Appendix to #7
My current best messy description of the core idea:
Within our bodies, there happens lots of vital stuff all the time (blood-flow, breathing, digestion, etc.).
All the vital stuff that is happening is being represented in the brain (="interoception").
Interoception is experienced in two dimensions - valence: spectrum from pleasant to unpleasant, and arousal: spectrum from calm to agitated (this two-dimensional experience of interoception is called "affect").
Our nervous system creates goal-specific concepts by wiring a large collection of sensory neurons (wiring = forming synapses) to other neurons up to a small collection of default network neurons, which represent the concept.
Emotions are concepts we create, to interpret and give meaning to the affect we feel in the context of a given situation.
My aspiration when I state the core idea of something I've read is usually that a hypothetical Me that would not have read that thing would be able to grasp the core idea from reading my description of it. Not too confident about that in this case. But I genuinely did the best I could I would be able to refine it by putting more work into it, but ain't nobody got time for that shit right now, I want to move on to something else finally for Christ's sake.
*****
Complete notes:
Chapter 1: The Search for Emotion's "Fingerprints"
Meta-analyses suggest:
Emotions do not correspond to one distinctive physiological pattern or brain pattern (= "fingerprint").
However, a statistical "average/meta brain pattern" can be extracted, which can then reliably match new brain patterns to the corresponding emotions.
Conclusions:
Emotions are better thought of as categories instead of universals.
Chapter 2: Emotions Are Constructed
Emotions are constructed by "the mind" ascribing (body-budgetly-relevant) meanings to sensations.
(Does "the mind" really exist? Or is ascription of meanings to sensations just happening as a mechanism of multiple different parts working together in a process, structurally similar to the one constructing emotions?)
Chapter 3: The Myth of Universal Emotions
The studies which seem to support the classical view of emotions rely on culture specific concepts.
"When we asked our Himba subjects to freely label their piles, smiling faces were not “happy” (ohange) but “laughing” (ondjora). Wide-eyed faces were not “fearful” (okutira) but “looking” (tarera). In other words, the Himba participants categorized facial movements as behaviors rather than inferring mental states or feelings." (p. 49)
"I asked them to make up a story about each facial expression [photograph]. “Tell me what is happening now, what happened before to make the person show this expression, and what is going to happen next.” It was like pulling teeth. I am not certain whether it was the translation process, or the fact that they have no idea what it was I wanted to hear or why I wanted them to do this. Perhaps making up stories about strangers was just something the Fore didn’t do." (p. 53, quoted from Ekman)
"Not all cultures understand emotions as internal mental states. Himba and Hadza emotion concepts, for example, appear to be more focused on actions. This is also true of certain Japanese emotion concepts. The Ifaluk of Micronesia consider emotions as transactions between people. To them, anger is not a feeling of rage, a scowl, a pounding fist, or a loud yelling voice, all within the skin of one person, but a situation in which two people are engaged in a script—a dance, if you will—around a common goal. In the Ifaluk view, anger does not “live” inside either participant." (p. 53)
Chapter 4: The Origin of Feeling
We experience interoception as affect.
Interoception = the brain's representation of all sensations from
- internal organs and tissues
- hormones in the blood
- immune system
"Think about what’s happening within your body right this second. Your insides are in motion. Your heart sends blood rushing through your veins and arteries. Your lungs fill and empty. Your stomach digests food. This interoceptive activity produces the spectrum of basic feeling from pleasant to unpleasant, from calm to jittery, and even completely neutral." (p. 56)
Affect = phenomenological experience of interoception
- Valence-spectrum: Pleasant -------------------- Unpleasant
- Arousal-spectrum: Calm -------------------- Agitated
"Affect is the general sense of feeling that you experience throughout each day. It is not emotion but a much simpler feeling with two features. The first is how pleasant or unpleasant you feel, which scientists call valence. The pleasantness of the sun on your skin, the deliciousness of your favorite food, and the discomfort of a stomachache or a pinch are all examples of affective valence. The second feature of affect is how calm or agitated you feel, which is called arousal. The energized feeling of anticipating good news, the jittery feeling after drinking too much coffee, the fatigue after a long run, and the weariness from lack of sleep are examples of high and low arousal. Anytime you have an intuition that an investment is risky or profitable, or a gut feeling that someone is trustworthy or an asshole, that’s also affect. Even a completely neutral feeling is affect." (p. 72)
Chapter 5: Concepts, Goals and Words
Concept = category
Category = collection of objects, events or actions
In order to navigate ourselves in the world, our nervous system creates goal-specific concepts by wiring a large collection of sensory neurons (wiring = forming synapses) to other neurons up to a small collection of default network neurons, which represent the concept. Words make this process more flexible and more efficient.
