Affective Neuroscience Quotes

Whatever positive facts you find, bring a mindful awareness to them—open up to them and let them affect you. It’s like sitting down to a banquet: don’t just look at it—dig in!

Skepticism is certainly a beneficial tool, to the extent that it yields a dialectic of ideas that can progress toward empirical resolution of difficult issues, but at present it is too commonly an attitude, a well-cultivated academic pretense, that leads to the neglect of important problems.

Descartes’ s faith in his assertion “I think, therefore I am” may be superseded by a more primitive affirmation that is part of the genetic makeup of all mammals: “I feel, therefore I am.”34 Evolutionary

The very definition of an addictive drug is one that stimulates the mesolimbic pathway, but there are three general axioms in psychopharmacology that also apply to all drugs: 1. All drugs act by changing the rate of what is already going on. 2. All drugs have side effects. 3. The brain adapts to all drugs that affect it by counteracting the drug’s effects.

learning, in the complex sense in which it happens in schools or the real world, is not a rational or disembodied process; neither is it a lonely one.

The attention given to the side of the head which has received the injury, in connection with a specific reference to the side of the body nervously affected, is in itself evidence that in this case the ancient surgeon was already beginning observations on the localization of functions in the brain.

People hate thinking systematically about how to optimize their relationships. It is normal to hear someone say: “I will just wait for something to happen naturally” when talking about one of the most important aspects of their life while genuinely believing that this approach has reasonable odds of success. Imagine if people said the same thing about their careers. It would sound truly bizarre for someone to expect a successful career to “just happen naturally” and yet it is entirely normalized to expect that good relationships will. People pay tens of thousands of dollars to receive degrees in computer science, marketing, and neuroscience. They make tough sacrifices with the understanding that the skills and knowledge they build in these domains will dramatically affect their quality of life. Ironically, people spend very little time systematically examining mating strategies—despite the fact that a robust understanding of the subject can dramatically affect quality of life. We will happily argue that your sexual and relationship skills matter more than your career skills. If you want to be wealthy, the fastest way to become so is to marry rich. Nothing makes happiness easier than a loving, supportive relationship, while one of the best ways to ensure you are never happy is to enter or fail to recognize and escape toxic relationships. If you want to change the world, a great partner can serve as a force multiplier. A draft horse can pull 8000 pounds, while two working together can pull 24,000 pounds. When you have a partner with whom you can synergize, you gain reach and speed that neither you nor your partner could muster individually. Heck, even if you are the type of person to judge your self-worth by the number of people with whom you have slept, a solid grasp of mating strategies will help you more than a lifetime of hitting the gym (and we say this with full acknowledgment that hitting the gym absolutely helps). A great romantic relationship will even positively impact your health (a 2018 paper in Psychophysiology found that the presence of a partner in a room lowered participants’ blood pressure) and increase your lifespan (a 2019 paper in the journal Health Psychology showed individuals in happy marriages died young at a 20% lower rate). 

Which end is nearer to God, if I may use religious metaphor, beauty and hope, or the fundamental laws? I think that the right way of course, is to say that what we have to look at is the whole structural interconnection of the thing;

Human agency, the ability to affect the surrounding world, may be a result not so simply of conscious choice - but instead a result of training unconscious habits beforehand.

It is now clear that affective values are built into the nervous system as birthrights, but not ethical and moral values, which are epigenetic emergents of developmental landscapes.

Emotions are at the nexus of thought and action, of self and other, of person and environment, of biology and culture. Emotion is a term that evokes many connotations, from the way we “feel” to the ways our lives are integrated across time.

The seat of consciousness and intelligence was from the earliest times regarded by the Egyptians as both the heart and the bowels or abdomen. Our surgeon, however, has observed the fact that injuries to the brain affect other parts of the body, especially in his experience the lower limbs. He notes the drag or shuffle of one foot, presumably the partial paralysis resulting from a cranial wound, and the ancient commentator carefully explains the meaning of the obsolete word used for "shuffle.

When children play, they exercise their senses, their intellect, their emotions, their imagination—keenly and energetically.… To play is to explore, to discover and to experiment. Playing helps children develop ideas and gain experience. It gives them a wealth of knowledge and information about the world in which they live—and about themselves. So to play is also to learn. Play is fun for children. But it’s much more than that—it’s good for them, and it’s necessary. … Play gives children the opportunity to develop and use the many talents they were born with. Instruction sheet in Lego® toys (1985) CENTRAL

We are still learning the lessons of urbanisation, and how it affects every aspect of our lives. And yet urban design is something owned and practised by architects and city planners rather than by neuroscientists or psychologists. This is a great pity, something to be lamented, because the science and sensibility that psychology and neuroscience can bring to urban design – to improve the liveability and walkability of a city – is significant, as we will see. Urban design that fully and properly takes account of the needs of walkers will make cities much more attractive places to live and work.

The inhibition of behavior provoked by cat odor is remarkably powerful and long-lasting. As summarized in Figure 1.1, following a single exposure to cat odor, animals continued to exhibit inhibition of play for up to five successive days. Our interpretation of this effect is that some unconditioned attribute of cat smell can innately arouse a fear system in the rat brain, and this emotional state becomes rapidly associated with the contextual cues of the chamber. On subsequent occasions, one does not need the unconditioned fear stimulus—the feline smell—to evoke anxiety. The contextual cues of the chamber suffice. This, in essence, is classical or Pavlovian conditioning. The flow of associations is outlined more formally in Figure 1.2, and as we will see, classical conditioning is still one of the most powerful and effective ways to study emotional learning in the laboratory.

