Reasoning Is Suffused With Emotion

Excerpt from “The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science,” by Chris Mooney, Mother Jones, April 18, 2011:

The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience. Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call "affect"). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds—fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we're aware of it. That shouldn't be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. It's a "basic human survival skill," explains political scientist Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.

Illustration by Jonathon Rosen

We're not driven only by emotions, of course—we also reason, deliberate. But reasoning comes later, works slower—and even then, it doesn't take place in an emotional vacuum. Rather, our quick-fire emotions can set us on a course of thinking that's highly biased, especially on topics we care a great deal about.

Consider a person who has heard about a scientific discovery that deeply challenges her belief in divine creation—a new hominid, say, that confirms our evolutionary origins. What happens next, explains political scientist Charles Taber of Stony Brook University, is a subconscious negative response to the new information—and that response, in turn, guides the type of memories and associations formed in the conscious mind. "They retrieve thoughts that are consistent with their previous beliefs," says Taber, "and that will lead them to build an argument and challenge what they're hearing."

In other words, when we think we're reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing. Or to use an analogy offered by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt: We may think we're being scientists, but we're actually being lawyers. Our "reasoning" is a means to a predetermined end—winning our "case"—and is shot through with biases. They include "confirmation bias," in which we give greater heed to evidence and arguments that bolster our beliefs, and "disconfirmation bias," in which we expend disproportionate energy trying to debunk or refute views and arguments that we find uncongenial.

That's a lot of jargon, but we all understand these mechanisms when it comes to interpersonal relationships. If I don't want to believe that my spouse is being unfaithful, or that my child is a bully, I can go to great lengths to explain away behavior that seems obvious to everybody else—everybody who isn't too emotionally invested to accept it, anyway. That's not to suggest that we aren't also motivated to perceive the world accurately—we are. Or that we never change our minds—we do. It's just that we have other important goals besides accuracy—including identity affirmation and protecting one's sense of self—and often those make us highly resistant to changing our beliefs when the facts say we should.

Read entire article here…

Uncoupling Negative Emotional Reactions from Behavior

From the abstract of a recent study looking at the impact on meditation practice on the decision-making process:

“Human decision-making is often framed as a competition between cognitive and emotional processes in the brain. Deviations from rational processes are believed to derive from inclusion of emotional factors in decision-making.

Here, we investigate whether a group of experienced Buddhist meditators are better equipped to regulate emotional processes compared with controls during economic decision-making in the Ultimatum Game.

We show that meditators accept unfair offers on more than half of the trials, whereas controls only accept unfair offers on one-quarter of the trials…

In summary, when assessing unfairness, meditators activate a different network of brain areas compared with controls enabling them to uncouple negative emotional reactions from their behavior. These findings highlight the clinically and socially important possibility that sustained training in mindfulness meditation may impact distinct domains of human decision-making.”

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See also:

• “Meditation Makes People More Rational Decision-makers,” by Elizabeth Weise, USA Today, April 20, 2011
• Soryu Scott's Method for Better Decision-Making

Feeling Emotion Conveyed by a Performer

Chopin’s Étude Op. 10 No. 3, Tristesse, performed by Derek Wang (11 years old).

The Musical Brain

The brain processes musical nuance in many ways, it turns out. Edward W. Large, a music scientist at Florida Atlantic University, scanned the brains of people with and without experience playing music as they listened to two versions of a Chopin étude: one recorded by a pianist, the other stripped down to a literal version of what Chopin wrote, without human-induced variations in timing and dynamics.

During the original performance, brain areas linked to emotion activated much more than with the uninflected version, showing bursts of activity with each deviation in timing or volume.

So did the mirror neuron system, a set of brain regions previously shown to become engaged when a person watches someone doing an activity the observer knows how to do — dancers watching videos of dance, for example. But in Dr. Large’s study, mirror neuron regions flashed even in nonmusicians.

Maybe those regions, which include some language areas, are “tapping into empathy,” he said, “as though you’re feeling an emotion that is being conveyed by a performer on stage,” and the brain is mirroring those emotions.

