Please use the form below to submit comments. Also provide an e-mail address and name. Your e-mail address and/or name will be used only to communicate with you about this or future comments you may submit. I am particularly keen to receive references to published material that contradicts the assertions and arguments I have made.
By submitting the above comment, I grant to Ross Alan Hangartner the right to incorporate the comment in full or in part, literally, paraphrased, or conceptually, as he sees fit, into State of Pain or other writings that he may create in the future. However, I don't grant permission to include my name or e-mail address, or to use them in any other way than to contact me for follow-up. I understand that by submitting the comment I acquire no right of any kind in State of Pain or other writings of Ross Alan Hangartner.
This page is incomplete. It displays memoes and/or notes.
The role of memories of emotions in behavior.
The nature of a memory. Memory is fragmentary, not photo-realistic.
[For this system of cognition to be effective, the connections between situation and emotion must be correct. (Often neglected in CBT theorizing.) This function, assuring that reward and punishment are connected to the correct triggers, may be an important function of our expanded cortices.]
Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, 162
It is perhaps more fruitful to think that our strong sense of mind integration is created from the concerted action of large-scale systems by synchronizing sets of neural activity in separate brain regions, in effect a trick of timing.
Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, 95
[We store memories as “images” that are less complete than the reality.] These recalled images tend to be held in consciousness only fleetingly, and although they may appear to be good replicas, they are often inaccurate or incomplete. I suspect that explicit recalled mental images arise from the transient synchronous a....
Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, [101]
The fundamental problem created by time binding has to do with the requirement for maintaining focused activity at different sites for as long as necessary for meaningful combinations to be made and for reasoning and decision making to take place. In other words, time binding requires powerful and effective mechanisms o....
Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, 96
…a signal body state or its surrogate [a somatic marker] may have been activated but not been made the focus of attention. Without attention, neither will be a part of consciousness, although either can be part of a covert action on the mechanisms that govern, without willful control, our appetitive (approach) or aversi....
Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, 185
…as we matured and repeated situations were categorized, the need to rely on somatic states for every instance of decision making decreased, and yet another level of economic[al] automation developed. [The scope and depth of such automaticity probably varies between people and situations.]
Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, 184
Naturally, somatic markers would not need to be perceived as “feelings.” But they would still act covertly to highlight, in the form of an attentional mechanism, certain components over others…. [I.e., somatic markers that evolved to provide bodily feedback could be evolutionarily repurposed for social feelings.]
Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, 190
Aunt Maggie as a complete person [in memory] does not exist in one single site of your brain. She is distributed all over it, in the form of many dispositional representations, for this or that [facet of your image of Aunt Maggie]. And when you conjure up remembrances of things Maggie, and she surfaces in various early....
Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, [103]
…the essence of a feeling may not be an elusive mental quality attached to an object, but rather the direct perception of a specific landscape: that of the body.
Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, xviii
In order for us to feel a certain way about a person or event, the brain must have a means to represent the causal link between the person or event and the body state, preferably in an unequivocal manner.
Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, 161
[A somatic marker is the feeling-tone that is associated with a real or contemplated state of affairs. Somatic markers become associated with states during the process of living life. They become associated with both stimuli and responses, and can influence actions either consciously or unconsciously.]
Damasio, Antonio R., "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", Penguin Books, 1994, 180
Even though many higher cortical perceptions sustained and exacerbated your fears, to the best of our knowledge, the resulting chronic hyperemotional state is created by deep subcortical networks that can become sensitized and can operate independently of your higher cognitive faculties. For this reason, long-lasting fe....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 207
Although we do not presently know exactly how memories are consolidated during REM, we can anticipate that the hippocampus will be in the middle of the neuronal action. After all, the hippocampus is the brain area that is well established to be a mediator between short- and long-term memories, and it goes into a charact....
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 129
[Four models of affect, body state, interpretation, and stimulus. The James-Lange or Damasio view is disparaged. Interpretation is not a unitary process. Stimuli are interpreted subconsciously, but are later, sometimes for a long time, re-appraised and remembered and re-remembered?]
Panksepp, Jaak, "Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions", Oxford University Press, 1998, 33
End of included memoes/notes