Sunday 16 January 2011

Notes on The Brain (BBC4) documentary and emotions: feeling the emotion

These are simply fast typed notes from a documentary I was watching ... excuse any errors or misinformation
(Pleasing to realise that I have learnt as all a very very familiar to me)

Watson believed that we are born with emotions.
Where do they come from - born with them or learnt?
Love fear and rage - mixing gives emotional range.
But he believed every experience we have later in life is the product of childhood experiences.
What you hated, who you would fall in love with and what would make you happy

Controversial but important experiment - Little Albert the study of fear

Is it possible to make a person phobic? - horrid video footage creating fright in the little child.
Well known experiments creating fear in the small child - placing objects with which he played happily and then later introducing loud sounds for example that scare the little child everything the once harmless stimuli is placed by the child
This child died very young - aged 6yrs, anonymous - Douglas, from an infectious disease. There is no trace of what actually happened after he left the experimental regime .
I wonder if the experiments left a mark on his psyche then affecting his physical health??

Love
What is it and what is it for?
Affection and love - does it develop and simply reinforce the bond with the person who feeds the baby?
Harry Harlow - studier of love.
The experiment of the baby monkeys and seeking comfort. It's a weird experiment creating a surrogate mother built from bits of scrap.
One of these surrogate mothers offered food ( a basic need satisfying hunger) and the other simple comfort and affectionate representative of a soft cover.
Rosenbaum - tended to agree that the monkeys seemed to form a loving attachment to the cloth mother
But he then created the cloth mother rejecting the monkey and being the one who created the emotional distress.
So it was deduced that having created a loving attachment the baby clung harder when the mother was the creator of emotional distress.
Deprived of love does this bring about despair and depression.
Harlow proved that in isolation and without any love the moneys were very disturbed.
Of course there is evidence now from orphaned babies not held or nurtured that there is an under development in the brain.
Proof indeed that we all need companionship and affection and close physical contact.
Changes were affected by Harlow's very controversial experiments.

Albert Bandura
Study of aggression - watching violence induces aggression - is this true?
With Watson showing that emotions are innate but associating them with experiences is the learning of the application of them ....

Empathy
Christian Keyser and the study of empathy
own feelings of pain important in understanding the pain in others
Current experiments monitor the reaction in the brain
same areas in the brain light up whether watching someone else experiencing pain as when receiving pain.

Brain scans can help model who we really are rather than what we want to think we are or want others to think we are.
Interesting.


Terrible personal misfortune and the ways in which this affects emotional processing.
Antonio Dimasio
http://fora.tv/2009/07/04/Antonio_Damasio_This_Time_With_Feeling
I have his books and as yet have not read them - well have dipped in and out.

A man with a brain tumor has it removed but it affected a change in him. He was emotionally flat, his wife describes him as cold. He says he does not feel emotions. He did not feel love anymore for his wife despite not falling out of love with her,
He relies on a cognitive realisation of what it might feel like for others because he cannot actually feel it.
He imagined that perhaps serial killers don't have emotions. Nothing would bother a killer perhaps.
The way he stops himself is by remembering that he is not a serial killer.
He can still read emotions in other people - recognising tears as sadness but whether he can use that to influence his decisions for himself.
Dimasio showed that decision making is dependant on emotional responses to situations.
He undermined the belief that decision making is all logical.
Emotional cues - commonly known as gut instincts.
INSTINCTUAL - emotionally driven.
But it's so close how the emotions education the cognition.
And then it seems like rational logical decisions are being made.

These are theories and experiments that match my own beliefs from years of observation now and my own experiences.
So a man who has no emotional response =??
So strange observing a person with no emotional responses. Incredible. And I guess there is this within degrees of aspergers and autism.
Empathy is so crucial to understanding self. This happens often at a sub conscious level. And contributes to a sense of self and the Theory of Mind in relating with others.
Vital to companionship and closeness which we have established is crucial to us humans and other animals

Ah Dimasio speaks about social emotions such as guilt and embarrassment or shame pride etc.
There are also biological emotions eg fear
Feeling is the capping of the process which then combined with logic and reason makes us sophisticated beings compared with non sentient probably lacking in conscious awareness creatures such as a snail without any brain who is a complicated biological functioing thing.

Distinction between emotion and thinking is so important but has been non -concious
When we feel the emotion is when we know we have it - as otherwsie the emotion goes undetected.
And then we may not be aware of what is driving our decision making.

Fascinated Bliss
X

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