Regions involved in motor activity, everything from knitting to sprinting, also lighted up with changes in timing and volume.

Anders Friberg, a music scientist at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, found that the speed patterns of people’s natural movements — moving a hand from one place to another on a desk or jogging and slowing to stop — match tempo changes in music that listeners rate as most pleasing.

“We got the best-sounding music from the velocity curve of natural human gestures, compared to other curves of tempos not found in nature,” Dr. Friberg said. “These were quite subtle differences, and listeners were clearly distinguishing between them. And these were not expert listeners.”

Dr. Daniel Levitin’s project found that musicians were more sensitive to changes in volume and timing than nonmusicians. That echoes research by Nina Kraus , a neurobiologist at Northwestern University, which showed that musicians are better at hearing sound against background noise, and that their brains expend less energy detecting emotion in babies’ cries.

Separately, the Levitin team found that children with autism essentially rated each nocturne rendition equally emotional, finding the original no more emotionally expressive than the mechanical version. But in other research, the team found that children with autism could label music as happy, sad or scary, suggesting, Dr. Levitin said, that “their recognition of musical emotions may be intact without necessarily having those emotions evoked, and without them necessarily experiencing those emotions themselves.”

Read the entire article here… 

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See also:

• How Musicians Communicate Emotion (NYT)
• A Brain on Chopin (NYT)
• Benjamin Zander on Music and Passion (TED)
• Musical Language (Radiolab)
• Evelyn Glennie Shows How to Listen (TED)
• This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin
• A Complete Experience of Listening

Compassion for Fun and Profit

“The first step is attention training. Attention is the basis of all higher cognitive and emotional abilities. Therefore, any curriculum for training emotional intelligence has to begin with attention training. The idea here is to train attention to create a quality of mind that is calm and clear at the same time. And this creates the foundation for emotional intelligence.”

~ Chade-Meng Tan, Google’s “Jolly Good Fellow,” talking about how the company practices compassion in its everyday business and the Search Inside Yourself program.

Everything Changes All the Time

From Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation by Sharon Salzberg:

“Again and again I’ve seen novice meditators begin to transform their lives—even if they were initially resistant or skeptical. As I’ve learned through my own experience, meditation helps us to find greater tranquility, connect to our feelings, find a sense of wholeness, strengthen our relationships, and face our fears. That’s what happened to me.

Because of meditation, I’ve undergone profound and subtle shifts in the way I think and how I see myself in the world. I’ve learned that I don’t have to be limited to who I thought I was when I was a child or what I thought I was capable of yesterday, or even an hour ago. My meditation practice has freed me from the old, conditioned definition of myself as someone unworthy of love. Despite my initial fantasies when I began meditating as a college student, I haven’t entered a steady state of glorious bliss. Meditation has made me happy, loving, and peaceful—but not every single moment of the day. I still have good times and bad, joy and sorrow. Now I can accept setbacks more easily, with less sense of disappointment and personal failure, because meditation has taught me how to cope with the profound truth that everything changes all the time.”

Satisfied with the Mystery

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery—even if mixed with fear—that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man...I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence—as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature."

~ Albert Einstein, from The World as I See It

 

[Thanks for the Einstein quote, Liv!]

Escalating into Tenderness

Excerpt from Unconditional Confidence: Instructions for Meeting Any Experience with Trust and Courage by Pema Chödrön:

It’s not like saying, if you turn towards fear, if you smile at fear, then BOOM—you’re fearless. Instead, you don’t discover courage right away. What you discover is something actually painful, but extremely tender.

So fear arises, and it causes you to close your mind and your heart and you harden. You harden against yourself, you harden against other people.

Or fear arises, in the form of slight anxiety, in the form of feeling inadequate, in the form of being embarrassed, in the form of absolute terror. It arises and it can escalate into the hardness of aggression or it can escalate into tenderness.

[You will have the actual experience of this tenderness] if you become curious about fear itself and go under the story line and actually feel it and know it even for one and a half minutes—even for two seconds. Right away, you understand that there’s something very tender hearted and vulnerable in the best sense that’s underneath the fear.

