How Our Brains Feel Emotion | Antonio Damasio | Big Think

How Our Brains Feel Emotion
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An emotion consists of a very well-orchestrated set of alterations in the body. Its purpose is to make life more survivable by taking care of a danger or taking advantage of an opportunity.
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ANTONIO DAMASIO:

Dr. Antonio Damasio is a renowned neuroscientist who directs the USC Brain and Creativity Institute. Before that, he was the Head of Neurology at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. His research focuses on the neurobiology of mind and behavior, with an emphasis on emotion, decision-making, memory, communication, and creativity. His research has helped describe the neurological origins of emotions and has shown how emotions affect cognition and decision-making. He is the author of a number of books, including "Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain," which will be published in November 2010. Dr. Damasio is also the 2010 winner of the Honda Prize, one of the most important international awards for scientific achievement.

Dr. Damasio is a Big Think Delphi Fellow.
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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What is happening in our brain when we feel an emotion?

Antonio Damasio: Feeling of an emotion is a process that is distinct from having the emotion in the first place. So it helps to understand what is an emotion, what is a feeling, we need to understand what is an emotion. And the emotion is the execution of a very complex program of actions. Some actions that are actually movements, like movement that you can do, change your face for example, in fear, or movements that are internal, that happen in your heart or in your gut, and movements that are actually not muscular movements, but rather, releases of molecules. Say, for example, in the endocrine system into the blood stream, but it’s movement and action in the broad sense of the term.

And an emotion consists of a very well orchestrated set of alterations in the body that has, as a general purpose, making life more survivable by taking care of a danger, of taking care of an opportunity, either/or, or something in between. And it’s something that is set in our genome and that we all have with a certain programmed nature that is modified by our experience so individually we have variations on the pattern. But in essence, your emotion of joy and mine are going to be extremely similar. We may express them physically slightly differently, and it’s of course graded depending on the circumstance, but the essence of the process is going to be the same, unless one of us is not quite well put together and is missing something, otherwise it’s going to be the same.

And it’s going to be the same across even other species. You know, there’s a, you know, we may smile and the dog may wag the tail, but in essence, we have a set program and those programs are similar across individuals in the species.

Then the feeling is actually a portrayal of what is going on in the organs when you are having an emotion. So it’s really the next thing that happens. If you have just an emotion, you would not necessarily feel it. To feel an emotion, you need to represent in the brain in structures that are actually different from the structures that lead to the emotion, what is going on in the organs when you’re having the emotion. So, you can define it very simply as the process of perceiving what is going on in the organs when you are in the throws of an emotion, and that is achieved by a collection of structures, some of which are in the brain stem, and some of which are in the cerebral cortex, namely the insular cortex, which I like to mention not because I think it’s the most important, it’s not. I actually don’t think it’s the number one structure controlling our feelings, but I like to mention because it’s something that people didn’t really know about and many years ago, which probably now are going close to 20 years ago, I thought that the insular would be an important platform for feelings, that’s where I started. And it was a hypothesis and it turns out that the hypothesis is perfectly correct. And 10 years ago, we had the first experiments that showed that it was indeed so, and since then, countless studies have shown that when you’re having feelings of an emotion or feelings of a variety of other things, the insular is active, but it doesn’t mean that it’s the only thing that is active and there are other structures that are very important as well.

Recorded July 2, 2010
Interviewed by David Hirschman

[Sambaboy]

Demasio has an incredible (and rare) ability to explain very complex concepts and deep knowledge in a way that interested students and non-experts can begin to learn. Brilliant!

[marcobiagini]