Chapter 6: How the Brain Makes Emotions
"Emotions are meaning. They explain your interoceptive changes and corresponding affective feelings, in relation to the situation. They are a prescription for action. The brain systems that implement concepts, such as the interoceptive network and the control network, are the biology of meaningmaking." (p. 126)
Chapter 7: Emotions as Social Reality
"Your brain continually predicts and simulates all the sensory inputs from inside and outside your body, so it understands what they mean and what to do about them. These predictions travel through your cortex, cascading from the body-budgeting circuitry in your interoceptive network to your primary sensory cortices, to create distributed, brain-wide simulations, each of which is an instance of a concept. The simulation that’s closest to your actual situation is the winner that becomes your experience, and if it’s an instance of an emotion concept, then you experience emotion. This whole process occurs, with the help of your control network, in the service of regulating your body budget to keep you alive and healthy. In the process, you impact the body budgets of those around you, to help you survive to propagate your genes into the next generation. This is how brains and bodies create social reality. This is also how emotions become real." (p. 151)
Chapter 8: A New View of Human Nature
Dividing line between self and world is permeable or nonexistent: Brain constructs world via simulation, world wires brain via sensory input creating synapses.
Culture helps wiring your brain, which in turn makes you behave in certain ways, wiring the brains of others and future generations.
All your actions, emotions, etc. are an active construction by your brain, having wired itself to issue the actions/emotions/etc., in order to regulate body budget. You can change your brain-wiring and therefore your behavior of tomorrow by changing your experiences today.
Chapter 9: Mastering Your Emotions
Keep body budget in good shape:
- Eat healthy
- Exercise
- Proper sleep & rest
- Body contact (e.g. massage)
- Yoga
- Get sunlight
- Spend time in greenery
- Have houseplants
- Take care of your living space
- Read good novels, watch good movies
- Set up regular lunch dates with a friend taking turns treating each other
- Have a Pet
- Take Walks
Increase emotional granularity by increasing emotional vocabulary by:
- Taking trips
- Reading books, watching movies
- Trying unfamiliar foods
- Try on new perspectives
- Learn new words for emotions
- Invent own emotion concepts
- Describe experiences, feelings/emotions with greater granulartiy
In the moment:
- Move your body
- Change location/situation
- Recategorize emotions into physical sensations
- Deconstruct your "self"
- Mindfulness meditation
- Cultivate awe (being in the presence of something vastly greater than yourself)
Chapter 10: Emotion and Illness
Many physical and psychological illnesses are explained by flawed regulation of body budget and an imbalance of prediction and correction.
Chapter 11: Emotion and the Law
Committing crimes "under the influence of emotion" should not protect you from harsher punishment.
"Take a moment and reflect on your own emotions. Do you tend to feel things intensely or more moderately? When we ask these types of questions in my lab to male and female test subjects —to describe their feelings from memory—the women report feeling more emotion than the men do on average. That is, the women believe they are more emotional than men, and the men agree. The one exception is anger, as subjects believe that men are angrier. However, when the same people record their emotional experiences as they occur in everyday life, there are no sex differences. Some men and women are very emotional, and some are not."
"Judges and jurors infer intent, usually in line with their own beliefs, stereotypes, and current body states. Here is just one example of how this works. Test subjects watched a video of protestors being dispersed by police. They were told the protestors were pro-life activists picketing an abortion clinic. Those who were liberal Democrats, who tend to be pro-choice, inferred that the activists had violent intentions, whereas socially conservative subjects inferred peaceful intentions. The researchers also showed the same video to a second set of subjects, describing the protestors this time as gay rights activists objecting to the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. This time, those who were liberal Democrats, who tend to support gay rights, inferred that the activists had peaceful intentions, whereas socially conservative subjects inferred violent intentions."