My own experience really is that the tenderness is under all strong emotions—not just fear. It’s also under aggression and jealousy and envy and addictive urges of all kinds. Somehow we always go in the direction of digging the hole deeper. Escalating the ubiquitous nervousness. But the encouragement here is to stop, and to breathe, and to feel the underlying tenderness. 

Constantly Keeping Track

Excerpts from "Sleep," Radiolab, May 25, 2007:

Robert Krulwich: Robert Stickgold has the theory that as you go through your day, your brain is constantly keeping track of emotional content. Your brain is going to flag that stuff, It says, Oh, I need to remember so I can work on it later. I’m going to put a sticky on this one.

Robert Stickgold: So if it puts a sticky on everything that’s hard during the day, then all the brain has to do when it’s creating a dream is go and grab stickies.

Jad Abumrad: Stickgold thinks he’s seeing the outline if the dream-making process here. It starts really simply at the very beginning of sleep, right after you fall asleep, with the replay. This, he suspects, is just the brain emptying out its stickies.

Robert Krulwich: Are you at all puzzled by the super-duper, Technicolor, extraordinarily cinematic qualities of some of these [dreams]? Because if it were just an everyday brain function to sort of make sense of the world and allow you to make new connections, you wouldn’t really need quit the movie quality.

Robert Stickgold: When we talk about dreams, what seems to come into dreams are memories, concepts, relationships, associations that have a strong emotional flavor and — I’m guessing from the data — need a full-blown orchestration to be properly processed.

“Sleep is the annihilation of consciousness, so it’s a terrible time in which everything disappears — the universe and yourself with it. I think if people didn’t sleep and didn’t have the unconsciousness of sleep, they possibly wouldn’t even realize that consciousness is an enormous gift.”

~ Dr. Giulio Tunoni

Both Respect and Imagination

Excerpt from the preface of From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law (Inalienable Rights) by Martha Nussbaum:

Today, large segments of the Christian Right openly practice a politics based upon disgust. Depicting the sexual practices of lesbians and, especially, of gay men as vile and revolting, they suggest that such practices contaminate and defile society, producing decay and degeneration…Although the influence of such appeals peaked, perhaps, in the 1980s and 1990s, and has since been declining, the politics of disgust continues to exercise influence, often in more subtle and unstated ways. We need, then, to understand why it is not a good approach to politics and law in a democratic society.

The politics of disgust is profoundly at odds with the abstract idea of a society based on the equality of all citizens, in which all have a right to the equal protection of the laws. It says that the mere fact that you happen to make me want to vomit is reason enough for me to treat you as a social pariah, denying you some of your most basic entitlements as a citizen.

…the politics of disgust is alive and well in America today, as many groups aggressively depict same-sex practices in such a way as to arouse disgust and then draw on that reaction when campaigning against the legalization of same-sex marriage, or nondiscrimination laws. Such appeals are often seen as not politically correct today, so other arguments are increasingly put forward. Disgust, however, has not gone away. We still need to understand its force, and why arguments based upon it are bad political arguments. A closer study of the emotion of disgust and the ways in which it has been used politically through history will suggest some powerful arguments against disgust’s apostles in theory and in practice, by showing how that emotion expresses a universal human discomfort with bodily reality, but then uses that discomfort to target and subordinate vulnerable minorities.

…Disgust relies on moral obtuseness. It is possible to view another human being as a slimy slug or a piece of revolting trash only if one has never made a serious good-faith attempt to see the world through that person’s eyes or to experience that person’s feelings. Disgust imputes to the other a subhuman nature. How, by contrast, do we ever become able to see one another as human? Only through the exercise of imagination. Humanity does not automatically reveal itself to strangers. No placard hung on the front of a fellow citizen announces that this one is a full-fledged human being. Seeing the shape of a human being before us, we always have choices to make: will we impute full equal humanity to that shape, or something less? Only by imagining how the world looks through that person’s eyes does one get to the point of seeing the other person as a someone and not a something. (Sadly, racial minorities have long been seen as somethings rather than someones, and women are all too frequently so seen today, given the ever-present phenomenon of sexual “object-ification,” in which a person is treated as a mere thing.) That crucial imaginative engagement has been sadly and sorely lacking in majority dealings with lesbians and gay lives…