I am a physicist and I will explain the reason why our scientific knowledge disproves the idea that consciousness is generated by the brain and that the origin of our mental experiences is physical/biological (in my youtube channel you can find a video with more detailed explanations). My arguments prove the existence in us of an indivisible unphysical element, which is usually called soul or spirit.
Physicalism/naturalism is based on the belief that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, but I will discuss two arguments that prove that this hypothesis implies logical contradictions and is disproved by our scientific knowledge of the microscopic physical processes that take place in the brain. (With the word consciousness I do not refer to self-awareness, but to the property of being conscious= having a mental experiences such as sensations, emotions, thoughts, memories and even dreams).
1) All the alleged emergent properties are just simplified and approximate descriptions or classifications of underlying processes and arbitrary abstractions of the actual microscopic physical processes, which are described DIRECTLY by the laws of physics alone, without involving any emergent properties (arbitrariness/subjectivity is involved when more than one option is possible; in this case, more than one possible description). An approximate description is only an abstract idea, and no actual entity exists per se corresponding to that approximate description, simply because an actual entity is exactly what it is and not an approximation of itself. This means that emergent properties do not refer to reality itself but to an arbitrary abstract concept (the approximate conceptual model of reality). Since consciousness is the precondition for the existence of concepts, approximations and arbitrariness, consciousness is a precondition for the existence of emergent properties.
Therefore, consciousness cannot itself be an emergent property.
The claim that emergent properties exist independently of a conscious mind is therefore simply nonsensical because it is equivalent to the claim that an approximation exists as an actual entity.
2) An emergent property is defined as a property that is possessed by a set of elements that its individual components do not possess. The point is that every set of elements is inherently an arbitrary abstract idea which implies the arbitrary choice of determining which elements are to be included in the set; what exists objectively are only the single elements. In fact, when we define a set, it is like drawing an imaginary line that separates some elements from all the other elements; obviously this imaginary line does not exist physically, independently of our mind, and therefore any set is not a physical entity but just an abstract idea and so are all its properties. Any property attributed to the set as a whole is inherently an abstract idea that refers to a property of another abstract idea (the set) and not to a physical entity. So any emergent property is by its very nature an arbitrary abstraction that refers to another arbitrary abstraction (the set). Since consciousness is a precondition for the existence of arbitrariness and abstractions, consciousness is the precondition for the existence of any property of a set as a whole, and therefore consciousness is the precondition for the existence of any emergent property. Therefore, consciousness cannot itself be an emergent property.

Both arguments 1 and 2 are sufficient to prove that every emergent property requires a consciousness from which to be conceived. Therefore, that conceiving consciousness cannot be the emergent property itself. Conclusion: consciousness cannot be an emergent property; this is true for any property attributed to the neuron, the brain and any other system that can be broken down into smaller elements.

In other words, emergence is a purely conceptual idea that is applied onto matter for taxonomy purposes. On a fundamental material level, there is no brain, or heart, or any higher level groups or sets, but just fundamental particles interacting. Emergence itself is just a category imposed by a mind and used to establish arbitrary classifications, so the mind can't itself be explained as an emergent phenomenon.

Obviously we must distinguish the concept of "something" from the "something" to which the concept refers. For example, the concept of consciousness is not the actual consciousness; the actual consciousness exists independently of the concept of consciousness since the actual consciousness is the precondition for the existence of the concept of consciousness itself. However, not all concepts refer to an actual entity and the question is whether a concept refers to an actual entity that can exist independently of consciousness or not. If a concept refers to "something" whose existence presupposes the existence of arbitrariness/subjectivity or is a property of an abstract object, such "something" is by its very nature abstract and cannot exist independently of a conscious mind, but it can only exist as an idea in a conscious mind. For example, consider the property of "beauty": beauty has an intrinsically subjective and conceptual nature and implies arbitrariness; therefore, beauty cannot exist independently of a conscious mind.
My arguments prove that emergent properties, as well as complexity, are of the same nature as beauty; they refer to something that is intrinsically subjective, abstract and arbitrary, which is sufficient to prove that consciousness cannot be an emergent property because consciousness is the precondition for the existence of any emergent property.

The "brain" doesn't objectively and physically exist as a single entity and the entity “brain” is only a conceptual model. We create the concept of the brain by arbitrarily "separating" it from everything else and by arbitrarily considering a bunch of quantum particles altogether as a whole; this separation is not done on the basis of the laws of physics, but using addictional arbitrary criteria, independent of the laws of physics. The property of being a brain, just like for example the property of being beautiiful, is just something you arbitrarily add in your mind to a bunch of quantum particles. Any set of elements is an arbitrary abstraction therefore any property attributed to the brain is an abstract idea that refers to another arbitrary abstract idea (the concept of brain).
Furthermore, brain processes consist of many parallel sequences of ordinary elementary physical processes. There is no direct connection between the separate points in the brain and such connections are just a conceptual model used to approximately describe sequences of many distinct physical processes; interpreting these sequences as a unitary process or connection is an arbitrary act and such connections exist only in our imagination and not in physical reality. Indeed, considering consciousness as a property of an entire sequence of elementary processes implies the arbitrary definition of the entire sequence; the entire sequence as a whole is an arbitrary abstract idea, and not to an actual physical entity.

For consciousness to be physical, first of all the brain as a whole (and brain processes as a whole) would have to physically exist, which means the laws of physics themselves would have to imply that the brain exists as a unitary entity and brain processes occur as a unitary process. However, this is false because according to the laws of physics, the brain is not a unitary entity but only an arbitrarily (and approximately) defined set of quantum particles involved in billions of parallel sequences of elementary physical processes occurring at separate points. This is sufficient to prove that consciousness is not physical since it is not reducible to the laws of physics, whereas brain processes are. According to the laws of physics, brain processes do not even have the prerequisites to be a possible cause of consciousness.

