This page is incomplete. It displays memoes and/or notes.
Human cognition is driven by emotion.
When we have feelings connected with emotions, attention is allocated substantially to body signals, and parts of the body landscape move from the background to the foreground of our attention.
Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, 149
Cognitive modules are linked strongly with emotional modules, as danger with fear, contamination with disgust, or moral transgression with righteousness, etc. [These cognitive/emotive systems are primitive and powerful.]
Pinker, Steven, "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature", Viking, 2002, 221
Some of the basic regulatory mechanisms operate at a covert level and are never directly knowable to the individual….more complex regulatory mechanisms, involving overt behaviors, let you know about their existence, indirectly, when they drive you to perform (or not) in a particular way. These are called instincts.
Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, 116
[the essential condition for mind is the ability to display images (visual, auditory, etc.) internally and to order those in the process of thought.]
Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, 89
Both “high-level” and “low-level” brain regions, from the prefrontal cortices to the hypothalamus and brain stem, cooperate in the making of reason.
Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, xvii
…the number of brain structures between the input [sensory] and output [motor] sectors is quite large, and the complexities of their connection patterns immense. [This activity] momentarily constructs and stealthily manipulates the images in our minds….[W]e can interpret the signals brought in at the early sensory corti....
Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, 93
Emotion, feeling, and biological regulation all play a role in human reason. The lowly orders of our organism are in the loop of high reason.
Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, xvii
…feelings end up being “qualifiers” to that something else [which happens in temporal proximity and which we associate with the feelings]. But there is more to a feeling than this essence. As I will explain, the qualifying body state, positive or negative, is accompanied and rounded up by a corresponding thinking mode:....
Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, xix
The brain probably cannot predict the exact landscapes the body will assume, after it unleashes a barrage of neural and chemical signals on the body, no more than it can predict all the imponderables of a specific situation….
Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, 158
….we are wired to respond with an emotion, in preorganized fashion, when certain features of stimuli in the world or in our bodies are perceived….[such as pain]. Such features…would be processed and then detected by a component of the brain’s limbic system, say, the amygdala; its neuron nuclei possess a dispositional re....
Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, 131-2
I conceptualize the essence of feelings as something you and I can see through a window that opens directly onto a continuously updated image of the structure and state of our body.
Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, xviii
As James McGaugh and colleagues have shown, the more adrenaline you secrete, the more precise your memory will be. But that is true only up to a certain point. Confronted with horror—especially the horror of "inescapable shock”—this system becomes overwhelmed and breaks down.
Van Der Kolk, Bessel, "The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma", Penguin Books, 2015, 178
...we experience feelings of thirst not primarily because of having a dry mouth but because certain neural circuits automatically and unconsciously inform us that our body does not have enough water or that the concentration of salts has become too high within our cells. The notion that emotions are simply the result of....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 32
The arousal of feeling states helps channel activities of the cognitive apparatus and thereby facilitates behavioral choices. Thus, it is easy to understand why basic emotional systems evolved to control much of the cognitive apparatus. It is safer and wiser to anticipate possibilities rather than to deal with them once....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 39
The body keeps the score: If the memory of trauma is encoded in the viscera, in heartbreaking and gut-wrenching emotions, in autoimmune disorders and skeletal/muscular problems, and if mind/brain/visceral communication is the royal road to emotion regulation, this demands a radical shift in our therapeutic assumptions.
Van Der Kolk, Bessel, "The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma", Penguin Books, 2015, 66
[Interoception provides an ongoing reading of "how we are." See, e.g., Dimasio. When pain dominates interoception, it dominates other perceptions of our state, changing our sense of ourselves.]
Van Der Kolk, Bessel, "The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma", Penguin Books, 2015, 95
When memory traces of the original sounds, images, and sensations are reactivated, the frontal lobe shuts down, including, as we’ve seen, the region necessary to put feelings into words, the region that creates our sense of location in time, and the thalamus, which integrates the raw data of incoming sensations. At this....
Van Der Kolk, Bessel, "The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma", Penguin Books, 2015, 178
Traumatized people are often afraid of feeling. It is not so much the perpetrators (who, hopefully, are no longer around to hurt them) but their own physical sensations that now are the enemy. Apprehension about being hijacked by uncomfortable sensations keeps the body frozen and the mind shut. Even though the trauma is....
Van Der Kolk, Bessel, "The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma", Penguin Books, 2015, 210
[The two groups were given the task of identifying which item in a picture wasn't like the others.]
In the "normal” group key parts of the brain worked together to produce a coherent pattern of filtering, focus, and analysis. (See left image below. [Charts of EEG readings]) In contrast, the brain waves of traumatiz....
Van Der Kolk, Bessel, "The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma", Penguin Books, 2015, 313
Because of the massive interaction of emotional systems with the higher cognitive apparatus, it is often tempting to conflate the two into a seamless whole, but as I have argued, a reasonably clear distinction between affective and cognitive processes may exist in the brain, at least in the lower reaches, and an underst....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 39
Although the spontaneous activation of such an emotional state [inability to breath] leads to a large number of cognitive evaluations, there is no reason to believe that the suffocation-alarm response itself is normally activated by any higher appraisal mechanism. This highlights the normal flow of motivational events i....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 166
Regulatory urges rarely become as intense as in the examples described earlier because we can anticipate their coming and their consequences. To some extent, our cognitive abilities allow us to anticipate such events and relieve ourselves of potential embarrassments. [But how do you cognize around pain?]
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 166
in this view, the “interpretation” or “appraisal" component of the full emotional response is generally deemed to be complex, including many rapid and unconscious neural processes, as well as slow, delibera- tive responses that characterize the conscious contents of a human mind dwelling on how to deal with emotional....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 34
This massive flow of cortical information into the “reptilian brain” is repeatedly recirculated back to the cortex through the thalamus. The overall functions of the basal ganglia are under the control of one major “power switch”—ascending brain dopamine. which arises from cell groups in the ventromedial part of the mid....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 76
Cortical control of primitive behaviors and basic emotions has been achieved in several ways. One way was for the cortex to extend emotions in time by allowing organisms to dwell on past and future events. Another pervasive solution was for the cortex to inhibit the actions of primitive instinctual systems situated in s....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 75
even though there is very little evidence that the neocortex elaborates affective feelings, this tissue surely elaborates the appraisal processes that can trigger emotional responses.
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 72
End of included memoes/notes