The politics of humanity, as I shall use the term, includes respect. But respect, as usually conceived, is not sufficient for it: something else, something closer to love, must also be involved. First of all, we are unlikely to achieve full respect for one another unless we can do something else first – see the other as a center of perception, emotion, and reason, rather than an inert object. Put that way, it might appear that this imaginative and emotional attitude is a mere instrument to a respect that might be arrived at by some other route. However, respect without this attitude is certainly no a complete basis for political action in a diverse society: for only imagination animates the cold and abstract categories of morality and law, turning them into the ways we can live together. So, respect is politically incomplete without imagination.

One may, however, make a stronger claim, and I shall defend this claim: the capacity for imaginative and emotional participation in the lives of others is an essential ingredient of any respect worthy of the name. Only this capacity makes real an ability that is a key part of respect, the ability to see the other as an end, not as a mere means. The politics of humanity includes, then, both respect and imagination, and imagination understood as an ingredient essential to respect itself.

To Map Out the World

Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly discussing The Toon Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics with Michael Silverblatt on KCRW’s Bookworm (February 4, 2010).

Francoise Mouly: Kids aren’t necessarily — the way we imagine they might be — looking for escape and fantasy. Actually, the seven year old, the eight year old, is eager for a way to map out information — to map out the world. And that’s part of the reason why comics appeal to them. Because they are a very instinctive way to structure information…As Art has often referred to it, it’s a story made manifest spatially. You have a very instinctive way to understand narratives and to understand character’s emotion…It gives you cues. It is in and of itself a medium that kids can use to understand all other kinds of visual information – much more than watching television or playing video games…They can go back to the same story and read it over and over again. And also because it’s done by one person — it’s drawn by hand — it inspires them to want to make comics.

Art Spiegelman: What makes this a real treasury rather than just a bunch of product put together in four hundred pages of offering [is that] so much of this is written and drawn by the same person…And here when we’re looking at Walt Kelly and Sheldon Mayer and, to a degree, John Stanley and certainly Carl Barks, they were really able to enter and make a whole world themselves. Really act it out, draw it, and write it. So you’re really throbbing inside one person’s brain. And to have that many brains presenting fully realized worlds, you feel it when you’re looking through these stories. They have a kind of urgency in their own way…These characters are a lot more complex than Spider Man. Little Lulu is so much more richer than Peter Parker.

Interconnected in Surprising Ways

Excerpt from “Botox Treatment Slows Perception of Negative Emotions” by Jonathan Rottenberg, Ph.D., Psychology Today (January 31, 2010):

Our default assumption is that our eyes and our brains are the organs dedicated to processing emotional information. New work led by David Havas of the University of Wisconsin, to be published in the journal Psychological Science, provides a fascinating demonstration that our facial muscles share in this job.

The new study reported on 40 people who were treated with Botox. Tiny applications of the nerve poison were used to deactivate muscles in the forehead that cause frowning (the corrugator muscles).

Before and after the Botox treatment, patients were asked to read written statements that carried an emotional tenor, including statements that were angry ("The pushy telemarketer won't let you return to your dinner"); sad ("You open your email in-box on your birthday to find no new emails"); or happy ("The water park is refreshing on the hot summer day.")

The authors used reading time as a proxy for processing speed.

The results showed no change in the time needed to understand the happy sentences. But in a fascinating result, after Botox treatment, the subjects needed more time to read the angry and sad sentences…

Perhaps the most interesting implication of the study is scientific. It shows yet again that our systems for communicating and perceiving emotion are interconnected, often in surprising ways.

A New Science of Happiness

Dacher Keltner from “Forget Survival of the Fittest: It Is Kindness That Counts,” by David DiSalvo, Scientific American Mind (September 2009):

Recent research is suggesting that our capacities for virtue and cooperation and our moral sense are old in evolutionary terms, and these capacities are found in the emotions I write about.