As discussed above, an emergent property is a concept that refers to an arbitrary abstract idea (the set) and not to an actual entity; this rule out the possibility that the emergent property can exist independently of consciousness. Conversely, if a concept refers to “something” whose existence does not imply the existence of arbitrariness or abstract ideas, then such “something” might exist independently of consciousness. An example of such a concept is the concept of “indivisible entity”. Contrary to emergent properties, the concept of indivisible entity refers to something that might exist independently of the concept itself and independently of our consciousness.
My arguments prove that the hypothesis that consciousness is an emergent property implies a logical fallacy and an hypothesis that contains a logical contradiction is certainly wrong.
Consciousness cannot be an emergent property whatsoever because any set of elements is a subjective abstraction; since only indivisible elements may exist objectively and independently of consciousness, consciousness can exist only as a property of an indivisible element. Furthermore, this indivisible entity must interact globally with brain processes because we know that there is a correlation between brain processes and consciousness. This indivisible entity is not physical, since according to the laws of physics, there is no physical entity with such properties; therefore this indivisible entity corresponds to what is traditionally called soul or spirit. The soul is the missing element that interprets globally the distinct elementary physical processes occurring at separate points in the brain as a unified mental experience. Marco Biagini

[viswavijeta]

2:35 To feel an emotion you need to represent an emotion in the structures that are different from the structure which leads to the emotion.

When you have feelings of varieties of emotion, the insular is active but it's not the most important one, there are structures in the brain stem that are active.

6:50 Emotion is largely non-conscious, automated. It's in the feeling/perceiving of that emotion, you react to the danger or happy sight.

8:05 Feelings can stay in the memory in terms of the elaboration we make about feelings e.g. language. Using those elaboration for future emotions make huge difference.

[edwigcarol]

This short video is a jewel. So brilliant. So interesting and so important.
I could listen to A Damasio hours and hours..

[romasucks]

amazing! could listen do Damasio for HOURS

[g.a.altnbay]

Thank you so much for the transcription of the interview.

[akramkarim]

emotions : Amygdala
feeling : Anterior cingulate cortex

[Kyrani]

Dr Damasio I think your work is fabulous. One thing though. I haven't found anything about the emotion of worry. I found that worry, which is circular thinking, tries to get the body to return to resting metabolism. I believe this is because the brain doesn't want to be competing with the musculature for fuel materials. Have you done any work regarding worry?

Anxiety is fear and worry or anger and worry and that creates conflicts, especially for the heart. They can be overcome by addressing the worry aspect. But I would like to know, from a neuro-scientific view, what happens in the brain in states of worry.

[julianholman]

In my almost 60 years of experience most emotion seems less helpful for dealing with situations than positively handicapping. Even joy seems just to make the gods irritable

[neillamas]

Difference between emotions and feelings.
Insular cortex + brainstem are actives when feeling emotions

[JDemen]

I stopped feeling anything years ago and have gotten to a place where I don't know how a normal person would react to an event or what a normal person would say to a question/comment.

[randomkiliinterviews]

Would love to see a debate between Damasio and Ledoux

[ivan.tucakov]

Could we say that motor neuron responses are essentially emotions?

[thomas.d.peterson]

I think the idea is that if organisms and their activities can be simplified to consequences of physics, and if physics can be simplified into laws, then free will seems to be a disguise to the basic laws of physics that determine our behavior.

[socint]

The lecture here is by Antonio Damassio who, despite his high reputation, speaks in terms which suggest he does not, himself, understand "emotion" He comes out with phrases such as "feeling an emotion"
"emotions are engaged" and even-for brain damaged patients- "inability to conjure up
emotions" Emotion is historiaclly misused, in sematic terms, as relating, not only to the
process as an evolved coping mechanism for survival but to the moods, sensations, thoughts and behavior induced.

[cailm]

Very insightful. Gives me and I'm sure - a lot others something to think about.

[BartolomeuLanca]

Am I thinking or is it an imagination of the thought? Am I a thinker or am I being thought?

[sleepingundrtree]

Free will is an interesting idea, you should read up on it. A lot of ideas seem to make free will impossible. Physics for example.

[pegasus]

All emotions are energy coming through chakra energy centers in the human soul we have 7 chakras and emotions are felt mostly through the heart chakra and solar plexus chakra

[pegasus]

Our souls vibrate at 4th dimension so can't be seen with the 3 dimensional eyes but the soul exists which is how ghosts still ha e emotions and feelings