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Basic brain emotional and homeostatic systems drive behavioral choices and learning.
How the brain systems described in Section 1212 work together to make behavioral choices, and how this drives learning (skill acquisition). The importance of pleasure/pain, i.e., approach/avoidance, and of salience (intensity). This can be understood without acknowledging what we know in folk understanding as "emotions."
Instinctual regulation might be explained in a simplified way by this example: Several hours after a meal your blood sugar level drops, and neurons in the hypothalamus detect the change; activation of the pertinent innate pattern makes the brain alter the body state so that the probability for correction can be increase....
Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, 116-7
…we still must explain why suffering arose in the first place. And for that we must consider the biologically prescribed sense of pain as well as its opposite, pleasure. The curious thing is, of course, that the biological mechanisms behind what we now call pain and pleasure were also an important reason why the innate....
Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, 262
Apparently, the instinctual, evolutionary baggage of each animal intruded into the well-ordered behaviorist view that only reinforcement contingencies could dictate what organisms do in the world. These observations were enshrined in the now famous article, “The Misbehavior of Organisms,” which led to the widespread rec....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 11
[Panksepp describes an imaginary scenario in which your life is threatened. The memory of it appears in your dreams and in feelings of dread. The scenario illustrates the basic emotions.]
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 15
Only a fooTl would deny that the memory of your emotional expert- I ences continues to control your behavior for some timej to come.
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 15
But nature and nurture provide different things in our final toolbox of skills—nature gives us the ability to feel and behave in certain ways, and learning allows us to effectively use those systems to navigate the complexities of the world. These tendencies are especially well mixed in those individualistic styles of t....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 16
All mammals, indeed all organisms, come into the world with a variety of abilities that do not require previous learning, but which provide immediate opportunities for learning to occur....emotional abilities initially emerge from “instinctual” operating systems of the brain, which allow animals to begin gathering food,....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 25
Without inherited behavioral potentials, no creature could survive.
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 25
I would say that the main thing that develops in emotional development is the linking of internal affective values to new life experiences. However, in addition to the epigenetic processes related to each individual’s personal emotional experiences leading to unique emotional habits and traits, there is also a spontaneo....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 55
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 t....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 24
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 lifechallenging circumstances.
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 26
From this vantage, emotions are the psychoneural processes that are especially influehtial in controlling the vigor and patterning of actions in the dynamic flow of intense behavioral interchanges between animals, as well as with certain objects during circumstances that are especially important for survival. Each emoti....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 48
the preceding results affirm that emotional learning can occur without the intervention of the highest reaches of the cognitive brain.
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 217
Consider a situation in which a tone is followed by shock: The sound enters the eighth cranial nerve, and after synapsing in the cochlear nucleus, the information moves on to the inferior colliculus of the midbrain, then to the medial geniculate of the thalamus, and then to the auditory cortex in the brain’s temporal ar....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 215
[The basic process of reinforcement (in learning) may reside in emotional systems.]
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 38
Apparently, the flow of information through striatal-thalamic-cortical loops helps solidify behavior sequences based on various component parts. The cortex contains the component parts, but the striatum welds them into a coherent plan.
It is generally believed that complex factual memories (often termed declarative....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 74-5
Obviously, all cognitive and emotional facts that we use as specific living skills are learned, while many of the underlying cognitive and emotional potentials of the brain are our birthright. For instance, our brains are' designed to have a sense of causality between certain temporally related events and also to classi....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 21
To be overwhelmed by an emotional experience means the intensity is such that other brain mechanisms, such as higher rational processes, are disrupted because of the spontaneous behavioral and affective dictates of the more primitive brain control systems.
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 47
most of animal behavior is directed toward effective survival, but contrary to the beliefs of early behaviorists, learning mechanisms are not the only brain functions that evolved to achieve those ends. While general-purpose learning mechanisms may help animals behave adaptively in future circumstances because of the sp....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 55
it takes less than a hundredth of a second for a fear-potentiated startle reflex to be initiated, and it is often claimed that nociceptive information gets into the relevant flexor reflex circuits more rapidly than it takes for the conscious experience of pain to emerge. The use of such facts to argue against the existe....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 33
My assumption is that neural interactions elaborate a variety of distinct periconscious affective states that have little intrinsic cognitive resolution except various feelings of “goodness" and “badness.” I use the term periconscious to suggest that higher forms of consciousness had to emerge evolutionarily from specif....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 32
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