. Our interpretation of this effect is that some unconditioned attribute of cat smell can innately arouse a fear system in the rat brain, and this emotional state becomes rapidly associated with the contextual cues of the chamber. On subsequent occasions, one does not need the unconditioned fear stimulus—the feline smell—to evoke anxiety. The contextual cues of the chamber suffice. This, in essence, is classical or Pavlovian conditioning. The flow of associations is outlined more formally in Figure 1.2, and as we will see, classical conditioning is still one of the most powerful and effective ways to study emotional learning in the laboratory.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“I use the term periconscious to suggest that higher forms of consciousness had to emerge evolutionarily from specific types of preconscious neural processes, and that the primitive affective systems that will be described in this text may have been the major gateways for the development of cognitively resolved awareness of values that appear to exist in the world.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“The notion that emotions are simply the result of our higher cognitive appreciation of certain forms of bodily commotion has been largely negated by the observation of essentially normal emotional responsivity in people who have suffered massive spinal cord injuries.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“it has now been demonstrated that pigeons can generate internal representations of moving visual stimuli, and can use these representations to solve problems when the visual stimuli are temporarily out of sight. This was achieved by using a video image of a rotating, constant-velocity clock hand as the cue, and requiring test animals to respond to the internally imaged speed of the clock hand during periods when the video display was briefly turned off. Pigeons that were able to accurately keep the temporal progression of such an image in mind could obtain food by responding appropriately in a timely manner. Pigeons acquired such tasks remarkably well, and a host of control manipulations indicated that the pigeons were in fact responding to sustained internal representations of the visual displays within their brains.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“Related topics, like the nature of the self, the will, and thinking processes, also remain neglected by neuroscientists. Only recently has human psychology returned its attention to these questions under the banner of cognitive neuroscience.16 Many animal behaviorists have also started to study the nature of animal cognitions.17 The renewed effort to understand cognitive representations, imagery, and thought is notoriously difficult, but it is decidedly easier than the study of emotions. Cognitive representations can often be treated as logical propositions that can be precisely linked to explicit referents in the external world, which allows investigators to initiate credible empirical studies.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“As we saw in the previous chapter, we cannot reasonably study the playfulness of young rats in the presence of predator odors. Likewise, we cannot study the courting, reproductive, dominance, and migratory urges of birds unless the lighting is right (e.g., the lengthening daylight hours of spring, which allow their reproductive systems to mature each year). If we do not pay attention to a host of variables that reflect the adaptive evolutionary dimensions of the animals we study, we will not obtain credible answers concerning their natural emotional tendencies.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“Although each instinctual psychobehavioral process requires the concurrent arousal of numerous brain activities (Figure 2.2), our scientific work is greatly simplified by the fact that there are “command processes” at the core of each emotional operating system, as indicated by the ability of localized brain stimulation to activate coherent emotional behavior patterns.9 We can turn on rage, fear, separation distress, and generalized seeking patterns of behavior. Such central coordinating influences can provoke widespread cooperative activities by many brain systems, generating a variety of integrated psychobehavioral and physiological/hormonal response tendencies. These systems can generate internally experienced emotional feelings and promote behavioral flexibility via new learning.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“Because of the ascending interactions with higher brain areas, there is no emotion without a thought, and many thoughts can evoke emotions. Because of the lower interactions, there is no emotion without a physiological or behavioral consequence, and many of the resulting bodily changes can also regulate the tone of emotional systems in a feedback manner.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“Each emotional system is hierarchically arranged throughout much of the brain, interacting with more evolved cognitive structures in the higher reaches, and specific physiological and motor outputs at lower levels.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“The most primal affective-cognitive interaction in humans, and presumably other animals as well, is encapsulated in the phrases “I want” and “I don’t want.” These assertions are reflected in basic tendencies to approach and avoid various real-life phenomena. However, there are several distinct ways to like and dislike events, and a proper classification scheme will yield a more complex taxonomy of emotions than the simple behavioral dimension of approach and avoidance. For instance, it seems unlikely that the dislike of bitter foods and the dislike of physical pain emerge from one and the same avoidance system. It is equally unlikely that the desire for food and the urge to play emerge from the same brain systems.