How Our Brains Feel Emotion | Antonio Damasio | Big Think

Question: What happens in our brain when we

feel

an

emotion

? Antonio Damasio: Feeling an

emotion

is a different process from having the emotion in the first place. So it's helpful to understand what an emotion is, what a

feel

ing is, we need to understand what an emotion is. And the emotion is the execution of a very complex program of actions. Some actions that are actually movements, like movements that you can do, change your face, for example, with fear, or movements that are internal, that happen in your heart or in your gut, and movements that are not actually muscle movements, but rather, releases of molecules.

Let's say, for example, from the endocrine system to the bloodstream, but it is movement and action in the broad sense of the term. And an emotion consists of a very well-orchestrated set of alterations in the body that has, as a general purpose, to make life more viable by responding to a danger, responding to an opportunity, this/or, or something in between. And it is something that is fixed in our genome and that we all have with a certain programmed nature that is modified with our experience, so that individually we have variations in the pattern. But, in essence, your emotion of joy and mine will be extremely similar.

We may express them physically slightly differently and of course it is classified depending on the circumstances, but the essence of the process will be the same, unless one of us is not quite well formed and is missing something, otherwise it will be the same. And it will be the same even in other species. You know, there's, you know, we can smile and the dog can wag its tail, but in essence, we have an established program and those programs are similar between individuals of the species. So the feeling is actually a representation of what happens in the organs when you have an emotion.

So that's actually the next thing that happens. If you have only one emotion, you won't necessarily feel it. To feel an emotion, it is necessary to represent in the brain, in structures that are actually different from the structures that lead to the emotion, what happens in the organs when the emotion is felt. So, you can define it very simply as the process of perceiving what happens in the organs when you are in the middle of an emotion, and that is achieved by a collection of structures, some of which are in the brain stem, and some of which are in the cerebral cortex, that is, the insular cortex, which I like to mention not because I

think

it is the most important, it is not.

I don't actually

think

it's the number one structure that controls our feelings, but I like to mention it because it's something that people didn't really know about and many years ago, which is probably almost 20 years now, I thought insular would be an important platform. For feelings, that's where I started. And it was a hypothesis and it turns out that the hypothesis is perfectly correct. And 10 years ago, we had the first experiments that showed that this was indeed the case, and since then, countless studies have shown that when you have feelings of an emotion or feelings of a variety of other things, the insular is active, but it doesn't mean that It is the only thing that is active and there are other structures that are very important as well.