Основы нейронаук/Эмоции
Цели этого урока[править]
Неврологический взгляд на природу эмоций[править]Emotion is so ubiquitous and essential for how one sees the world that becomes necessary to view emotion in a new way in order to interpret it scientifically. As such every emotional response, from love to hate, fear to joy, and everything in between, can be summed up (although not perfectly) as purely physiological responses to environmental events that serve to motivate away from harm and toward reward. While this is a rather bold assertion, it enables one to look at emotional responses objectively and on a purely neurological level. In the brain, emotion can often be thought of as a more base impulse coming from the inner-middle regions of the brain, which is in conflict with the reasoned and advanced computation of the higher cortex. Although this model is not entirely wrong, it is important to acknowledge just how closely supposedly 'rational' cognitive processes are tinged by emotional experience. Thoughts and understanding even on a cortical level are often rooted in emotional experiences, in the sense that, for instance, while debating the place of law and morality in civilization may seem like a purely detached and cortical function, if one has never experienced emotional responses like pain or frustration judgments as to what constitutes right and wrong become impossible to make. Thus the story of emotion in the brain is a cross between the lower 'feeling' aspect, and the upper 'conscious' aspect. Finally, much of emotion is below the threshold of consciousness. Only when activity spills over into the cerebrum is there a concrete and obvious awareness of one's own emotional state. Often, such moods are highly transient and even may be triggered by cues that one is not consciously aware of. In all cases however, emotion's main goal is to provide a means of understanding what is happening. So positive emotions cause a specific situation to be tied to feelings of reward, altering future decision making related to that situation or at least giving an understanding that that situation was a 'good' one, and vice versa for negative experiences. Нейроанатомия эмоций[править]When discussing emotion, the most important brain feature to mention is the limbic system. This large assemblage of closely interconnected and related brain regions toward the center of the brain is key for almost all aspects of emotional experience- from taking in raw sensory input through the thalamus to relaying up toward the frontal cortex. Each of the primary limbic system areas and their chief contribution to emotion is listed below:
Нейронные цепи и эмоции, чувства и ощущения[править]Because emotion is not just the product of one brain region but rather an emergent property of many working together, the best way to represent emotion on a neural level is through neural circuits. Paths may differ depending on the exact emotion (for example a fear response would be significantly different from a calm feeling) but a good general outline is depicted to the left. As emphasized earlier, emotion relies both on cortical processing and on processing done in the limbic system. Much of emotion's practical value comes from its interplay with the reward circuit, which is a loosely defined collection of brain pathways that seem to produce pleasurable feelings when activated. It is hard to say whether a pleasurable emotion is something which activates the reward pathway, or if activation of the pathway itself creates the emotion which feels pleasurable, but in either case the positive feelings foster a desire to have those feelings repeated. This may manifest itself in intense motivation to achieve gratification, up to the point seen in addiction. |