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“precognitive is taken to mean that these systems have an internal organization so that they could, in principle, generate emotional feelings with no direct input from either unconditioned or learned environmental inputs. For instance, a ill-placed tumor could generate a chronic state of emotional arousal, even though the underlying neural system is designed to be normally governed by external inputs.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“affective feelings help animals to better identify events in the world that are either biologically useful or harmful and to generate adaptive responses to many life-challenging circumstances”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“It is now well established that one can reliably evoke several distinct emotional patterns in all mammals during electrical stimulation of homologous subcortical regions. Typically, animals either like or dislike the stimulation, as can be inferred from such behavioral criteria as conditioned approach and avoidance. If the electrodes are not placed in the right locations, no emotional behaviors are observed. For instance, most of the neocortex is free of such effects. Even though cortical processes such as thoughts and perceptions (i.e., appraisals) can obviously instigate various emotions, to the best of our knowledge, the affective essence of emotionality is subcortically and precognitively organized.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“Emotional tendencies such as those related to fear, anger, and separation distress emerge at early developmental stages, allowing young animals to cope with archetypal emergency situations that could compromise their survival. Gradually, through their effects on other parts of the brain, these systems allow animals to have more subtle social feelings and to anticipate important events and deal with them in increasingly complex ways. Others, such as sexual lust and maternal devotion, emerge later to promote reproductive success.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“in order to understand the neural nature of emotional feelings in humans, we must first seek to decode how brain circuits control the basic, genetically encoded emotional behavioral tendencies we share with other mammals. Then we must try to determine how subjective experience emerges from or is linked to those brain systems. Progress on these issues has been meager. In general, both psychology and modern neuroscience have failed to give sufficient credence to the fact that organisms are born with a variety of innate affective tendencies that emerge from the ancient organizational structure of the mammalian brain.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“As we now know, there are no credible, routine ways to unambiguously separate the influences of nature and nurture in the control of behavior that will apply across different environments. To understand the aspects of behavior that derive their organizational essence mainly from nature, we must first identify how instinctual behaviors emerge from the intrinsic potentials of the nervous system. For instance, animals do not learn to search their environment for items needed for survival, although they surely need to learn exactly when and how precisely to search. In other words, the “seeking potential” is built into the brain, but each animal must learn to direct its behaviors toward the opportunities that are available in the environment. In addition, animals do not need to learn to experience and express fear, anger, pain, pleasure, and joy, nor to play in simple rough-and-tumble ways, even though all of these processes come to modify and be modified by learning. Evidence suggests that evolution has imprinted many spontaneous psychobehavioral potentials within the inherited neurodynamics of the mammalian brain; these systems help generate internally experienced emotional feelings.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“When required to work for set wages for a certain amount of time at work (i.e., a fixed-interval schedule, where one merely has to wait a certain amount of time before a single response will bring a reward), they tend to work slowly during the first part of the interval, gradually increasing behavioral output as “paytime” arrives (yielding a scalloped curve). When placed on variable-ratio and variable-interval schedules, where things are unpredictable (as in Las Vegas), animals work at constant steady rates, but the rates are substantially faster with variable-ratio schedules (just the way profiteers in Las Vegas want us to behave when playing one-armed bandits). Both humans and animals work in about the same way on such schedules. Unfortunately, behaviorism provided no cogent mechanistic explanation of why and how the brain generates such consistent learned behavior patterns.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“Even though our unique higher cortical abilities, especially when filtered through contemporary thoughts, may encourage us to pretend that we lack instincts—that we have no basic emotions—such opinions are not consistent with the available facts. Those illusions are created by our strangely human need to aspire to be more than we are—to feel closer to the angels than to other animals. But when our basic emotions are fully expressed, we have no doubt that powerful animal forces survive beneath our cultural veneer. It is this ancient animal heritage that makes us the intense, feeling creatures that we are.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“Evolution may have created a greater diversity of specific cognitive potentials across species than affective potentials, even though there are also bound to be many general principles that govern the seemingly distinct cognitive styles of different species. For instance, within the spatial maps of the hippocampus,28 the “well-grounded” navigational thoughts of groundhogs may be organized around similar neural principles as the soaring spatial thoughts of falcons. In any event, the empirically based premise of the present work is that at the basic affective level, neural similarities will abound.