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1-Page Summary of The Emotional Brain

Emotions and the Brain: A New Area for Researchers

In the past, scientists didn’t think much about emotion in relation to the brain. They focused on other aspects of the mind and ignored emotions. However, that changed with recent research into split-brain patients. Scientists were surprised to find out that even though a person’s left hemisphere couldn’t process information from their right hemisphere, it could still respond emotionally to stimuli.

Research has shown that there are different parts of the brain responsible for each emotion. For example, fear is processed differently than sexual desire. In order to understand how emotions work, you have to study them in their psychological and physiological contexts. The same cannot be said about one emotion being related to another.

1. Emotions are critical to the survival of organisms. They’re a result of millions of years of evolution and have helped humans survive for centuries. It’s possible that animals can be aware that they feel something without being conscious about it, such as when they sense danger or get excited when food is nearby.

2. Emotions are a product of the human brain. They’re not something you can choose, but they happen to you. For example, if someone is afraid of heights, that person will experience fear when he’s around high places or even think about them. Scientists can measure these reactions and study how emotions affect the body and mind.

Thinking and Feeling about Thinking and Feeling

The brain is very complex, with billions of neurons that are interconnected in a network. The interactions within and among these networks lead to emotions which drive our actions without us even knowing it. We remember emotions vividly but often don’t know what causes them.

Throughout history, philosophers and scientists have studied thought and feeling. The ancient Greeks believed that emotion and reason were constantly battling for control over the human psyche. Scientists focused on rationality during the early 20th century, trying to study feelings in a vacuum without emotions. Behaviorists only concentrated on external actions that could be measured by others. Computers became the dominant metaphor for the brain later on as functionalism took hold of science, suggesting that if humans and computers can accomplish similar tasks then they must use similar processes within their brains or bodies to do so.

Some thinkers argued that emotions were important to human life. William James, for example, said that people feel afraid because they run away from danger. Cannon believed that there are a limited number of emotional responses to stimuli; he called these “fight or flight.”

In the 1960s, several thinkers proposed that emotions are cognitive interpretations of situations. However, they failed to recognize the role of appraisal in emotion. Some theorists focused too much on subjects’ reports about their emotions and neglected the important role of appraisal in emotion. Others said that stimuli could trigger an emotional response without conscious processing. This led to subliminal exposure, a phenomenon used in advertising where advertisers expose audiences to images for 1/200th of a second or less so as not to be consciously processed by viewers but still create associations with those images. While some early research overstated the implications of subliminal exposure, scientists now know definitively that appraisals happen unconsciously and sometimes people don’t even know why they’re upset or how they feel.

Emotions and cognition are separate but interacting mental functions. Emotion is mediated by the limbic system of the brain, while cognition is mediated by the cerebral cortex. If a person’s limbic system or cerebral cortex is damaged, they can still see objects as stimuli, but they cannot feel emotions about them. When both systems are functioning properly, people can start to feel an emotional response to something before they even finish perceiving it. Many of the body’s response systems operate automatically without engaging conscious cognition; for example, if you were in danger your heart would start beating faster even before you realized that there was a threat around you. The brain also stores emotional memories differently than cognitive memories; therefore we remember things better when we associate them with strong emotions like fear or anger rather than positive ones like happiness or joy.