Emotions, Cognition, and the World-Brain: Exploring the Interplay - Prof. Kurowski, Slides of History of Sociological Knowledge

Download Emotions, Cognition, and the World-Brain: Exploring the Interplay - Prof. Kurowski and more Slides History of Sociological Knowledge in PDF only on Docsity!

Emotions and the

world-brain problem

Emotions versus emotional feelings

• (^) Emotional feelings are embodied : sensorimotor and behavioral output
• (^) James-Lange theory: feelings are perceptions of physiological changes in body
• (^) Anxiety: racing heart
• (^) Depression: abnormal somatic perception of body and interoceptive input as pain and anxiety, while heart rate is normal.

Panksepp’s theory

• First-order neuronal representations: enough to trigger emotional feelings
• (^) Somatic and environmental input linked to motor output
• (^) Any neuronal representation based on sensory input from body and environment generates feelings. Damasio vs. Panksepp:
• (^) Damasio: feelings not directly related to body
• (^) Panksepp: feelings directly related to body and vegetative states

Cont’d

• (^) Panksepp: emotional feelings represent the relation between brain, body and world.
• (^) Feelings are existential (e.g., pandemic)
• (^) Heidegger: Dasein: our being is existential in a given world
• (^) Think about living(existing) on Mars?
• (^) Damasio: emotional feelings represent how the brain generates subjective feelings based on first-order representations. This tells us more about the brain than the brain’s relations to its immediate environment.

Feeling and cognition

• (^) Cognitive: higher-order processing(in prefrontal and parietal lobes) lifts unconscious neuronal processing(e.g., amygdala) to consciousness via cognitive functions, such as working memory, language and attention
• (^) How do you distinguish between emotions?
• (^) Via evaluation and appraisal by higher cognitive functions of context.
• (^) And depression, Judy? Does it follow?
• (^) Sadness not limited to her but the whole world around her

The role of insula in feelings

• (^) Where are emotions?
• (^) Interception
• (^) Exteroception
• (^) Cognition? Or cognitive functions
• (^) Judy: abnormal somatic sensations in depression (e.g., chest pain, stomach pressure, tightness when breathing)
• (^) The right insula’s neural activity is low during depression, and normal in healthy subjects
• (^) When low, it leads to anxiety. Why?
• (^) “Mental image of a physical state” (Craig, 2011)

Cont’d

• Insula: seems to mediate the attentional balance between internal and external inputs
• Receives(interoceptive) input from subcortical regions and the five senses: auditory, tactile, gustatory, somatosensory and olfactory -mediates (as a subjective feeling) our bodily relation with our interoceptive and exteroceptive environments
• Judy: the shift is to interoceptive input(brain-self relationship) and isolation from exteroceptive input
• Depression: In tone detection test: insular and auditory cortices showed lower activity=Judy’s self-focus and isolation.
• Somatoform and depressed patients have similar symptoms without underlying objective factors

Relationality of emotional feelings

• (^) Insula: Represents the body in relation to the environment, not strictly the body
• (^) There is a synchrony between the two: the balance tilts as our attention or awareness tilts, or shifts, between interoceptive and exteroceptive content (e.g., Judy)
• (^) Emotional feelings: a representation of the relation of neurocognitive, intero- and exteroceptive inputs
• (^) Mediated by the brain but not reduced to the brain only
• (^) An EF is our relation to the world and ourselves at the same time