Every part of the brain plays a crucial role in the construction of something magnificent which we call ”mind”. But if we observe closely, the mind doesn’t exactly exist as one distinct process or entity or system. It’s rather an illusion. We can understand this better if we see the mind as a nation. Think of the nation you live in. Is there really any such thing as a ”nation”! A nation is simply the collection of activities of a group of people inside an imaginary border. Likewise, mind is the collection of activities of a group of neurons inside the skull. And just like in a nation, when a few neurons malfunction, others can slowly learn to take their place. But when an entire group of neurons in a specific brain region malfunctions, it can impede in the proper functioning of the mind, just like when a huge number of people in an entire state or district stop working, it can affect the functioning of the entire nation.

Look around on your next plane trip. The iPad is the new pacifier for babies and toddlers… Parents and other passengers read on Kindles… Unbeknownst to most of us, an invisible, game-changing transformation links everyone in this picture: the neuronal circuit that underlies the brain’s ability to read is subtly, rapidly changing… As work in neurosciences indicates, the acquisition of literacy necessitated a new circuit in our species’ brain more than 6,000 years ago… My research depicts how the present reading brain enables the development of some of our most important intellectual and affective processes: internalized knowledge, analogical reasoning, and inference; perspective-taking and empathy; critical analysis and the generation of insight. Research surfacing in many parts of the world now cautions that each of these essential “deep reading” processes may be under threat as we move into digital-based modes of reading… Increasing reports from educators and from researchers in psychology and the humanities bear this out. English literature scholar and teacher Mark Edmundson describes how many college students actively avoid the classic literature of the 19thand 20th centuries because they no longer have the patience to read longer, denser, more difficult texts. We should be less concerned with students’ “cognitive impatience,” however, than by what may underlie it: the potential inability of large numbers of students to read with a level of critical analysis sufficient to comprehend the complexity of thought and argument found in more demanding texts… Karin Littau and Andrew Piper have noted another dimension: physicality. Piper, Littau and Anne Mangen’s group emphasize that the sense of touch in print reading adds an important redundancy to information – a kind of “geometry” to words, and a spatial “thereness” for text. As Piper notes, human beings need a knowledge of where they are in time and space that allows them to return to things and learn from re-examination – what he calls the “technology of recurrence”. The importance of recurrence for both young and older readers involves the ability to go back, to check and evaluate one’s understanding of a text. The question, then, is what happens to comprehension when our youth skim on a screen whose lack of spatial thereness discourages “looking back.

Relax and steady the mind, focusing on the breath. Pick a situation in which you feel someone has wronged you. Be mindful of your reactions to this person, especially the deeper ones. Scan yourself for any ill will. Now reflect on some of the various causes—the ten thousand things—that have led this person to act in the way that he has. Consider biologically based factors affecting him, like pain, age, innate temperament, or intelligence. Consider the realities of his life: race, gender, class, job, responsibilities, daily stresses. Consider whatever you know about his childhood. Consider major events in his life as an adult. Consider his mental processes, personality, values, fears, hot buttons, hopes, and dreams. Consider his parents in light of whatever you know or can reasonably guess about them; consider, too, the factors that may have shaped their lives. Reflect on the historical events and other upstream forces that have formed the river of causes flowing through his life today. Look inside yourself again. Do you feel any differently now about him? Do you feel any differently about yourself?

Your Dopamine System with Quality Sleep. The dopamine system helps modulate both slow-wave sleep and REM sleep.28 Furthermore, not only does dopamine have a large effect on sleep (as well as on pain and depression) but sleep, pain, and depression all also affect the dopamine system. In addition, many aspects of the dopamine system are influenced by circadian rhythms, including the production of dopamine receptors, dopamine transporters, and dopamine itself.

Though energy fields are invisible, they shape matter. Albert Einstein said that, “The field is the sole governing agency of the particle.” Many studies show that human beings are influenced by the energy fields of others. In a series of 148 1-minute trials involving 25 people, trained volunteers going into heart coherence were able to induce coherence in test subjects at a distance. They didn’t have to touch their targets to produce the effect. Their energy fields were sufficient. When you are in a heart coherent state, your heart radiates a coherent electromagnetic signal into the environment around you. This field is detectable by a magnetometer several meters away. When other people enter that coherent energy field, their heart coherence increases too, producing a group field effect. Not only are we affected by the fields of other people; we’re affected by the energies of the planet and solar system. A remarkable series of experiments, conducted by a research team led by Rollin McCraty, director of research at the HeartMath Institute, has linked individual human energy to solar cycles. McCraty and his colleagues track solar activity using large magnetometers placed at strategic locations on the earth’s surface. Solar flares affect the electromagnetic fields of the planet. The researchers compare the ebbs and flows of solar energy with the heart coherence readings of trained volunteers. They have found that when people are in heart coherence, their electromagnetic patterns track those of the solar system. 8.15. The heart coherence rhythms of a volunteer compared to solar activity over the course of a month. A later study of 16 participants over 5 months found a similar effect. McCraty writes: “A growing body of evidence suggests that an energetic field is formed among individuals in groups through which communication among all the group members occurs simultaneously. In other words, there is an actual ‘group field’ that connects all the members” together. The results of this research confirm a hypothesis McCraty and I discussed at a conference when I was writing Mind to Matter: Not only are these heart-coherent people in sync with large-scale global cycles, they’re also in sync with each other. McCraty continues, “We’re all like little cells in the bigger Earth brain—sharing information at a subtle, unseen level that exists between all living systems, not just humans, but animals, trees, and so on.” When we use selective attention to tune ourselves to positive coherent energy, we participate in the group energy field of other human beings doing the same. We may also resonate in phase with coherent planetary and universal fields. 8.16. The brain functions as receiver of information from the field. The Brain’s Ability to Detect Fields The idea of invisible energy fields has always been difficult for many scientists to swallow. Around 1900, when Dutch physician Willem Einthoven proposed that the human heart had an energy field, he was ridiculed. He built progressively more sensitive galvanometers to detect it, and he was eventually successful.

