Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions
This book earns the title for the longest time between starting to read it and finishing it. Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions is packed with information on a hugely important topic. Generally, since Rene Descartes, we’ve focused on the impact of reason, but evidence points to the idea that it isn’t reason that’s king – it’s emotions. (See Descartes’ Error and The Righteous Mind.) The critical and underappreciated importance of emotions meant better understanding them was essential, and the material was deep enough that I had to be in special places and times to give it the attention it deserved.
The Causal Arrow
Before we can explore emotion and how it functions in the brain, it’s important to address the common misbelief that reason is in charge. Jonathan Haidt’s Elephant-Rider-Path model, as discussed in his The Happiness Hypothesis and by Dan and Chip Heath in Switch, makes it clear that our reason, the rational rider, is only in charge when the elephant, our emotions, aren’t engaged. In The Righteous Mind, Haidt goes on to explain that what we call “reason” really acts like a press secretary justifying the decisions that have already been made.
Daniel Kahneman reaches a similar conclusion from a different direction. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, he explains his model of two systems. System 1 is the automatic pattern matching that we use to navigate our days, and the more glucose-expensive System 2 makes our rational decisions. System 1 is the same system from which we get our emotions, and Kahneman explains that it can “lie” to System 2 – or not engage it when it’s appropriate to. In short, System 2 is subject to the rules of System 1. Reframed in Haidt’s language, the rider only goes where the elephant wants to go.
For some, accepting that our reason and rational consciousness doesn’t have the control we believed it had our whole lives can be difficult. It can be hard to accept that what we think of as “self” is just the tip of the cognitive iceberg. However, work from many different directions seems to agree that this is the case. Even Charles Duhigg explains that the reason comes after the action in The Power of Habit.
Genetics and Epigenetics
The science of genetics is well established. We know that certain traits are inborn. Our eye color is determined by the genes of our parents and random probabilities. Other traits are impacted not just by our genetics but also by the environment that people live in. It’s become more accepted that we can have genes in our biology that are activated or deactivated by our experiences.
From a genetic point of view, lab-raised rats who had never met a cat showed remarkable differences in their play after being introduced to cat fur. Cats are, of course, a natural predator of rats – but not the rats who were born in the lab. Somehow, the exposure to cat fur was recognized by even those with no experience with cats. This and other experiments show that we have certain genetically transmitted fears.
Toxoplasma gondii is a microbe that has an interesting neurological trick it plays for replication. It suppresses the fear of cats in rodents that have it. This causes the rodents to be eaten by the cats. The Toxoplasma then infects the cat as well as other mice that come in contact with the cat’s stool. (See The Neuroscience of Suicidal Behavior for more on Toxoplasma gondii.) Thus, it’s possible to change items even if they’ve been laid down by genetics.
Robert Sapolsky in Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers shares the famous adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) study and the impact that childhood traumas have on the long-term health of humans. This was a landmark study in increasing understanding about the impact of epigenetics, which means “above” or “over” genetics. This and other studies began to shed light on the ability for genes to be expressed differently based on current and historical environments.
Sapolsky also notes the work of David Barker, who discovered what is now called fetal origins of adult disease (FOAD). This work demonstrated that even stress to the mother during pregnancy can have long-term consequences for the baby’s health.
Judith Rich Harris in No Two Alike and The Nurture Assumption explains how neither genetics nor good parenting can guarantee that a child will end up a certain way. There are too many uncontrolled variables that are enabling and disabling genes. There are too many conversations that you can’t be in the room for. There are just too many things to expect that you can control the development. Instead, we’re encouraged to do the best we can and recognize that even our best efforts may not generate the results we want.
They Made Me Feel
One of the common – but incorrect – statements that people make when they’re in an argument is, “You made me feel…” It’s usually a person who has been hurt trying to connect their feelings to the actions (words or deeds) of another person. In some cases, we can draw the connection between the actions and the resulting feeling. In other cases, it’s harder. Even in those times when the resulting feeling makes sense given the actions, that doesn’t mean that one person can cause another person to feel a certain way. If it were possible, it would be a dangerous power for others to have.
Our feelings are, necessarily, a cognitive process that relies upon our experiences and our biology. They are subject to our desires and our whims. While one person’s actions can influence our feelings, they cannot directly cause us to feel a certain way or another – ultimately, we own our emotions.
I can hear it now. “But you don’t know what they did.” That’s true – but it really doesn’t matter. We’ve met those people who have come out of a divorce happier than when they were married. Infidelity and irresponsibility aside, they are happy that they can start on the next chapter of their life. If people can choose their attitudes they find themselves divorced by a betrayal by the other person, can’t we choose our attitude when someone slights us?