"The law has been slow to accept that memories are constructed, but the situation is gradually changing. The Supreme Courts of New Jersey, Oregon, and Massachusetts are leading the way in this regard. Their jurors now receive instructions that provide step-by-step details — based on years of psychological research — explaining all the ways in which memory can go wrong in eyewitness testimony. They read how memories are constructed and infused with beliefs that can result in distortions and illusions, how the instructions given by lawyers and police can introduce biases, how confidence is unrelated to accuracy, how stress can impair memory, and how eyewitness testimony was a factor in falsely convicting more than three quarters of the people who were exonerated by DNA evidence for crimes that they did not commit.
Unfortunately, no such guidelines exist to explain to jurors what an emotional expression is, what a mental inference is, or how they are constructed."
"People don’t have a rational side and an emotional side, with the former regulating the latter. Judges can’t set aside affect to issue rulings by pure reason. Jurors can’t detect emotion in defendants. The most objective-looking evidence is tainted by affective realism. Criminal behavior can’t be isolated to a blob in the brain. Emotional harm is not mere discomfort but can shorten a life. In short, every perception and experience within the courtroom— or anywhere else—is a culturally infused, highly personalized belief, corrected by sensory inputs from the world, rather than the result of an unbiased process."
[How could I forget to note the page numbers for these quotes?]
Chapter 12: Is a Growling Dog Angry?
Animals feel affect, but likely don't have emotion concepts.
Chapter 13: From Brain to Mind: The New Frontier
The Mind is a product of evolution, but not sculpted by genes alone.
The Mind is not a battleground between opposing inner forces (passion and reason).
Brain predicts with its concepts, at least a slew of them are learned, as the brain wires itself to its physical and social surroundings.
Although human brains share basically the same kind of networks, individual minds are structurally different, depending on individual experience and cultural differences.
Overall structure of the brain is similar from person to person, but details vary significantly.
The wiring within a single brain is not static.
The billions of neurons in one brain continually reconfigure themselves from one pattern into another.
Different sets of neurons produce the same outcomes (degeneracy).
The brain is a complex system (its efficiency in creating and transmitting information is highly increased by the fact that every single neuron can be part of a variety of different patterns, which makes possible a huge repertoire of experiences, perceptions and behaviors).
Natural selection favors a complex brain.
Complexity goes against the idea of mental organs, issuing universal concepts (as they would be much less efficient).
A human brain can create many different kinds of minds, yet all minds share some commonalities:
- Affective realism (you experience what you believe, )
- Concepts (human brain is wired to build a conceptual system)
- Social reality (at birth, your body budget is regulated by other people, which determines the building of your conceptual system)
Construction theory advocates skepticism.
Appendix A: Brain Basics
Nervous system
- Central nervous system
- Spinal cord
- Brain
- Cortex
- Frontal lobe
- 4-6 Layers of
- Neurons (organinzed in columns, wired into circuits and networks)
- Parietal lobe
- Layers
- Occipital lobe
- Layers
- Temporal lobe
- Layers
- Subcortex
- Regions
- Clumps of neurons (e.g. amygdala)
- Cerebellum
- Peripheral nervous system
- Autonomic nervous system
- Somatic nervous system
Neurons (receiving and sending electrical energy (= "firing") and neurotransmitters)
- Cell body
- Nucleus
- Dendrites (with receptors receiving neurotransmitters)
- Axons
- Synaptic terminals (sending neurotransmitters)
[in OnNote, this actually looks fine]
Appendix D: Evidence for the Concept Cascade
There is a (non-strict) hierarchy of neurons reaching from sensory neurons to default network neurons (bottom-up) and a (non-strict) hierarchy of neurons reaching from default network neurons to sensory neurons (top-down). Sensory neurons represent sensory information, default network neurons represent concepts of sensations.
Wow. These are a mess. Definitely could refine these with more work. But I cannot see this shit anymore right now. Bye How Emotions Are Made, was nice talkin' to you, now I gotta move on with my LIFE.