FIELD EFFECTS Emotional contagion is just one explanation for the growth of meditation. Another is field effects. Everything begins as energy, then works its way into matter. Though energy fields are invisible, they shape matter. Albert Einstein said that, “The field is the sole governing agency of the particle.” Many studies show that human beings are influenced by the energy fields of others. In a series of 148 1-minute trials involving 25 people, trained volunteers going into heart coherence were able to induce coherence in test subjects at a distance. They didn’t have to touch their targets to produce the effect. Their energy fields were sufficient. When you are in a heart coherent state, your heart radiates a coherent electromagnetic signal into the environment around you. This field is detectable by a magnetometer several meters away. When other people enter that coherent energy field, their heart coherence increases too, producing a group field effect. Not only are we affected by the fields of other people; we’re affected by the energies of the planet and solar system. A remarkable series of experiments, conducted by a research team led by Rollin McCraty, director of research at the HeartMath Institute, has linked individual human energy to solar cycles. McCraty and his colleagues track solar activity using large magnetometers placed at strategic locations on the earth’s surface. Solar flares affect the electromagnetic fields of the planet. The researchers compare the ebbs and flows of solar energy with the heart coherence readings of trained volunteers. They have found that when people are in heart coherence, their electromagnetic patterns track those of the solar system. 8.15. The heart coherence rhythms of a volunteer compared to solar activity over the course of a month. A later study of 16 participants over 5 months found a similar effect. McCraty writes: “A growing body of evidence suggests that an energetic field is formed among individuals in groups through which communication among all the group members occurs simultaneously. In other words, there is an actual ‘group field’ that connects all the members” together. The results of this research confirm a hypothesis McCraty and I discussed at a conference when I was writing Mind to Matter: Not only are these heart-coherent people in sync with large-scale global cycles, they’re also in sync with each other. McCraty continues, “We’re all like little cells in the bigger Earth brain—sharing information at a subtle, unseen level that exists between all living systems, not just humans, but animals, trees, and so on.” When we use selective attention to tune ourselves to positive coherent energy, we participate in the group energy field of other human beings doing the same. We may also resonate in phase with coherent planetary and universal fields. 8.16. The brain functions as receiver of information from the field. The Brain’s Ability to Detect Fields The idea of invisible energy fields has always been difficult for many scientists to swallow. Around 1900, when Dutch physician Willem Einthoven proposed that the human heart had an energy field, he was ridiculed. He built progressively more sensitive galvanometers to detect it, and he was eventually successful.

cog out of the machine can not only affect vision, it can completely disrupt someone’s life. The eyes have it Any discussion of how vision works logically starts with the eye and focuses especially on the neural structure at the back of the eye called the retina, which is where visual perception really happens. More on that in a moment, but first let’s talk about the outermost parts of the eye, all of which have a similar goal: to focus light onto the retina. When light enters your eye, it travels

She’s probably going to be chair of our department in a couple years. She’s the editor of the journal Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience. She’s involved with basically every committee possible at the university. She’s the kind of person who wakes at four in the morning and writes a couple manuscripts before the kids wake up at seven. And she’s the leader of our daughter’s Girl Scout troop. She’s just the kind of person who makes everybody feel like: What am I doing wrong? And she’s an incredibly nice person, too. She’s not arrogant or egotistical. And she picked me. That’s the one thing that stops me from feeling insecure. She must have seen something.

Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions, where

For example, Dell (2009a) further explicitly asserts “that the domain of dissociative psychopathology is all of human experience. There is no human experience that is immune to invasion by the symptoms of pathological dissociation. Pathological dissociation can (and often does) affect seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, emoting, wanting, dreaming, intending, expecting, knowing, believing, recognizing, remembering, and so on” (Dell, 2009a, p. 228, emphasis in original). This

Interpersonal mindfulness helps us recognize how our behavior affects our students. Our students learn social values primarily by observing and responding to our behavior.

Decision making in the prefrontal cortex, which is a high-level brain process, affects the lower-level sensory processes.

Vast swaths of nonprotein-coding DNA, making up about 98 percent of the genome, are sensitive to an unending stream of environmental input and translate these signals to affect gene transcription. That is, they use stimuli such as nurturing by a parent, the contents of our meals, a roller-coaster ride, or a difficult interaction with a boss to guide suppression or enhancement of protein synthesis, orchestrating a symphony of molecular changes that plays from a score of everything we experience—what’s in the air, in the news, the background and foreground of our lives.