A new science of happiness is finding that these emotions can be readily cultivated in familiar ways, bringing out the good in others and in oneself. Here are some recent empirical examples:

• Experiences of reverence in nature or of being around those who are morally inspiring improves people’s sense of connection to one another and their sense of purpose.
• Meditating on a compassionate approach to others shifts resting brain activation to the left hemisphere, a region associated with happiness, and boosts immune functions.
• Talking about what we are thankful for—in classrooms, at the dinner table or in a diary—boosts happiness, social well-being and health.
• Devoting resources to others, rather than indulging a materialist desire, brings about lasting well-being.

This kind of science gives me many hopes for the future. At the broadest level, I hope that our culture shifts from a consumption-based, materialist culture to one that privileges the social joys (play, caring, touch, mirth) that are our older (in the evolutionary sense) sources of the good life. In more specific terms, I see this new science informing practices in almost every realm of life.

More…

Closed Eyes Intensify Emotions

"Neuroscientists have discovered that a brain centre involved in sensing emotion and fear called the amygdala kicks into action when volunteers listen to scary music with eyes closed...Shutting your eyes heightens people's emotional responses to the outside world, suggests previous research—not to mention everyday experience."

~ From “Scary Music is Spookier with Eyes Shut," by Ewen Callaway, New Scientist (July 28, 2009)

I Lose Interest

“I feel like my last album was really very much about this emotion to want justice. And maybe I go with this emotion as a way to get at how it is to feel injustice—to want justice and to demand it. It’s very strong, this image of a person with a flag, declaring independence. But I’m not interested in politics. I lose interest the microsecond it ceases to be emotional, when something becomes a political movement. What I’m interested in is emotions.”

~ Björk, from Interview Magazine (June/July 2009). Voltaic, a two-CD, two-DVD box set of live recordings from Medúlla and Volta, will be available June 23 from Nonesuch.

She Really Does Emote

Animator Travis Knight talking about the many facial expressions which had to be created for the characters in Coraline. The main character herself required over 200,000 different expressions (from Coraline: A Visual Companion by Stephen Jones):

“For facial animation, in particular, we’ve been able to find ways to use a computer to help out the stop-motion. Replacement animation has been around forever, but there’s only a certain amount of refinement you can get with it—it’s hand-done and it’s a little crude, but it does have a real beauty to it. With the computer you can make it pixel-perfect, get real subtlety.”

“We have these machines that can transfer what we’ve done with the computer, make physical objects out of them. That’s how we did a lot of the facial replacement animation. We were modeling and sculpting in the computer, printing them out on these wacky 3-D printers, painting them all by hand, and then fitting them and putting them on the puppets. That was how we got this really incredible, subtle, beautiful, and expressive facial animation.”

“It hurts my stomach to think about all those poor people who had to paint all that stuff and build all that. But I think it shows. When you see the film, she really does emote, and she feels like a real, living, breathing girl. Of course, all that comes from the animators.”

In the Fire

Anita Barrows in conversation with Krista Tippett from “The Soul in Depression,” Speaking of Faith (Feb. 26, 2009):

Suddenly, in depression you are ripped from what felt like your life, from what felt right and familiar and balanced and ordinary and ordered, and you're just thrown into this place where you're ravaged, where the wind rips the leaves from the trees, and there you are. Yeah. Very, very much the soul in depression.

And I think that all of the talk about, 'Oh, well, this will, you know, be really good for your soul or your character, this will make a better person of you,' feels like absolute rubbish when you're in the midst of the wretchedness of depression. But I think that in a way, I mean, it almost feels sort of physiological. If the soul were material, I think depression sort of works on it the way you could work a piece of clay, so that it softens and it becomes more malleable. It becomes wider. It becomes able to take in more. But that's only afterward. In the fire, what you get is the fire.

This is a poem called "Questo Muro." It is a phrase from a passage in Dante's Purgatory. Dante has been in the depths of depression, in the depths of the inferno, and he's now working his way out of it toward Beatrice, who is — you know, you could call her the soul or the anima. And he and Virgil are climbing the mountain, and all of a sudden they get to a wall of fire, and you can't go any farther unless you go through it. So this is my poem, and it really is a poem, I think, about finding the courage to persist, to go through that fire.

