Diseases of the brain are seen as tragedies visited on people who cannot be blamed for their condition, while diseases of the mind, especially those that affect conduct and emotion, are seen as social inconveniences for which sufferers have much to answer. Individuals are to be blamed for their character flaws, defective emotional modulation, and so on; lack of willpower is supposed to be the primary problem.) (Location 917)
Note: Locus of control
As a result, we usually conceive of emotion as a supernumerary mental faculty, an unsolicited, nature-ordained accompaniment to our rational thinking. If emotion is pleasurable, we enjoy it as a luxury; if it is painful, we suffer it as an unwelcome intrusion. In either case, the sage will advise us. we should experience emotion and feeling in only judicious amounts. We should be reasonable. (Location 1104)
Note: Stoicism, or at least its modern form
Reduction in emotion may constitute an equally important source of irrational behavior. (Location 1115)
(Francis Crick has drawn on my suggestion that volition was preempted in patients with such lesions, and discussed a neural substrate for free will. (Location 1442)
Note: Agency
Moreover, the neural explanation only begins to be useful when it addresses the results of the operation of a given system on yet another system. (Location 1507)
The important finding described above should not be demeaned by superficial statements to the effect that serotonin alone “causes” adaptive social behavior and its lack “causes” aggression. (Location 1508)
Second, the processes of emotion and feeling are part and parcel of the neural machinery for biological regulation, whose core is constituted by homeostatic controls, drives, and instincts. (Location 1548)
Although we have the illusion that everything comes together in a single anatomical theater, recent evidence suggests that it does not. (Location 1551)
Note: How is it orchestrated
However, since the brain holds and retrieves knowledge in spatially segregated rather than integrated manner, they also require attention and working memory so that the component of knowledge that is retrieved as a display of images can be manipulated in time. (Location 1561)
I believe that this repository of facts and strategies for their manipulation is stored, dormantly and abeyantly, in the form of “dispositional representations” (“dispositions,” for short) in the in-between brain sectors. (Location 1710)
Note: What does “stored” actually mean
The idea of integration by time has surfaced over the past decade and now appears prominently in the work of a number of theorists. (Location 1736)
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 of attention and working memory, and nature seems to have agreed to provide them. (Location 1741)
Images are based directly on those neural representations, and only those, which are organized topographically and which occur in early sensory cortices. (Location 1776)
if our brains would simply generate fine topographically organized representations and do nothing else with those representations, I doubt we would ever be conscious of them as images. How would we know they are our images? Subjectivity, a key feature of consciousness, would be missing from such a design. Other conditions must be met. (Location 1799)
Why should these circuits interfere with the shaping of the more modern and plastic ones concerned with representing our acquired experiences? The answer to this important question lies in the fact that both the records of experiences and the responses to them, if they are to be adaptive, must be evaluated and shaped by a fundamental set of preferences of the organism that consider survival paramount. (Location 1982)
it is apparent that we must rely on highly evolved genetically based biological mechanisms, as well as on suprainstinctual survival strategies that have developed in society, are transmitted by culture, and require, for their application, consciousness, reasoned deliberation, and willpower. This is why human hunger, desire, and explosive anger do not proceed unchecked toward feeding frenzy, sexual assault, and murder, at least not always, assuming that a healthy human organism has developed in a society in which the suprainstinctual survival strategies are actively transmitted and respected. (Location 2186)
I am not attempting to reduce social phenomena to biological phenomena, but rather to discuss the powerful connection between them. It should be clear that although culture and civilization arise from the behavior of biological individuals, the behavior was generated in collectives of individuals interacting in specific environments. Culture and civilization could not have arisen from single individuals and thus cannot be reduced to biological mechanisms and, even less, can they be reduced to a subset of genetic specifications. Their comprehension demands not just general biology and neurobiology but the methodologies of the social sciences as well. (Location 2198)
This illustrates that the motor control for an emotion-related movement sequence is not in the same location as the control for a voluntary act. The emotion-related movement is triggered elsewhere in the brain, even if the arena for the movement, the face and its musculature, is the same. (See fig. 7-3.) (Location 2446)