For me, when I read deep, I am immediately reconnected with a shared knowingness – in a group soul kind of way. To see that what you’ve been feeling has had words put to it triggers a sense of congruence. Also, to see that an artist has turned your perplexing pain into a thing of beauty . . . well, that can see me air-punch in celebration. I also love that deep reading improves us at a biological level. Neuroscience shows that when we learned to read 6,000 years ago, particular circuits were formed. These circuits sparked vital processes, such as internalized knowledge (which I take to mean “knowingness”), fair reasoning, the ability to be empathetic and to have insight. As one of the researchers noted, our inability to deep read is seeing us fail to “grasp complexity, to understand another’s feelings, to perceive beauty, and to create thoughts of [our] own.” Studies show young people now struggle to be able to read university texts, as well as life-affecting contracts and information relating to their political responsibilities (um, Brexit!). In essence, skimming has made us sleepy, with all the now-familiar repercussions. As one researcher put it, “It incentivizes a retreat to the most familiar silos of unchecked information, which require and receive no analysis, leaving us susceptible to false information and demagoguery.” Reading deep articles and nonfiction, as well as good literature, cultivates focus and reprograms our neurons. The stillness and time required for a long read (anything over 3,000 words) also allows our minds to formulate our moral position. This is like building a muscle.

Evolution may have created a greater diversity of specific cognitive potentials across species than affective potentials, even though there are also bound to be many general principles that govern the seemingly distinct cognitive styles of different species. For instance, within the spatial maps of the hippocampus,28 the “well-grounded” navigational thoughts of groundhogs may be organized around similar neural principles as the soaring spatial thoughts of falcons. In any event, the empirically based premise of the present work is that at the basic affective level, neural similarities will abound.

Even though our unique higher cortical abilities, especially when filtered through contemporary thoughts, may encourage us to pretend that we lack instincts—that we have no basic emotions—such opinions are not consistent with the available facts. Those illusions are created by our strangely human need to aspire to be more than we are—to feel closer to the angels than to other animals. But when our basic emotions are fully expressed, we have no doubt that powerful animal forces survive beneath our cultural veneer. It is this ancient animal heritage that makes us the intense, feeling creatures that we are.

Although each instinctual psychobehavioral process requires the concurrent arousal of numerous brain activities (Figure 2.2), our scientific work is greatly simplified by the fact that there are “command processes” at the core of each emotional operating system, as indicated by the ability of localized brain stimulation to activate coherent emotional behavior patterns.9 We can turn on rage, fear, separation distress, and generalized seeking patterns of behavior. Such central coordinating influences can provoke widespread cooperative activities by many brain systems, generating a variety of integrated psychobehavioral and physiological/hormonal response tendencies. These systems can generate internally experienced emotional feelings and promote behavioral flexibility via new learning.

As we saw in the previous chapter, we cannot reasonably study the playfulness of young rats in the presence of predator odors. Likewise, we cannot study the courting, reproductive, dominance, and migratory urges of birds unless the lighting is right (e.g., the lengthening daylight hours of spring, which allow their reproductive systems to mature each year). If we do not pay attention to a host of variables that reflect the adaptive evolutionary dimensions of the animals we study, we will not obtain credible answers concerning their natural emotional tendencies.

Related topics, like the nature of the self, the will, and thinking processes, also remain neglected by neuroscientists. Only recently has human psychology returned its attention to these questions under the banner of cognitive neuroscience.16 Many animal behaviorists have also started to study the nature of animal cognitions.17 The renewed effort to understand cognitive representations, imagery, and thought is notoriously difficult, but it is decidedly easier than the study of emotions. Cognitive representations can often be treated as logical propositions that can be precisely linked to explicit referents in the external world, which allows investigators to initiate credible empirical studies.

it has now been demonstrated that pigeons can generate internal representations of moving visual stimuli, and can use these representations to solve problems when the visual stimuli are temporarily out of sight. This was achieved by using a video image of a rotating, constant-velocity clock hand as the cue, and requiring test animals to respond to the internally imaged speed of the clock hand during periods when the video display was briefly turned off. Pigeons that were able to accurately keep the temporal progression of such an image in mind could obtain food by responding appropriately in a timely manner. Pigeons acquired such tasks remarkably well, and a host of control manipulations indicated that the pigeons were in fact responding to sustained internal representations of the visual displays within their brains.

The inhibition of behavior provoked by cat odor is remarkably powerful and long-lasting. As summarized in Figure 1.1, following a single exposure to cat odor, animals continued to exhibit inhibition of play for up to five successive days. Our interpretation of this effect is that some unconditioned attribute of cat smell can innately arouse a fear system in the rat brain, and this emotional state becomes rapidly associated with the contextual cues of the chamber.

Bowlby – like Freud – believed that the mother is the regulator of distressed states. Schore advances these ideas by proposing that a child in distress reaches out to its mother so that she can act as a regulator of his right brain generated negative affective states. But Schore also adds that the attachment relationship also regulates the infant’s burgeoning positive states, such as joy and excitement. Developmental neuroscience now indicates that play experiences, which start at the end of the second month after birth, are also associated with right brain functions. Attachment to the mother therefore not only minimizes negative states but also maximizes positive states.

actively look for good news, particularly the little stuff of daily life: the faces of children, the smell of an orange, a memory from a happy vacation, a minor success at work, and so on. Whatever positive facts you find, bring a mindful awareness to them—open up to them and let them affect you.