Questo Muro

You will come at a turning of the trail
to a wall of flame
After the hard climb & the exhausted dreaming
you will come to a place where he
with whom you have walked this far
will stop will stand
beside you on the treacherous steep path
& stare as you shiver at the moving wall, the flame
that blocks your vision of what comes after.
And that one
who you thought would accompany you always,
who held your face
tenderly a little while in his hands —
who pressed the palms of his hands into drenched grass
& washed from your cheeks, the tear-tracks —
he is telling you now
that all that stands between you
& everything you have known since the beginning
is this: this wall. Between yourself
& the beloved, between yourself & your joy,
the riverbank swaying with wildflowers, the shaft
of sunlight on the rock, the song.
Will you pass through it now, will you let it consume
whatever solidness this is
you call your life, & send
you out, a tremor of heat,
a radiance, a changed
flickering thing?

Emotions Come First

From Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals by Temple Grandin:

I believe that the best way to create good living conditions for any animal, whether it’s a captive animal living in a zoo, a farm animal, or a pet, is to base animal welfare programs on the core emotion systems in the brain. My theory is that the environment animals live in should activate their positive emotions as much as possible, and not activate their negative emotions any more than necessary. If we get the animal’s emotions right, we will have fewer problem behaviors.

That might sound like a radical statement, but some of the research in neuroscience has been showing that emotions drive behavior, and my own thirty-five years of experience working with animals have shown me that this is true. Emotions come first. You have to go back to the brain to understand animal welfare.

Of course, usually — though not always — the more freedom you give an animal to act naturally, the better, because normal behaviors evolved to satisfy the core emotions. When a hen hides to lay her eggs, the hiding behavior turns off fear. But if you can’t give an animal the freedom to act naturally, then you should think about how to satisfy the emotion that motivates the behavior by giving the animal other things to do. Focus on the emotion, not the behavior.

So far, research in animal behavior agrees with the neuroscience research on emotions. A really good study on whether animals have purely behavioral needs was done with gerbils. Gerbils love to dig and tunnel, and a lot of them develop a corner-digging stereotypy when they’re around thirty days old. A stereotypy is an abnormal repetitive behavior (ARB for short), such as a lion or tiger pacing back and forth in its cage for hours on end. Pets and farm animals can develop stereotypies, too. Stereotypies are defined as abnormal behaviors that are repetitive, invariant (lions always pace the exact same path in their cages), and seemingly pointless.

An adult gerbil spends up to 30 percent of its "active time" doing stereotypic digging in the corner of its cage. That would never happen in nature, and many researchers have hypothesized that the reason captive gerbils develop stereotypic digging is that they have a biological need to dig that they can’t express inside a cage.

On the other hand, in nature gerbils don’t dig just to be digging. They dig to create underground tunnels and nests. Once they’ve hollowed out their underground home, they stop digging. Maybe what the gerbil needs is the result of the digging, not the behavior itself. A Swiss psychologist named Christoph Wiedenmayer set up an experiment to find out. He put one set of baby gerbils in a cage with dry sand they could dig in, and another set in a cage with a predug burrow system but nothing soft to dig in. The gerbils in the sand-filled box developed digging stereotypies right away, whereas none of the gerbils in the cage with the burrows did.

That shows that the motivation for a gerbil’s digging stereotypy is a need to hide inside a sheltered space, not a need to dig. The gerbil needs the emotion of feeling safe, not the action of digging. Animals don’t have purely behavioral needs, and if an animal expresses a normal behavior in an abnormal environment, its welfare may be poor. A gerbil that spends 30 percent of its time digging without being able to make a tunnel does not have good welfare.

All animals and people have the same core emotion systems in the brain. Most pet owners probably already believe this, but I find that a lot of executives, plant managers, and even some veterinarians and researchers still don’t believe that animals have emotions. The first thing I tell them is that the same psychiatric medications, such as Prozac, that work for humans also work for animals. Unless you are an expert, when you dissect a pig’s brain it’s difficult to tell the difference between the lower-down parts of the animal’s brain and the lower-down parts of a human brain. Human beings have a much bigger neocortex, but the core emotions aren’t located in the neocortex. They’re in the lower-down part of the brain.

