Emotions are Cognitive, Not Innate, Researchers Conclude

zenosanalytic:

jumpingjacktrash:

neurosciencestuff:

Emotions are not innately programmed into our brains, but, in fact,
are cognitive states resulting from the gathering of information, New
York University Professor Joseph LeDoux and Richard Brown, a professor
at the City University of New York, conclude in the latest issue of the
journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We argue that conscious experiences, regardless of their content,
arise from one system in the brain,” explains LeDoux, a professor in New
York University’s Center for Neural Science. “Specifically, the
differences between emotional and non-emotional states are the kinds of
inputs that are processed by a general cortical network of cognition, a
network essential for conscious experiences.”

As a result, LeDoux and Brown observe, “the brain mechanisms that
give rise to conscious emotional feelings are not fundamentally
different from those that give rise to perceptual conscious
experiences.”

Their paper—“A Higher-Order Theory of Emotional
Consciousness”—addresses a notable gap in neuroscience theory. While
emotions, or feelings, are the most significant events in our lives,
there has been relatively little integration of theories of emotion and
emerging theories of consciousness in cognitive science.

Existing work posits that emotions are innately programmed in the
brain’s subcortical circuits. As a result, emotions are often treated as
different from cognitive states of consciousness, such as those related
to the perception of external stimuli. In other words, emotions aren’t a
response to what our brain takes in from our observations, but, rather,
are intrinsic to our makeup.

However, after taking into account existing scholarship on both
cognition and emotion, LeDoux and Brown see a quite different
architecture for emotions—one more centered on process than on
composition. They conclude that emotions are “higher-order states”
embedded in cortical circuits. Therefore, unlike present theories, they
see emotional states as similar to other states of consciousness.

interesting! kind of a slippery distinction, isn’t it? i mean from the end-user point of view. from the neurological point of view it’s pretty significant.

This is just a very short article based on an abstract, so it’s difficult to assess it. Typically emotions are thought of as a response; an event happens, your brain is hardwired to respond to it with a specific, autonomic biochemical and anatomical reaction, which we label “emotions”. But what they’re saying is that emotions are how particular inputs, particular sorts of experiences, are processed by the brain using a single cognitive system. I’m going to talk this through for myself under the cut.

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