The very definition of an addictive drug is one that stimulates the mesolimbic pathway, but there are three general axioms in psychopharmacology that also apply to all drugs: All drugs act by changing the rate of what is already going on. All drugs have side effects. The brain adapts to all drugs that affect it by counteracting the drug’s effects.

Bob Fagan, a researcher who has spent fifteen years studying the behavior of grizzly bears, discovered bears who played the most tended to survive the longest. When asked why, he said, “In a world continuously presenting unique challenges and ambiguity, play prepares these bears for a changing planet.”4 Jaak Panksepp concluded something similar in Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions, where he wrote, “One thing is certain, during play, animals are especially prone to behave in flexible and creative ways.

Big bundles of neurons conduct information up through the spinal cord into the brain. Sitting at the top of this conduit is the thalamus. In Chapter 3, I compared the thalamus to a relay station, conducting information from the senses to the prefrontal cortex. During meditation, the thalamus is active, as meditators suppress sensory input that might pull them out of Bliss Brain. Andrew Newberg finds that one of the two lobes of the thalamus is often more active than the other. One interpretation of this activity may be the meditator’s awareness that she is more than her body and that she is connected to nonlocal mind, not just her senses. It’s the thalamus that is telling us what is and isn’t reality, and this is affected by the larger reality in which the meditator is absorbed. In long-term meditators, this asymmetry persists when they open their eyes. As the meditator experiences oneness, the universe will, in Newberg’s words, “be sensed as real. But it will not be a ‘symmetrical’ reality. Instead, it will be perceived ‘asymmetrically,’ meaning that the reality will appear different from one’s normal perception.” The nonlocal universe may be perceived as more real than local sensory reality and, as Newberg observes, “The more frequently a person engages in meditative self-reflection, the more these reality centers [like the thalamus] change.

Deeper integration of technology within the body, as well as the use of neuro-technological and neuropharmacological means of enhancing our bodies could affect how we feel and think – and therefore also how we act on the battlefield. While enhancement may boost cognitive and physical capabilities, they also diminish some deeply human features like compassion and empathy, that have been pivotal to us as a species, both for survival and cooperation.

Chemically induced joy comes at a cost. That cost can be high. Very, very high. So high that you’re going to think twice after reading what science has to say about drug use. One study found that adolescents who smoke just a couple of joints of marijuana show changes in their brains. That’s not a couple of years of smoking or the decades that some adults rack up. It’s just two joints. A research team led by Dr. Gabriella Gobbi, a professor and psychiatrist at the McGill University Health Center in Montreal, discovered that teenagers using cannabis had a nearly 40% greater risk of depression and a 50% greater risk of suicidal ideation in adulthood. Dr. Gobbi stated that “given the large number of adolescents who smoke cannabis, the risk in the population becomes very big. About 7% of depression is probably linked to the use of cannabis in adolescence, which translates into more than 400,000 cases.” The research that revealed these startling numbers was not just a single study of adolescent marijuana use. It was a meta-analysis and review of 11 studies with a total of 23,317 teenage subjects followed through young adulthood. Further, Gobbi’s team only reviewed studies that provided information on depression in the subjects prior to their cannabis use. “We considered only studies that controlled for [preexisting] depression,” said Dr. Gobbi. “They were not depressed before using marijuana, so they probably weren’t using it to self-medicate.” Marijuana use preceded depression. The specific findings of Gobbi’s research include: The risk of depression associated with marijuana use in teens below age 18 is 1.4 times higher than among nonusers. The risk of suicidal thoughts is 1.5 times higher. The likelihood that teen marijuana users will attempt suicide is 3.46 times greater. In adults with prolonged marijuana use, the wiring of the brain degrades. Areas affected include the hippocampus (learning and memory), insula (compassion), and prefrontal cortex (executive functions). The authors of one study stated that “regular cannabis use is associated with gray matter volume reduction in the medial temporal cortex, temporal pole, parahippocampal gyrus, insula, and orbitofrontal cortex; these regions are rich in cannabinoid CB1 receptors and functionally associated with motivational, emotional, and affective processing. Furthermore, these changes correlate with the frequency of cannabis use . . . [while the] . . . age of onset of drug use also influences the magnitude of these changes.” A large number of studies show that cannabis use both increases anxiety and depression and leads to worse health. Key parts of your brain shrink more, based on how early you began smoking weed, and how often you smoke it. That’s a “high” price to pay.

Despite how certainty feels, it is neither a conscious choice nor even a thought process. Certainty and similar states of "knowing what we know" arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of reason.

Neuroscience is a new and exciting field for the study of affects. One researcher who has become prominent in the emerging subfield of “affective science” is LeDoux (1994a, 1994b, 1994c, 1995, 1996). His work has dwelt on the emotion of fear in rats, which, he believes, is more or less similar across species, and he has drawn attention to the importance of the amygdala as the focal point in the brain that determines emotional significance. According to LeDoux, there are two emotional response systems in the brain: the first, which has its origin in the amygdala, is described as “quick and dirty” because it occurs automatically and is rather crude in nature; the second, which involves the neocortex, refines our capacity to respond by featuring a cognitive component.