When people are suffering mentally, they want to feel better — they want to stop having bad emotions and start having good emotions. That’s the right goal with animals, too.

Emotional Risk Is Where It's At

"Starting Out in the Evening...takes on a character who, in his daily grind [as an author], approaches the question of transformation. He looks at character, he looks at life, and he's looking for the collision between the two in order to speak about what humanity goes through. But the irony here is, in his own life, he's removed himself from the intimacies that put him at risk.

"I suppose one of the things that the struggles of my own life have taught me is that emotional risk is where it's at. That's where real change comes from. That's where real growth comes from. That's how we stretch our life muscle as artists and that's how we make our relationships work. We avail ourselves. We open ourselves. And I find that theme dominating almost everything I've been working on for the last ten years. This idea of surrender. This idea of opening rather than closing."

--Director Andrew Wagner in conversation with Elvis Mitchell on KCRW's The Treatment (12.12.07)

Combined to a Unique Degree

From The Body Has a Mind of Its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better, by Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee:

Your right frontal insula “lights up” when you feel all the quintessential human emotions—love, hate, disgust, gratitude, resentment, self-confidence, embarrassment, trust, distrust, empathy, contempt, approval, disdain, pride, humiliation, truthfulness, deceit, atonement, guilt. It also lights up when you feel strong sensations, from physical pain to a fluttery stomach to tingling loins.
...

This dual physical-emotional sensitivity is not just a coincidence. The right frontal insula is where conscious physical sensation and conscious emotional awareness co-emerge. Consider this amazing fact: the right frontal insula is active both when you experience literal physical pain and when you experience the psychic “pain” of rejection or the social exclusion of being shunned. It lights up when you feel someone is treating you unfairly.
...

In every brain-imaging study ever done of every human emotion, the right frontal insula and anterior cingulate cortex light up together, [Arthur] Craig [a neuroanatomist at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix] says. He takes this to mean that in humans, emotions, feelings, motivations, ideas and intentions are combined to a unique degree, and that this is a key element of our humanity.

We Didn't Have the Tools To See

Dr. Esther Sternberg discussing new insights into the molecular level of the mind-body connection on Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett:

Scientists need evidence. We need measurable proof. That started with Descartes in the 1600s. And at that time, 400 or 500 years ago, science didn't have the tools to measure something as ephemeral and not concrete as abstract as an emotion.

You can measure disease. Disease is an abnormality of anatomy. So with the anatomists of the 16th century, when they started to dissect the human body, they discovered that when there was a pneumonia, there was a hole in the lung. You know, there was a problem in the liver, there was an anatomical problem in the liver. So the assumption became that disease is associated with an abnormality of anatomy, which allowed huge advances in medicine. You know, Laennec, in the 19th century, when he developed the stethoscope, developed it so that you could hear problems in the lung. Without seeing them, you could actually hear them. And so that's concrete; that's easy to understand.

But we didn't have the tools until now, until very recently, to see the living human brain at work with neuroimaging. We didn't have the tools to see into how the nerve cells function, the biochemistry, the chemicals that change, the nerve chemicals that are released, the electrical activity that changes. We couldn't see into the genes that make these cells function until very, very recently.
...

And here is a quote from the book:

"Emotions are always with us but constantly shifting. They change the way we see the world and the way we see ourselves. Diseases come and go but on a different time scale. And if they change the way we see the world, they do it through emotions. Could something as vague and fleeting as an emotion actually affect something as tangible as a disease? Can depression cause arthritis? Can laughing and a positive attitude ameliorate, even help to cure disease? We all suspect that the answers to these questions are yes, yet we can't say why and certainly not how. Indeed, entire self-cure industries have been built on this underlying assumption. But physicians and scientists, until recently, dismissed such ideas as nonsense because there did not appear to be a plausible biological mechanism to explain the link. Part of the reason for this is that scientists and lay people speak different languages. But so do emotions and disease. Poetry and song are the language of emotions. Scientific precision, logic, and deductive reasoning are the language of disease."