One of the most common feelings that we ascribe to others is anger. “You made me angry.” They could have done something (or not done something) that we are angry about – but that doesn’t mean they made us angry. There’s an intervening internal process. Our process includes the judgement that we make about others’ behavior and how they might have violated it. (See Emotion and Adaptation.) This judgement is ours – and the disappointment it triggers is the precursor to anger. Anger is just one example where our processing of the information creates the feeling – not the actions (or inactions) themselves.
It’s important, in a book titled Affective Neuroscience, to understand that it’s the way we process the world that creates our emotions and the meaning we take from it.
Emotions and Reason
Fundamental to cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is the awareness that our thoughts, emotions, and moods are intertwined. When we think about something, we change our emotions, and our emotions change our ability to think. (See Drive.) If we were to think about the neurons that make up our brains as a very large and three dimensional spiderweb, when we tread on one of the strands, the other strands move, adjust, and vibrate in ways that cannot be isolated.
No doubt this is why Jaak Panksepp proposes that both behavior and reason are both linked to emotional arousal. He suggests that there is probably no emotional state that is free of cognitive ramifications. He goes on to say, “There is no emotion without a thought, and many thoughts can evoke emotion.”
Spontaneous Facial Expression of Emotion
Panksepp says, “The fact that the face spontaneously expresses emotionality is not controversial.” At the time of publication, that was true. In 1998, when Affective Neuroscience was first published, it was an established fact. Lisa Feldman Barrett in How Emotions Are Made does, in fact, challenge this premise. More broadly, she directly challenges the work of Paul Ekman. (See Nonverbal Messages, What the Face Reveals, Telling Lies, and Emotional Awareness for his work.) I agree with Panksepp’s perspective and don’t believe Barrett’s concerns about this are particularly warranted.
The spontaneous facial expression is important to the discussion of rationality and neuroscience, because the amount of time rational processing takes exceeds the time that these facial expressions are shown. In other words, there must be multiple pathways from emotions – and not all of them are typically under conscious control. When the spider web of our neurons makes sense of something that has an affective component, we may show it on our faces before we’ve been able to process it.
Overwhelmed
Panksepp says, “To be overwhelmed by an emotional experience means the intensity is such that other brain mechanisms, such as higher rational processes, are disrupted because of the spontaneous behavioral and affective dictates of the more primitive brain control systems.” In part, this statement is an echo of Kahneman’s statement in Thinking, Fast and Slow that System 1 can lie to System 2. However, there’s more to the statement in terms of the impact of being overwhelmed.
He doesn’t talk about the psychological defenses that we automatically deploy when we’re overwhelmed. We can temporarily use compartmentalization to say that we’re not able to process all the emotion at the moment. Nor does he discuss dissociation – the “not me” defense that can leave us feeling as if we’re watching the scene from outside our body. (See Traumatic Stress and Trauma Therapy and Clinical Practice for more on compartmentalization and dissociation.)
With or without defenses, Panksepp is speaking about trauma. Trauma, as he describes, opens the door for long-term serious mental illness. (See The Myth of Normal for more about the relationship between trauma and mental illness.)
Four of Seven
Panksepp proposes that there are seven major emotional-behavioral-motivational systems in humans. Four of them are:
- Seeking – This system drives the desire to explore, investigate, and find rewards, essentially the motivation to actively pursue something
- Panic – Associated with feelings of separation anxiety, loneliness, and distress when feeling disconnected from a caregiver or social group.
- Rage – Represents anger, aggression, and the urge to fight back when threatened or frustrated.
- Fear – The basic emotion of anxiety triggered by perceived danger, leading to “fight or flight” responses.
The remaining three are lust, care, and play. Panksepp believes that it’s these systems that are the major systems that direct behavior in animals (including humans).
Reiss wrote about 16 motivators in Who Am I? and The Normal Personality. These motivators don’t track to Panksepp’s systems directly, but they don’t contradict them either. One of the challenges with trying to isolate the major motivators is that the frame that you look at the problem defines the problem. Approaching from the neurobiological point of view often leads to different answers than when viewed from the behavioral perspective.
Distributed Parallel Processing
At the dawn of the computer revolution, most computers were made up of a central processor with a wide array of supporting electronics to take input, buffer data, and perform other operations while the central processor was too busy. Mainframe computers boasted great overall processing capacity with limited amounts being able to be used. The rise of the personal computer focused on one central processor with fewer supporting processors – but still many. Eventually, personal computers gained multiple processors of equal performance. The move to multiple processing went even further as video cards began supporting graphics processing units (GPUs) that could do hundreds of computations simultaneously. (GPUs should really be called math processing units.)