When required to work for set wages for a certain amount of time at work (i.e., a fixed-interval schedule, where one merely has to wait a certain amount of time before a single response will bring a reward), they tend to work slowly during the first part of the interval, gradually increasing behavioral output as “paytime” arrives (yielding a scalloped curve). When placed on variable-ratio and variable-interval schedules, where things are unpredictable (as in Las Vegas), animals work at constant steady rates, but the rates are substantially faster with variable-ratio schedules (just the way profiteers in Las Vegas want us to behave when playing one-armed bandits). Both humans and animals work in about the same way on such schedules. Unfortunately, behaviorism provided no cogent mechanistic explanation of why and how the brain generates such consistent learned behavior patterns.

Each emotional system is hierarchically arranged throughout much of the brain, interacting with more evolved cognitive structures in the higher reaches, and specific physiological and motor outputs at lower levels.

Because of the ascending interactions with higher brain areas, there is no emotion without a thought, and many thoughts can evoke emotions. Because of the lower interactions, there is no emotion without a physiological or behavioral consequence, and many of the resulting bodily changes can also regulate the tone of emotional systems in a feedback manner.

The notion that emotions are simply the result of our higher cognitive appreciation of certain forms of bodily commotion has been largely negated by the observation of essentially normal emotional responsivity in people who have suffered massive spinal cord injuries.

When I give presentations on trauma and trauma treatment, participants sometimes ask me to leave out the politics and confine myself to talking about neuroscience and therapy. I wish I could separate trauma from politics, but as long as we continue to live in denial and treat only trauma while ignoring its origins, we are bound to fail. In today’s world your ZIP code, even more than your genetic code, determines whether you will lead a safe and healthy life. People’s income, family structure, housing, employment, and educational opportunities affect not only their risk of developing traumatic stress but also their access to effective help to address it. Poverty, unemployment, inferior schools, social isolation, widespread availability of guns, and substandard housing all are breeding grounds for trauma. Trauma breeds further trauma; hurt people hurt other people.

Pour Jean Decety, chercheur en neurosciences affective et sociales à Chicago, éprouver de la sympathie pour quelqu'un, c'est, dit-il « ressentir le désir de lui apporter du bien-être. La sympathie fournit une base affective nécessaire au développement morale chez l'enfant ». Pour lui la sympathie n'est pas l'attirance, le penchant pour une personne, mais le désir de lui apporter du bien-être. Quant à l'empathie, Jean Decety différencie l'empathie cognitive et l'empathie affective. L'empathie cognitive signifie comprendre les intentions d'autrui. L'empathie affective désigne le fait de sentir, partager les émotions et sentiments d'autrui. Il est possible d'éprouver de la sympathie pour quelqu'un sans ressentir d'empathie. (p. 40)

It is an emotional issue which ultimately revolves around the question of whether other animals affectively experience the world and themselves in a way similar to humans—as subjectively feeling, sentient creatures. The topic of subjectivity is one that modern neuroscience has avoided. It is generally agreed that there are no direct, objective ways to measure the subjectivity of other animals, nor indeed of other humans.

Interestingly, at the present time scientists are discouraged from inferring the existence of cross-species processes in the brain by prevailing research funding policies. Obviously, a strong argument of homology cannot be made until a great deal of relevant neurological data has been collected in a variety of species, and at the present time the collection of such data has to be done in a different guise than argument by homology. To argue for the likelihood that homologous processes exist is to seriously diminish the possibility of obtaining research support from peer-reviewed funding sources. In any event, because of some deep-seated philosophical and evolutionary perspectives, I have chosen to pursue this debatable course of thought and action for the past quarter of a century, and I will continue that journey in this text.

Despite its claim to a new view among the psychological sciences, affective neuroscience is deeply rooted within physiological psychology, behavioral biology, and the modernized label for all of these disciplines: behavioral neuroscience. The present coverage will rely heavily on data collected by individuals in these fields, but it will put a new twist on the evidence. It reinterprets many of the brain-behavior findings to try to account for the central neuropsychic states of organisms.

Behaviorism has dealt credibly with the modification and channeling of behavior patterns as a function of learning, but it has not dealt effectively with the nature of the innate sources of behavioral variation that are susceptible to modification via the reinforcement contingencies of the environment. The various cognitive sciences are beginning to address the complexities of the human mind, but until recently they chose to ignore the evolutionary antecedents, such as the neural systems for the passions, upon which our vast cortical potentials are built and to which those potentials may still be subservient.

As we now know, there are no credible, routine ways to unambiguously separate the influences of nature and nurture in the control of behavior that will apply across different environments. To understand the aspects of behavior that derive their organizational essence mainly from nature, we must first identify how instinctual behaviors emerge from the intrinsic potentials of the nervous system. For instance, 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 the environment. In addition, animals do not need to learn to experience and express fear, anger, pain, pleasure, and joy, nor to play in simple rough-and-tumble ways, even though all of these processes come to modify and be modified by learning. Evidence suggests that evolution has imprinted many spontaneous psychobehavioral potentials within the inherited neurodynamics of the mammalian brain; these systems help generate internally experienced emotional feelings.

in order to understand the neural nature of emotional feelings in humans, we must first seek to decode how brain circuits control the basic, genetically encoded emotional behavioral tendencies we share with other mammals. Then we must try to determine how subjective experience emerges from or is linked to those brain systems. Progress on these issues has been meager. In general, both psychology and modern neuroscience have failed to give sufficient credence to the fact that organisms are born with a variety of innate affective tendencies that emerge from the ancient organizational structure of the mammalian brain.

Emotional tendencies such as those related to fear, anger, and separation distress emerge at early developmental stages, allowing young animals to cope with archetypal emergency situations that could compromise their survival. Gradually, through their effects on other parts of the brain, these systems allow animals to have more subtle social feelings and to anticipate important events and deal with them in increasingly complex ways. Others, such as sexual lust and maternal devotion, emerge later to promote reproductive success.

It is now well established that one can reliably evoke several distinct emotional patterns in all mammals during electrical stimulation of homologous subcortical regions. Typically, animals either like or dislike the stimulation, as can be inferred from such behavioral criteria as conditioned approach and avoidance. If the electrodes are not placed in the right locations, no emotional behaviors are observed. For instance, most of the neocortex is free of such effects. Even though cortical processes such as thoughts and perceptions (i.e., appraisals) can obviously instigate various emotions, to the best of our knowledge, the affective essence of emotionality is subcortically and precognitively organized.

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 life-challenging circumstances

precognitive is taken to mean that these systems have an internal organization so that they could, in principle, generate emotional feelings with no direct input from either unconditioned or learned environmental inputs. For instance, a ill-placed tumor could generate a chronic state of emotional arousal, even though the underlying neural system is designed to be normally governed by external inputs.

The most primal affective-cognitive interaction in humans, and presumably other animals as well, is encapsulated in the phrases “I want” and “I don’t want.” These assertions are reflected in basic tendencies to approach and avoid various real-life phenomena. However, there are several distinct ways to like and dislike events, and a proper classification scheme will yield a more complex taxonomy of emotions than the simple behavioral dimension of approach and avoidance. For instance, it seems unlikely that the dislike of bitter foods and the dislike of physical pain emerge from one and the same avoidance system. It is equally unlikely that the desire for food and the urge to play emerge from the same brain systems.

I use the term periconscious to suggest that higher forms of consciousness had to emerge evolutionarily from specific types of preconscious neural processes, and that the primitive affective systems that will be described in this text may have been the major gateways for the development of cognitively resolved awareness of values that appear to exist in the world.

a best self is “the cognitive representation of the qualities and characteristics the individual displays when at his or her best.”5 Our concepts of our best selves are not projections of what we think we could become someday. Rather, they’re based on our real-life experiences and actions. They comprise the skills and traits that we’ve developed and discovered over time, and the actions we have taken to affect others in a positive way. The more our colleagues know who we are when we’re at our best, the more likely we can feel like ourselves at work. We suspected that this is the reason why the people who experienced our wise intervention stayed so much longer and made clients happier: because they could express themselves more authentically.

our bias against creativity damages our ability to recognize creative ideas.23 In another set of studies, Mueller and her colleagues demonstrated that when employees expressed creative ideas, it negatively affected whether they were viewed as having leadership potential—even though they were working in jobs that required creative problem solving!

Neuroscience has shown that the child’s brain is biologically primed to learn from experience, so that early environments powerfully affect the architecture of the developing brain. The most fundamental feature of that experience is interaction with responsive adults—typically, but not only, parents.

As I have mentioned earlier, emotional states appear to transfer between the hemispheres subcortically, and this transfer is not affected by severing the corpus callosum

The realization that the brain used so many different kind of chemicals, in addition to classical neurotransmitters, to communicate beween neurons was just the first step in a major conceptual shift in neuroscience. Many of these substances are neuropeptides, and most of those affect mood and behavior. The specificity of their effects resides not in the anatomical connectivity between neurons, but in the distribution of receptors within the brain. Different receptors have very different patterns of distribution, and the distributions differ between species in ways that correlate with differences in behavior. The mere fact of a receptor-peptide mismatch in a particular brain area might have no great importance. It might be that many cells are promiscuous in the receptors that they express: If some receptors see no ligand, the cost to the cells is negligible. Profligate receptor expression might contribute to the evolvability of neural systems, and might be common because organisms with a liberal attitude to receptor expression are those most likely to acquire novels functions. Because extrasynaptic signaling does not require precise point-to-point connectivity, it is intrinsically 'evolvable': a minor mutation in the regulatory region of a peptide receptor gene, by altering the expression pattern, could have functional consequences without any need for anatomical rewiring. That peptide receptors have distinctive patterns of expression, and that peptides produce coherent behavioral effects when given quite crudely into the brain, suggests that volume transmission is used as a signaling mechanism by many different populations of peptidergic neurons. We thus must see neuropeptides as 'hormones of the brain'.

At the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience in Lausanne, Switzerland, scientists have been studying the link between mystical experiences and cognitive neuroscience. They point out that the fundamental revelations to the founders of the three monotheistic religions—Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed—occurred on mountains, and included such components as feeling a presence, seeing a figure, hearing voices, and seeing lights. These similarities of experience suggest to the scientists that exposure to altitude might affect functions relying on brain areas such as the temporoparietal junction and the prefrontal cortex. Prolonged stays at high altitude, especially when linked to social deprivation, can lead to prefrontal lobe dysfunctions, which are commonly found during ecstatic experiences. Also, the physical and emotional stresses of climbing at altitude release endorphins, which are known to lower the threshold for temporal lobe epilepsy, which in turn might evoke such experiences. All such phenomena, then, might relate to “abnormal body processing.

It is hard to imagine how therapy could yield successful outcomes if there were no sense of warmth, attachment, and care between clinician and client. If therapists cannot assume an interpersonal stance in which they resonate

Education is cumulative, and it affects the breed. —Plato

I would suggest that subjectively experienced feelings arise, ultimately, from the interactions of various emotional systems with the fundamental brain substrates of “the self,” but, as already mentioned, an in-depth discussion of that troublesome issue will be postponed until Chapter 16.

Our emotional feelings reflect our ability to subjectively experience certain states of the nervous system. Although conscious feeling states are universally accepted as major distinguishing characteristics of human emotions, in animal research the issue of whether other organisms feel emotions is little more than a conceptual embarrassment. Such states remain difficult—some claim impossible—to study empirically.

many investigators who study behavior have argued that emotions, especially animal emotions, are illusory concepts outside the realm of scientific inquiry. As I will seek to demonstrate, that viewpoint is incorrect. Although much of behavioral control is elaborated by unconscious brain processes, both animals and humans do have similar affective feelings that are important contributors to their future behavioral tendencies. Unfortunately, the nature of human and animal emotions cannot be understood without brain research. Fortunately, a psychoneurological analysis of animal emotions (via a careful study of how animal brains control certain behaviors) makes it possible to conceptualize the basic underlying nature of human emotions with some precision, thereby providing new insights into the functional organization of all mammalian brains. A strategy to achieve such a cross-species synthesis will be outlined here. It is based largely on the existence of many psychoneural homologies—the fact that the intrinsic nature of basic emotional systems has been remarkably well conserved during the course of mammalian evolution.

To their initial chagrin and eventual delight, more and more investigators began to note that animals trained according to behaviorist principles would often “regress” to exhibiting their own natural behavioral tendencies when experimental demands became too severe. For instance, raccoons that had been trained to put coins in piggy banks to obtain food (for advertisement purposes) would often fail to smoothly execute their outward demonstrations of learned “thriftiness,” instead reverting to rubbing the coins together and manipulating them in their hands as if they were food itself. 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.

A great challenge for psychology at present is to identify and unravel the nature of the intrinsic operating systems of the mammalian brain—to distinguish coherently functioning psychobehavioral “organ systems” among the intricate webs of anatomical, chemical, and electrical interactions of neurons. Why has progress at this level of analysis been so slow in coming? Partially because there has been a widespread aversion to approaches that sought to localize functions in the brain after the embarrassing era of phrenological thinking in the 19th century

I will develop the position that a hybrid discipline focusing on the neurobiological nature of brain operating systems (especially those that mediate motivational and emotional tendencies) is needed as a foundation for a mature and scientifically prosperous discipline of psychology. A guiding assumption of this approach is that a common language, incorporating behavioral, cognitive, and neuroscientific perspectives, must be found for discussing the fundamental psychoneurological processes that all mammals share.

Ultimately, an understanding of all our mental activities must begin with our willingness to use words that approximate the nature of the underlying brain processes. Our thinking is enriched if we use the right words—those that reflect essential realities—and it is impoverished if we select the wrong ones. However, words are not equivalent to physical reality; they are only symbols that aid our understanding and communication (see Appendix B). This book is premised on the belief that the common emotional words we learned as children—being angry, scared, sad, and happy—can serve the purpose better than many psychologists are inclined to believe. These emotions are often evident in the behaviors animals spontaneously exhibit throughout their life span.

After modest study of the underlying issues, one can understand why scientists must be conservative with their concepts. In order to make real scientific progress, as opposed to merely generating creative ideas, we must seek rigorous definitions for the concepts we use. All key concepts should be defined in clear and consistent ways, and they must be deployed experimentally (operationally) in ways that help us predict new behavioral acts.

Without a concurrent neural analysis, emotional concepts cannot be used noncircularly in scientific discourse. We cannot say that animals attack because they are angry and then turn around and say that we know animals are angry because they exhibit attack. We cannot say that humans flee from danger because they are afraid and then say we know that humans are afraid if they exhibit flight. Such circular word juggling does not allow us to make new and powerful predictions about behavior. However, thanks to the neuroscience revolution, we can begin to specify the potential brain mechanisms that are essential substrates for such basic emotions.

A central, and no doubt controversial, tenet of affective neuroscience is that emotional processes, including subjectively experienced feelings, do, in fact, play a key role in the causal chain of events that control the actions of both humans and animals. They provide various types of natural internal values upon which many complex behavioral choices in humans are based. However, such internal feelings are not simply mental events; rather, they arise from neurobiological events. In other words, emotional states arise from material events (at the neural level) that mediate and modulate the deep instinctual nature of many human and animal action tendencies, especially those that, through simple learning mechanisms such as classical conditioning, come so readily to be directed at future challenges. One reason such instinctual states may include an internally experienced feeling tone is that higher organisms possess neurally based self-representation systems.

Thus, while basic emotional circuits are among the tools provided by nature, their ability to permanently change the life course and personalities of organisms depends on the nurturance or lack of nurturance that the world provides. In more precise scientific terms, everything we see is epigenetic, a mixture of nature and nurture. If you plant two identical tomato seeds in two different environments, you will have two plants of strikingly different size and overall shape, but they will still be discernibly tomato plants. There is no longer any question that brain tissues create the potential for having certain types of experiences, but there is also no doubt that the experiences, especially early ones, can change the fine details of the brain forever.