Behaviour neurologist explains how our brains feel emotion

Interview with behaviour neurologist, Antonio Damasio on how our brains feel emotion.

"An emotion consists of a very well orchestrated set of alterations in the body. Its purpose is to make life more survivable by taking care of a danger or taking advantage of an opportunity."

Question: What is happening in our brain when we feel an emotion?

Antonio Damasio: Feeling of an emotion is a process that is distinct from having the emotion in the first place. So it helps to understand what is an emotion, what is a feeling, we need to understand what is an emotion. And the emotion is the execution of a very complex program of actions. Some actions that are actually movements, like movement that you can do, change your face for example, in fear, or movements that are internal, that happen in your heart or in your gut, and movements that are actually not muscular movements, but rather, releases of molecules. Say, for example, in the endocrine system into the blood stream, but it’s movement and action in the broad sense of the term.

And an emotion consists of a very well orchestrated set of alterations in the body that has, as a general purpose, making life more survivable by taking care of a danger, of taking care of an opportunity, either/or, or something in between. And it’s something that is set in our genome and that we all have with a certain programmed nature that is modified by our experience so individually we have variations on the pattern. But in essence, your emotion of joy and mine are going to be extremely similar. We may express them physically slightly differently, and it’s of course graded depending on the circumstance, but the essence of the process is going to be the same, unless one of us is not quite well put together and is missing something, otherwise it’s going to be the same.

And it’s going to be the same across even other species. You know, there’s a, you know, we may smile and the dog may wag the tail, but in essence, we have a set program and those programs are similar across individuals in the species.

Then the feeling is actually a portrayal of what is going on in the organs when you are having an emotion. So it’s really the next thing that happens. If you have just an emotion, you would not necessarily feel it. To feel an emotion, you need to represent in the brain in structures that are actually different from the structures that lead to the emotion, what is going on in the organs when you’re having the emotion. So, you can define it very simply as the process of perceiving what is going on in the organs when you are in the throws of an emotion, and that is achieved by a collection of structures, some of which are in the brain stem, and some of which are in the cerebral cortex, namely the insular cortex, which I like to mention not because I think it’s the most important, it’s not. I actually don’t think it’s the number one structure controlling our feelings, but I like to mention because it’s something that people didn’t really know about and many years ago, which probably now are going close to 20 years ago, I thought that the insular would be an important platform for feelings, that’s where I started. And it was a hypothesis and it turns out that the hypothesis is perfectly correct. And 10 years ago, we had the first experiments that showed that it was indeed so, and since then, countless studies have shown that when you’re having feelings of an emotion or feelings of a variety of other things, the insular is active, but it doesn’t mean that it’s the only thing that is active and there are other structures that are very important as well.

Recorded July 2, 2010
Interviewed by David Hirschman

How neural rhythm processing shapes the way we communicate

Sonja Kotz leads the Minerva research group "Neurocognition of Rhythm in Communication" at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig. She presented evidence from neuroimaging on the impact of cognitive functions on bilingual processing at the AAAS symposium "Crossing Borders in Language Science: What Bilinguals Tell Us About Mind and Brain".

Rhythm, as the recurrent patterning of events in time, underlies most human behavior such as speech, music, and body movements. Sonja Kotz investigates how temporal patterns in di!erent languages influence the processing of phonological, semantic, and syntactic information. Individuals who learn a new language usually need time to develop a "feel" for its characteristics. With rapid speech it can initially even be difficult to recognize individual words. "This is because the brain has to become accustomed to new speech rhythms," explains Sonja Kotz.

Our brain is very good at recognizing patterns in the environment and uses them to create general predictions about the near future.

"We assume there is a neural network permanently engaged in evaluating information about duration, rhythm, tempo and stress of syllables in order to recognize temporal regularities in the stream of speech", says Kotz. During language acquisition, this network could store fundamental regularities of speech in the brain so that later, language processing is more efficient.

Rhythm processing predominantly occurs in brain areas in and just belowthe cerebral cortex but also in motor areas and evolutionarily older areas like the cerebellum and basal ganglia.

"This points to an early stage of development," says Kotz. "The evolution of language would not have been possible without the development of brain areas which have the ability to structure events temporally." To meet the high communicative demands of homo sapiens, the motor system in and below the cerebral cortex might have become increasingly sensitive to rhythmic input.

Source:
Sonja A. Kotz, Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

Medical News Today

The embodied nature of meaning and metaphor

BODY AWARENESS by Penny Tompkins and James Lawley

Extract from notes first presented at The Developing Group, 25 September 2004

6. The embodied nature of meaning and metaphor

Mark Johnson in The Body in the Mind makes the case that:

"The centrality of human embodiment directly influences what and how things can be meaningful for us, the ways in which these meanings can be developed and articulated, the ways we are able to comprehend and reason about our experience, and the actions we take. Our reality is shaped by the patterns of our bodily movements, the contours of our spatial and temporal orientation, and the forms of our interactions with objects. It is never merely a matter of abstract conceptualizations and propositional judgements.

Human bodily movement, manipulation of objects, and perceptual interactions involve recurring patterns without which our experience would be chaotic and incomprehensible. They are gestalt structures, consisting of parts standing in relations and organized into unified wholes, by means of which our experience manifests discernible order. When we seek to comprehend this order and to reason about it, such bodily based schema play a central role." (p. xix)

Thus,
"Through metaphor, we make use of patterns that obtain in our physical experience to organise our more abstract understanding. Understanding via metaphorical projection from the concrete to the abstract makes use of physical experience in two ways. First, our bodily movements and interactions are structured, and that structure can be projected by metaphor onto abstract domains. Second, metaphorical understanding is not merely a matter of arbitrary fanciful projection from anything to anything with no constraints. Concrete bodily experience not only contrails the "inputs" to the metaphorical projections but also the nature of the projections themselves, that is, the kinds of mappings that can occur across domains." (p. xv)

For example,
"Balancing is an activity we learn with our bodies and not by grasping a set of rules or concepts. First and foremost, balancing is something we do. The baby stands, wobbles, and drops to the floor. It tries again, and again, and again, until a new world opens up — the world of balanced erect posture.

We also come to know the meaning of balance through the closely related experience of bodily equilibrium, or loss of equilibrium. We understand the notion of systemic balance in the most immediate, preconceptual fashion through our bodily experience. There is too much acid in the stomach, the hands are too cold ... Things are felt as 'out of balance.' There is 'too much' or 'not enough' so that the healthy organization of forces, processes, and elements is upset " (pp. 74-75)