While we can trace the changes in computer technology and identify which periods focused on a single central processor and which leveraged more distributed processing, we cannot make such a delineation for brains. Every brain, from the lowest level to the highest order of thinking, fundamentally processes signals in a parallel and networked kind of way.
“A single neuron typically receives input from thousands of synapses.” In other words, there’s no one signal that creates one output. Instead, there’s a collection of inputs and conditions that drive an output of a neuron. It’s one of the reasons why our simplistic, causal reasoning doesn’t hold up. Neuroanatomically, there is no one cause to create a single neuron firing and therefore a single thought and a resulting single behavior. It’s an illusion that serves us. It helps us take in an overwhelming world of information and cope with it based on our limited capacity. (See Thinking, Fast and Slow.)
Specialized Skin Tissue
What people rarely consider when thinking about our brains is that they are formed by a specialization of the embryonic ectoderm – the outermost layer of the embryo. It specializes into many different organs, most notably the brain. This understanding is important, as we often downplay the role our skin plays in our cognition. Our brains are made of the same stuff as our skin, and we retain a deep connection to the signals that our skin provides to the brain.
Kindling
One of the challenges in studying the brain is the lack of indication of the underlying function. A structural review of the brain often doesn’t reveal clear indications for why someone does – or does not – behave in a particular way. Instead, there seems to be a yet unseen organization of information that doesn’t surface in a structural view.
Consider a process called kindling, where a targeted electrical stimulation is applied to the brain. Once the electrical stimulation has occurred (a few times or even once), the brain will be particularly sensitive in that area – either by further direct electrical stimulation or natural activation of that area of the brain.
What makes this sensitivity interesting is that it doesn’t appear to be caused structurally. There are no specific structural changes that can be identified – and thus the brain is both changed and unchanged at the same time.
Chemical Manufacturing
In some ways, our bodies – and our brains – are quirky chemical factories. They crank out long chains of amino acids that are sliced up by enzymes into shorter chains of useful amino acids. The whole process is a dance between the creation of the large and the targeted reduction into useful tools. The complexity of this process means that if any part of the process gets out of balance, it can shift the availability of the neuropeptides – which has incalculable shifts in emotional processing.
Complicating this process is that the amino acids created by our bodies can have components that are consumed by different areas of our body. Without a map, we can only guess the impact of a surplus or deficiency of these chemical messengers.
Blood-Brain Barriers
Our brains don’t have blood circulating through them. Blood is kept out of the brain while vital amino acids and nutrients are allowed through. Drug manufacturers are constantly trying to find ways to penetrate the blood-brain barrier to deliver pharmaceuticals to the neural tissue. Obviously, many substances have psychoactive results. However, in general, the blood-brain barrier – made of cells similar to our skin – is designed to enable only the “approved list” of things through.
The blood-barrier is a necessary protection and creates a challenge for the power hungry brain. There’s a maximum rate of transfer – including for the transfer of glucose – and this can sometimes starve the brain when there has been sustained high consumption. (See The Rise of Superman.)
Stimulating Governing
Imagine your doctor telling you to get your six-year-old child to like coffee. You’d arrived with the problem of your child’s hyperactivity, and by now you’re scratching you head and wondering if your doctor had heard you right or if they have something seriously wrong with them. This paradoxical recommendation for caffeine or other stimulants to address hyperactivity can be explained when we realize that there is a part of the child which is insufficiently activated.
It’s believed that children with hyperactivity may have insufficient cortical arousal and thus have less impulse control. The psychostimulant (in this case, caffeine) increases cortical arousal and creates the capacity for decreased activity – because of a stimulant.
Defining Stress
Robert Sapolsky took a whole book to explain stress from an animal and human behavior perspective. In Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, he focuses on the biological impact of stress. Panksepp offers a reason why approaching stress from a biological perspective is easier: “Psychologists have traditionally had a difficult time generating a satisfactory definition of ‘stress.’ In psychobiology, it is much easier: Stress is anything that activates the pituitary-adrenal system (the ACTH-cortisol axis).” However, what this perspective doesn’t explain is why some people are stressed and others are not in the same circumstances. It also doesn’t explain why some stress is good – and even necessary – while other stress can be harmful.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work on flow may answer the first question. Csikszentmihalyi discovered a psychological state that is highly productive, which he called flow. (See Flow, Finding Flow, and The Rise of Superman.) His critical observation is that flow exists in a narrow band where challenge and skill are balanced. If the challenge far exceeded the skill, anxiety (and stress) would result. If the challenge were insufficient, people would be bored. Thus, the answer to why some people are stressed in a situation while others are not may hinge on their skill.
