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Hello readers! Happy New Year and all that. I took a few weeks off for the holidays and went to visit family and friends back in Toronto. It was a time of heart-warming reconnection with people I've known for much of my life. But it was also a time of anxiety and sadness: loss, disappointment, regret -- all part of the package. Hence the topic of today's post... Read More
Byproduct of emotional pain perhaps
We could argue evolution wants you to retain the ability to retain emotional memories (pain included), not necessarily addiction. Addiction appears to the bane of emotionally sensitive folks. In other words, who have inflammatory amygdalas that helps them to register emotional pain rather too well.
Losing limbic system should affect making all kinds of emotional memories. Painful or pleasure seeking, alike. Dont you think? The amnesia patient is found more cheerful perhaps, but that is not to say he is able to make new connections to remember the happy events.
I wonder if emotional pain is say alleviated by magical psychoanalytic interventions, would that alone treat addiction? An addict loses rational control over the limbic system during an episode. It may not just be emotional pain itself, but some irreversible synaptic connections formed since the painful event that guide the brain during that episode. How could an addict un-learn that?
P.S.
When I say emotion theorists have a hard time with happiness, consider this: Nico Frijda, one of the most prominent emotion theorists alive today, defines emotions as states of "action readiness". That works pretty well for almost all emotions. But it doesn't make a bit of sense with respect to happiness.
serene lake
This is personally very interesting. Nico Frijda's book on emotions was the first psychology book that I really looked into after being attracted by Kahnemann's behavioral psychology. It was an eye opening experience on the vast influence emotions and their realm of operation.
First of all, I am not trying to preach to the choir but merely presenting my thoughts and re-iterating some basic ideas.
From Nico's book, I grasped a certain understanding of emotions. His chapters on feelings and beliefs are thought provoking. Emotional states are often misconstrued by people as being overtly excited and visibly expressive. I mean, outward states like anger or delirium. In reality we all know emotions go much deeper in the and first act internally in the brain. On certain stimuli (not necessarily verbal or visual), limbic system preempts control and holds the reins from then on.
An emotional brain, I think, is like a serene lake that gets perturbed even with small pebble. The ripples can take forever and that can easily be compared to people with emotional disorders who suffer in episodes. Addiction, OCD, bipolar mania , you name it and we can apply this analogy.
That is my analogy I use to explain the impact of emotions. As for happiness, I believe , like you said, it is benign and limbic system is mercifully quiet. Using my analogy, I would say limbic system doesnt go far enough to perturb the rest of the cortices (the lake, so to say). The person does not lose as much rational control as he/she would with other emotions.
Besides Nico's book, I found 'Emotional Brain' by Joseph Ledoux to be very enlightening. The book discusses 'fear' mostly but lays out very well the chronology,if you will, of emotions. (Stimuli -> hypothalamus -> amygdala and so on).
Having said that, you could see my vested interest in understanding emotions. I am very glad to see your blog take a serious approach towards evolutionary history.
Neuroscience has given us so much understanding but yet I probably dont know any more about dopamine than my uncle who first heard about it in the 90s. I mean, it doesn't take me very far in understanding why the brain works the way it does. Personally I have heard enough of the dynamics of neuro-transmitters and I guess that neuroscientists can only take us so far. I truly believe it is up to some philosophers/psychologists to pose serious questions to neuroscientists that will help bridge the gap between evolution and true purpose of chemicals in the brain.
My long reply suffices in explaining my 'emotional' lake is indeed perturbed and it is not just my academic urge for a healthy discussion. :-)
Lovely to hear about your
Lovely to hear about your reflections, interpretations, and the seriousness with which you think about these things. Making the connection from neuroscience (all that chatter about neurotransmitters, which admittedly does get boring) to actual felt emotions...is exactly what I'm after in my writing. Check out my recent book: that's its precise aim. But yes, philosophers of mind can really help us with that goal. Neuroscience tends to be atheoretical, whereas emotion theory is almost all theory -- the empirical work is pretty superficial. Philosophers and others can help bring the two together productively.
I think the ripples in the lake describe a positive feedback process -- small perturbations are self-reinforcing. We tend to focus on events that cause pain, anxiety, anger and shame, and then that attentional focus amplifies the feelings...so the waves fan out and even grow in magnitude...quite rapidly. I've modeled this in neuroscientific terms. The brain works through feedback at many scales. So we can try to trace how it actually happens, though we're still a long way off.
I agree --but I do mean "byproduct"
I agree with basically everything you say. I don't think that Roger became cheerful because of memories, new or old, of happy events. And Roger may not have been emotionally sensitive -- he may not have been personally prone to addiction. As you say, the two often go hand in hand.
But his case does demonstrate something fundamental and mysterious. I've studied emotions for about 20 years, and I know that emotion theorists have the hardest time with happiness. What are its neural mediators? Who knows? So I sometimes imagine it as a default state when the amygdala and its connections are mercifully quiet.
The role of synaptic shaping in addiction is indisputable for me as well. That's pretty much the main focus of my book. So -- no -- it can't be undone. It can only be sidelined by new connections that grab enough dopamine and norepinephrine (and serotonin?) to take on a life of their own.
When I say addiction might be a byproduct of human evolution, I really do mean byproduct. I agree that this was not a front-runner in natural selection. But then neither are back problems, and half the people I know have one.
The right half?
At first glance, I thought your title is about losing one hemisphere of the brain and probably the right one. :-). But of course, you meant the limbic system which is the lower half. Technically it maybe only a quarter though if you look at the brain as four lobes. I think limbic system almost entirely belongs to the temporal lobe. Anyway this comment is in jest and I will appreciate if you could correct me in my understanding.
I now clearly see your point on how Roger probably could not be an addict even if he desperately wanted to. That probably brings us to the only real cure for serious ailments. Have a neurosurgeon drill through your skull and chuck the amygdala out of sight. The consequences are not funny though.
We owe a lot to the work done by neuroscientists in the realm of emotions, in the past two decades. Emotions are definitely the basis for personality disorders but it will be interesting to see what part they play in neural disorders. I mean, during the formation of the brain, does the temporal lobe form primarily and then influence the development of frontal lobe (PFC) and so on? I believe emotions have a very wide reach.
Emotions have to do with
Emotions have to do with everything! I used to think that cognition and emotion were two different processes that become synchronized in time. I don't think that anymore. There is no brain part that exclusively "does" emotion. The amygdala "does" classical conditioning, it also does "appraisal" of relevance. Are these emotional processes? Not according to most scholars. Even the hippocampus only keeps track of what's emotionally relevant, which is brought to its attention by direct fibers from the amygdala. So, rather than just chuck out the amygdala, you might as well chuck out the whole brain if you really want to live a relaxed life. (not that it would last very long)
The limbic system connects with the cortex through the temporal lobes, true, but also through the inferior frontal cortex and through direct connections to more dorsal regions. The dorsal anterior cingulate talks directly to the amygdala, which was a surpris to me when I learned it. And the occipital cortex gets a lot of "backwash" from the amygdala so that it can remain focused on what's emotionally relevant.
We divide the terrain into cognition and emotion, just as the Greeks divided it into reason and passion. And we know who's supposed to be in charge. But the brain doesn't work that way. That's not how it slices the pie. Rather, the very many functions of the different parts work together to create a sense of the world that is both cognitive and emotional.
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