* When I use the word “body” in this book, I am excluding the brain, as in the sentence, “Your brain tells your body to move.” To refer to the entire body including the brain, I write “the anatomical body.”
* In this book, I use initial capitals and double quotation marks to denote an emotion in general, such as “Fear,” as opposed to a single instance of fear.
* For a quick overview of brain terminology—neurons, lobes, and so on—see appendix A.
* Actually, we have two amygdalae, one each in the left and right temporal lobes.
* I sometimes hear comments from emotion researchers who subscribe to the classical view: “What about these other fifty studies, with these thousands of subjects, that show incontrovertible evidence for emotion fingerprints?” Yes, there are many such confirmatory studies, but a theory of emotion must explain all the evidence, not just the portion that supports the theory. One must not point to fifty thousand black dogs as proof that all dogs are black.
* If you prefer sports analogies, a network is like a baseball team. In a given moment, only nine out of the team’s twenty-five players participate, and the nine may change at any time, yet we say that “the team” won or lost the game.
* A proponent of the classical view might suggest that people suppressed their inborn smiles of happiness as socially inappropriate until the advent of dentistry.
* Also known as “limbic” or “visceromotor” regions. To keep things manageable—because the brain is a complicated structure—we’ll focus only on body-budgeting regions in the cerebral cortex. Others can be found outside of cerebral cortex, such as the central nucleus of the amygdala. I also use “cortex” to mean “cerebral cortex.”
* The noun “affect” is pronounced like “apple,” with its accent on the first syllable and a short “a”: \’A-fekt\.
* Affective realism is a common but powerful form of naive realism, the belief that one’s senses provide an accurate and objective representation of the world.
* I am absolutely not saying that affective realism is the primary cause of police shootings. I’m just making the scientific point that the brain is wired for prediction. All of us literally see what we believe based on our past experiences, unless our predictions are corrected by sensory inputs from the world.
* I apologize on behalf of the world’s philosophers, sages, luminaries, and other professional thinking persons for the muddled state of affairs regarding the distinction between categories and concepts. Categories like cars and birds are said to exist in the world, whereas concepts are said to exist in your brain, but if you think about it for a moment, who is creating the category? Who is grouping its members together to treat them as equivalent? You are. Your brain is doing it. So categories, like concepts, exist in your brain. (Their separation is rooted in a problem called “essentialism” that you’ll learn about in chapter 8.) In this book, I refer to a “concept” when talking about knowledge, like knowledge of redness. I refer to a “category” when we talk about the instances that we construct with knowledge, like the red roses we perceive. (Tip of the hat to Douglas Adams for the phrase “philosophers, sages, luminaries, and other professional thinking persons.”)
* In case you’re wondering how scientists can know what an infant is “expecting,” here’s the trick. Babies pay more attention to the unexpected. If the experimenter does something predictable, like selecting colored balls that conform to his goal, the baby will barely pay attention. However, if the experimenter selects a different set of balls, the baby will pay close attention and look for a longer time, indicating the pattern was unexpected. In psychology, this is called the habituation paradigm.
* More detailed scientific evidence supporting this chapter can be found in appendix D.
* And as luck would have it, his name was Kevin.
* Specifically, in a portion of the interoceptive network known as the default mode network. Appendix D has the details.
* “Lange” refers to physiologist Carl Lange, another contemporary of James and Dewey. His ideas on emotion were superficially similar to James’s but retained the essentialist belief that each category of emotion had a distinct fingerprint. Lange was in the right place at the right time to have his name emblazoned on Dewey’s theory.
* A significant number of patients who suffer from Broca’s aphasia have no damage in Broca’s area, and conversely, about half the people with lesions in Broca’s area do not have Broca’s aphasia. Scientists continue to debate the function of Broca’s area, which is better referred to as lateral prefrontal cortex, but few believe that it is specific to language production, grammatical abilities, or even general language processing. The current consensus is that it’s part of several intrinsic networks, including the interoceptive and control networks. Where language is concerned, the control network helps your brain choose between conflicting options, such as the words “your” and “you’re,” but as we saw in chapter 6, this network participates in other non-language tasks.
* Pixar’s movies are impressive in how well they do not stick to the stereotypes. Even the characters in Inside Out, which is a thoroughly essentialist fantasy about emotions, show a broad range of subtle and fascinating facial and bodily configurations during emotional episodes.
* My friend Kevin, who cultivated the pink Queen Anne’s lace in chapter 7, has a saying: “Honey, when all else fails, put on a beautiful flowing scarf and a chic pair of sunglasses, buy a convertible, and drive across the country.”
* From a Buddhist perspective, we might say that deconstructing the self helps to “suspend categorization.” From a neuroscience perspective, however, the brain never stops predicting so you can’t turn off concepts.
* Not all types of inflammation involve cytokines, and not all cytokines cause inflammation. We’re concerned only with chronic inflammation, which is caused by proinflammatory cytokines. For simplicity I just say “cytokines.”
* For the sake of this discussion, I will continue referring to interoception and nociception separately.
* In this chapter, I discuss all anxiety disorders as a group (unless otherwise indicated), because it’s well known that these disorders have common causes. For many years, a variety of anxiety disorders were presumed to be biologically distinct, but (as you should not be surprised to learn by now) there is a lot of overlap in their symptom profiles, making it challenging to study one disorder in the absence of the others.
* My comments in this chapter are limited to the legal system in the United States, though they may be true for legal systems in other countries. All phrases like “the law” and “the legal system” refer to the United States.
* In my more cynical moments, I also think the “two-system brain” survives as a convenient scapegoat, an animalistic, emotional part of the brain on which we can blame our bad behavior.
* For simplicity, I’ll use the words “animal,” “mammal,” “primate,” and “ape” strictly to mean the non-human kind. Of course we humans also belong to these categories.
* I am studiously avoiding the word “empathy” here. For some scientists, empathy means simple synchrony of affect. For others, empathy is a complex, purely mental concept rooted in social reality. These two completely different ideas, unfortunately, are named by the same word in English.
* Feed a dog and it salivates. Ring a bell before feeding the dog, repeat this sequence enough times, and the dog will salivate when it hears the bell. Pavlov was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1904 for this discovery.
* If we scanned the brains of scientists as they write papers about “fear learning,” we’d probably see evidence of mental inference as activity in nodes of the interoceptive and control networks as they describe their freezing rats as afraid.
* In a nutshell, the idea that concepts depend on experience (empiricism) keeps being soundly trounced by beliefs that concepts are built-in, either because you are endowed with them (nativism) or because they come from intuition or logic (rationalism). Every attempt at empiricism has failed in one way or another, from the associationist philosophers of the seventeenth century to the behaviorists of the twentieth century.
* As related by Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate.
* People divide the brain in many different ways, depending on their needs. Divisions may be spatial (top to bottom, back to front, outer to inner), anatomical (by lobe, by region, by network), chemical (by neurotransmitter), functional (which parts do which tasks), and more. Since the division between cortex and the subcortical regions is so important in the history of emotion, I’ll talk about the brain in those simplified terms.
* Different neuroscientists slice and dice the brain in different ways, using different terms to suit their goals and preferences. I’m presenting only a selection of the most conventional distinctions.