My mentor Norman Geschwind, the Harvard neurologist whose work bridged the classical and modern eras of brain and mind research in humans, was fond of pointing out that the reason we have difficulty smiling naturally for photographers (the “say cheese” situation) is that they ask us to control our facial muscles willfully, using the motor cortex and its pyramidal tract. (Location 2458)
the essence of feeling an emotion is the experience of such changes in juxtaposition to the mental images that initiated the cycle. (Location 2518)
In other words, a feeling depends on the juxtaposition of an image of the body proper to an image of something else, such as the visual image of a face or the auditory image of a melody. The substrate of a feeling is completed by the changes in cognitive processes that are simultaneously induced by neurochemical substances (for instance, by neurotransmitters at a variety of neural sites, resulting from the activation in neurotransmitter nuclei which was part of the initial emotional response). (Location 2519)
The idea that the “qualified” (a face) and the “qualifier” (the juxtaposed body state) are combined but not blended helps explain why it is possible to feel depressed even as one thinks about people or situations that in no way signify sadness or loss, or feel cheerful for no immediately explainable reason. (Location 2532)
Nobody would have guessed, watching and hearing her, that she was just bodily “portraying” emotion rather than “feeling” it. But she does admit that once, playing in Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades, alone on the dark stage for the death-by-fright scene of the Old Countess, she did become one with her character and was terrified. (Location 2580)
The process of knowledge display is possible only if two conditions are met. First, one must be able to draw on mechanisms of basic attention, which permit the maintenance of a mental image in consciousness to the relative exclusion of others. (Location 3360)
Without basic attention and working memory there is no prospect of coherent mental activity, (Location 3368)
and the culture in which it develops is healthy, the device has been made rational relative to social conventions and ethics. (Location 3413)
Note: What about family?
Rationality is probably shaped and modulated by body signals, even as it performs the most sublime distinctions and acts accordingly. (Location 3418)
Note: Q Nietzschean rly
I suspect that before and beneath the conscious hunch there is a nonconscious process gradually formulating a prediction for the outcome of each move, and gradually telling the mindful player, at first softly but then ever louder, that punishment or reward is about to strike if a certain move is indeed carried out. In short, I doubt that it is a matter of only fully conscious process, or only fully nonconscious process. It seems to take both types of processing for the well-tempered decision-making brain to operate. (Location 3567)
It is conceivable that the images which constitute a future scenario are weak and unstable. The images would be activated but somehow not held long enough in consciousness to play a role in the appropriate reasoning strategy. In neuropsychological terms this is equivalent to saying that working memory and/or attention are not functioning well, as far as images about the future are concerned. (Location 3637)
And to ensure body survival as effectively as possible, nature, I suggest, stumbled on a highly effective solution: representing the outside world in terms of the modifications it causes in the body proper, that is, representing the environment by modifying the primordial representations of the body proper whenever an interaction between organism and environment takes place. (Location 3802)
Should these hypotheses be supported, are there sociocultural implications to the notion that reason is nowhere pure? (Location 4061)
like the molecular biologist Gunther Stent, have been concerned, justly, that the overvaluing of feelings might result in less determination to uphold the Faustian contract that has brought progress to humanity. (Location 4073)
Note: Wot
This is not the place to do justice to these issues but let me comment that educational systems might benefit from emphasizing unequivocal connections between current feelings and predicted future outcomes, and that children’s overexposure to violence, in real life, newscasts, or through audiovisual fiction, downgrades the value of emotions and feelings in the acquisition and deployment of adaptive social behavior. The fact that so much vicarious violence is presented without a moral framework only compounds its desensitizing action. (Location 4085)
Note: Wot
And for us now, as we come into the world and develop, we still begin with being, and only later do we think. We are, and then we think, and we think only inasmuch as we are, since thinking is indeed caused by the structures and operations of being. (Location 4108)
Note: Can one reconstruct the dependent order of one’s development
Augustine’s “Fallor ergo sum” (I am deceived therefore I am). (Location 4122)
The value accorded to images is a recent development, part of the cognitive revolution that followed the long night of stimulus-response behaviorism. We owe it in large part to the work of Roger Shepard and Stephen Kosslyn. See: R. N. Shepard and L. A. Cooper (1982). Mental Images and Their Transformations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. S. M. Kosslyn (1980). Image and Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. For a historical review, see also Howard Gardner (1985). The Mind’s New Science. New York: Basic Books. (Location 4621)
