If you thought emotions are ‘inborn’…you’re wrong
We never decide first and then react in a situation,
we react according to the present state of mind! A study has found that
emotions are not innately programmed in our brains, but, in fact, are cognitive
states resulting from the gathering of information. The research appeared in
the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The team observed,
“the brain mechanisms that give rise to conscious emotional feelings are not
fundamentally different from those that give rise to perceptual conscious
experiences.” “We argue that conscious experiences, regardless of their
content, arise from one system in the brain,” said Joseph LeDoux from New York
University’s center for neural science. “Specifically, the differences between
emotional and non-emotional states are the kinds of inputs that are processed
by a general cortical network of cognition, a network essential for conscious
experiences,” LeDoux added. The findings suggest that the existing work posits
that emotions are innately programmed in the brain’s subcortical circuits.
As a result, emotions are often treated as different
from cognitive states of consciousness, such as those related to the perception
of external stimuli. In other words, emotions are not a response to what our
brain takes in from our observations, but, rather, are intrinsic to our makeup.
However, after taking into account existing scholarship on both cognition and
emotion, the researchers saw a quite different architecture for emotions — one
more centered on process than on composition. They concluded that emotions are
“higher-order states” embedded in cortical circuits. Therefore, unlike present
theories, they see emotional states as similar to other states of
consciousness.
20.02.2017
Life is about making an impact,
not making an income
Kevin Kruse
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