It’s important to qualify that, for Csikszentmihalyi, experience that was converted into inherent, tacit understanding still counts as skill. Gary Klein’s internal models of situations and how they work that drive recognition primed decisions are a skill – and one that isn’t easy to teach. (See Sources of Power and Seeing What Others Don’t.) As a result, in most cases, the more experience we get with something, the less stress it will induce. Trauma and the reinforcement that can happen is a notable exception. (See Traumatic Stress.)
Nassim Taleb explains in Antifragile how we need stress to help us become stronger. The stress needs to be the right kind, at the right intensity, and at the right time – but it’s essential to our growth. In How We Learn, it’s called desirable difficulty. We don’t remember well those things that we don’t try hard to learn. The more that there is difficulty associated with our learning, the more we learn.
Stress Kills Brain Cells
Panksepp shares, “The neurons that contain the cortisol receptors can tolerate only so much stimulation. If cortisol secretion is sustained at excessive levels, the metabolic resources of hippocampal neurons become depleted and die prematurely. In short, a sustained stress response can kill certain brain cells!” This is nearly identical to Sapolsky’s language in Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. Sapolsky goes on to explain how we’ve subsumed a process of stress and fear that was designed for short term use to deliver us to safety instead of the belly of a beast. Instead of fearing the lion, our unique human gift of seeing into the future allows us to fear losing our job, our house, or relationships, and a variety of other things that threaten our psychological survival if not our physical survival.
The physical and neurological impacts of sustained stress are why we need to learn to manage our stress response. Matthiew Ricard in Happiness encourages meditation, as does the Dalai Lama. (See The Book of Joy and The Dalai Lama’s Big Book of Happiness.)
Dreams
Our brains take in overwhelming amounts of information while we’re awake. We’re bombarded with visual and auditory information while needing to attend to our internal state and our sense of touch, smell, and taste. Much of what we encounter isn’t processed in the moment. Instead, during our sleep, we process our days, develop our long-term memories, and perform sense-making to the day. This is why sleep is critically important for learning and for our health in general.
Dreams are what we experience while post-processing our days in REM sleep. As Freud recognized, dreams are “windows to the soul.” Panksepp expresses it this way: “Dreams tell us the way we really think and feel, not the way we pretend we think and feel.” While we are conscious, we can delude others and ourselves as to what our beliefs are. (See Immunity to Change for more on our ability to hide what we really believe while awake.) Our dreams are unfiltered expressions of our true beliefs.
Schizophrenic Break
If you’ve never been around someone who has had a schizophrenic break – a disconnection from reality – I don’t recommend it. It’s unsettling to see how someone can exist in reality and yet be so disconnected from it. From a neurological point of view, schizophrenic breaks are interesting because, for the most part, “Schizophrenics do not exhibit any more REM than normal folks, except during the evening before a ‘schizophrenic break,’ when REM is in fact elevated.” REM refers to the rapid eye movement (REM) phase of sleep.
Sleep helps us process our day and the information we’re taking in – both from our internal states (see How Emotions Are Made) and our external environment. What the research seems to say is that, prior to the break, we see their minds struggling to find ways to make sense of the information that it’s receiving.
Slow-Wave Sleep
Slow-wave sleep (SWS) is an even deeper form of sleep than REM sleep and performs another important function. Where REM sleep seems to be primarily integrating a day’s experiences, SWS seems to be designed to allow for bodily repair. It seems to be when the body is the most relaxed and when the body’s natural repair systems are the most active.
It’s important to recognize that not all sleep is REM sleep. Sleep is a like a layer cake, stacked from SWS and REM sleep to necessary but less restorative phases of sleep.
Love and Marriage
While it’s common to believe that we are totally monogamous by nature, Panksepp argues against this notion: “Indeed, it seems likely that human bonding is not totally monogamous by nature, but our neurobiology is compatible with long-term serial and parallel relationships.” This is, of course, consistent with Helen Fisher’s work, Anatomy of Love.
Amygdala
Most people associate the amygdala with emotion. It’s associated with fight or flight and a host of other basic – limbic – responses. Panksepp explains, “The main reason the amygdala may appear to be so important in generating affect may arise largely from the fact that most emotional episodes in adult animals are closely linked to learning and cognitive appraisals. These are the types of emotional stimuli that converge on the amygdala.” In short, it’s implicated because all “neural roads” lead to it. However, there’s much more involved in Affective Neuroscience.