Feb 14th, 2007
Where are emotions located?
In my neuropsych class I learned that if you’re in an accident & the brain’s ability to control the body is damaged, you’ll actually be amazingly calm. Sure you’ll be freaking out, but since the brain can’t send a signal to the body that tells it to increase your heart rate, to pespire, to breath faster, etc., you don’t feel nervous. This has been confirmed by people who’ve either recovered, or whose condition only affected them from the neck down & who’ve found other ways to communicate, such as blinking.
While a lot of scientists are looking inside the brain for the root of emotion, others look to the body.
This is brought home by two things I’ve recently read. One is a recap of an important experiment in which subjects are divided into two groups - both receive a stimulant (adrenaline), but one half is put in a friendly environment with people who are playful, and the other half is told that the drug they just took will make them nervous. Both groups have a heightened experience, but they have vastly different ones.
They all had the same physiological activity, but the interpretations were vastly different. The group that was surrounded by positive influnces had a great, positive experience. The group that was told they may experience some nervousness, did. The source of the emotions was the physical response to the adrenaline, but the interpretation of it was due entirely to circumstance.
This is part of why I like to be on time for job interviews - if I’m late, I may have to run to catch the train, and I know I can’t distinguish a faster heartbeat from genuine nervousness in those situations.
So you get caught in a feedback loop of sorts - the brain tells the body to prepare for “fight or flight” and when the body does it, the brain interprets what it feels as nervousness and the cycle continues. The same can be true for excitement and happiness, though such extreme happiness is, sadly, rare in our culture. Given this, it’s easy to see why anxiety is such a difficult problem, and why sedatives and muscle relaxants are so popular.
The other article I read is of a woman who has brain damage & shows no signs of responsiveness, but when they put her in an MRI machine, all the right areas light up when she’s presented with stimulus (such a people talking, or being asked to imagine acting in certain ways, such as playing tennis). Some scientists think this is original thought, others believe it’s just a reaction to the stimulus, like aeomeba moving towards or away from light.
It’s hard to imagine a life where you cannot contact the outside world, not even to communicate whether or not you’re conscious or alive, though given what we know about emotions such as fear & anxiety, it’s possible she isn’t as scared as we would imagine.
The next time you experience an extreme emotion, take a moment to think about it - where is this emotion located? Is it a thought or is it something in the body? What differentiates this emotion from other emotions?