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“The inhibition of behavior provoked by cat odor is remarkably powerful and long-lasting. As summarized in Figure 1.1, following a single exposure to cat odor, animals continued to exhibit inhibition of play for up to five successive days. Our interpretation of this effect is that some unconditioned attribute of cat smell can innately arouse a fear system in the rat brain, and this emotional state becomes rapidly associated with the contextual cues of the chamber.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“Interestingly, at the present time scientists are discouraged from inferring the existence of cross-species processes in the brain by prevailing research funding policies. Obviously, a strong argument of homology cannot be made until a great deal of relevant neurological data has been collected in a variety of species, and at the present time the collection of such data has to be done in a different guise than argument by homology. To argue for the likelihood that homologous processes exist is to seriously diminish the possibility of obtaining research support from peer-reviewed funding sources. In any event, because of some deep-seated philosophical and evolutionary perspectives, I have chosen to pursue this debatable course of thought and action for the past quarter of a century, and I will continue that journey in this text.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“Thus, while basic emotional circuits are among the tools provided by nature, their ability to permanently change the life course and personalities of organisms depends on the nurturance or lack of nurturance that the world provides. In more precise scientific terms, everything we see is epigenetic, a mixture of nature and nurture. If you plant two identical tomato seeds in two different environments, you will have two plants of strikingly different size and overall shape, but they will still be discernibly tomato plants. There is no longer any question that brain tissues create the potential for having certain types of experiences, but there is also no doubt that the experiences, especially early ones, can change the fine details of the brain forever.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“I would suggest that subjectively experienced feelings arise, ultimately, from the interactions of various emotional systems with the fundamental brain substrates of “the self,” but, as already mentioned, an in-depth discussion of that troublesome issue will be postponed until Chapter 16.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“A central, and no doubt controversial, tenet of affective neuroscience is that emotional processes, including subjectively experienced feelings, do, in fact, play a key role in the causal chain of events that control the actions of both humans and animals. They provide various types of natural internal values upon which many complex behavioral choices in humans are based. However, such internal feelings are not simply mental events; rather, they arise from neurobiological events. In other words, emotional states arise from material events (at the neural level) that mediate and modulate the deep instinctual nature of many human and animal action tendencies, especially those that, through simple learning mechanisms such as classical conditioning, come so readily to be directed at future challenges. One reason such instinctual states may include an internally experienced feeling tone is that higher organisms possess neurally based self-representation systems.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“Without a concurrent neural analysis, emotional concepts cannot be used noncircularly in scientific discourse. We cannot say that animals attack because they are angry and then turn around and say that we know animals are angry because they exhibit attack. We cannot say that humans flee from danger because they are afraid and then say we know that humans are afraid if they exhibit flight. Such circular word juggling does not allow us to make new and powerful predictions about behavior. However, thanks to the neuroscience revolution, we can begin to specify the potential brain mechanisms that are essential substrates for such basic emotions.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“After modest study of the underlying issues, one can understand why scientists must be conservative with their concepts. In order to make real scientific progress, as opposed to merely generating creative ideas, we must seek rigorous definitions for the concepts we use. All key concepts should be defined in clear and consistent ways, and they must be deployed experimentally (operationally) in ways that help us predict new behavioral acts.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“Ultimately, an understanding of all our mental activities must begin with our willingness to use words that approximate the nature of the underlying brain processes. Our thinking is enriched if we use the right words—those that reflect essential realities—and it is impoverished if we select the wrong ones. However, words are not equivalent to physical reality; they are only symbols that aid our understanding and communication (see Appendix B). This book is premised on the belief that the common emotional words we learned as children—being angry, scared, sad, and happy—can serve the purpose better than many psychologists are inclined to believe. These emotions are often evident in the behaviors animals spontaneously exhibit throughout their life span.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions