Post by arrane on Nov 16, 2017 21:15:31 GMT
Damasio and Panksepp viewed the brain stem as critical to mapping feelings because it is the conduit from the body to the brain and the brain to the body. Damasio saw this area as critical to high-order control of homeostasis and a major coordinator of emotion. According to Panksepp, it releases opioid neurotransmitter receptors important to many emotional states. He suggested that it was this area that first allowed creatures to cry out in distress and pleasure, and he agreed that the brain stem is a subcortical contributor to conscious feeling.
Immune responses, basic reflexes, and metabolic regulation that maintains interior chemical balance. Working up to the more complex of these devises are systems of pain and pleasure, which automatically determine what is to be sought and avoided. Further up this ladder are the appetites, including hunger, thirst, curiosity, and sex. The crown jewel of such life regulation is emotion. Above emotion is feeling, which is ultimately seamlessly connected and looping back on it. Although all of these homeostasis devices are present at birth, the more complex the system is, the more learning is required to engage it.
“The brain’s ethical sense may run deeper than we think.” The essence of ethical behavior,” writes the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio in Looking for Spinoza. Though human altruism is much further evolved, in one experiment ”monkeys abstained from pulling a chain that would deliver food to them if pulling the chain caused another monkey to receive an electric shock. Damasio does not believe that there is a gene for ethical behavior or that we are likely to find a moral center in the brain. But we may one day understand the “natural and automatic devices of homeostasis” — the brain’s system that balances appetites and controls emotions, much as a constitution and a system of laws regulates and governs a nation
Damasio, has argued in a number of books that studies of the brain, cognition and consciousness are seriously hampered because neuroscientists traditionally ignore the role of functions and emotions in the brain. 47 He claims that “it is possible that feelings are poised at the threshold that separates being from knowing and thus have a privileged connection to consciousness” Damasio. Emotions are at a fairly high level of life regulation, and when they are sensed, that is when one has ‘feelings,’ the threshold of consciousness has been crossed. Emotions are part of homeostasis, which is the automatic regulation of temperature, oxygen concentration or pH in the body by the autonomatic nervous system, the endocrine system and the immune system. According to Damasio, homeostasis is the key to consciousness Damasio. Damasio defined consciousness as constructing knowledge about two facts: “that the organism is involved in relating to some object, and that the object in the relation causes a change in the organism”
Immune responses, basic reflexes, and metabolic regulation that maintains interior chemical balance. Working up to the more complex of these devises are systems of pain and pleasure, which automatically determine what is to be sought and avoided. Further up this ladder are the appetites, including hunger, thirst, curiosity, and sex. The crown jewel of such life regulation is emotion. Above emotion is feeling, which is ultimately seamlessly connected and looping back on it. Although all of these homeostasis devices are present at birth, the more complex the system is, the more learning is required to engage it.
“The brain’s ethical sense may run deeper than we think.” The essence of ethical behavior,” writes the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio in Looking for Spinoza. Though human altruism is much further evolved, in one experiment ”monkeys abstained from pulling a chain that would deliver food to them if pulling the chain caused another monkey to receive an electric shock. Damasio does not believe that there is a gene for ethical behavior or that we are likely to find a moral center in the brain. But we may one day understand the “natural and automatic devices of homeostasis” — the brain’s system that balances appetites and controls emotions, much as a constitution and a system of laws regulates and governs a nation
Damasio, has argued in a number of books that studies of the brain, cognition and consciousness are seriously hampered because neuroscientists traditionally ignore the role of functions and emotions in the brain. 47 He claims that “it is possible that feelings are poised at the threshold that separates being from knowing and thus have a privileged connection to consciousness” Damasio. Emotions are at a fairly high level of life regulation, and when they are sensed, that is when one has ‘feelings,’ the threshold of consciousness has been crossed. Emotions are part of homeostasis, which is the automatic regulation of temperature, oxygen concentration or pH in the body by the autonomatic nervous system, the endocrine system and the immune system. According to Damasio, homeostasis is the key to consciousness Damasio. Damasio defined consciousness as constructing knowledge about two facts: “that the organism is involved in relating to some object, and that the object in the relation causes a change in the organism”