The united concept of Consciousness and Emotions

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The united concept of Consciousness and Emotions

• Emotion, systemic differentiation, and perceptual
  activity

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Orthogenetic Principle

• Wherever development occurs, it proceeds from a
  state of relative lack of differentiation to a
  state of increasing differentiation
• The older and later evolved forms coexist
• H. Werner B. Kaplan, 1956

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CONSCIOUSNESS
INDIVIDUAL DEVELOPMENT
LEVELS OF DIFFERENTIATION
EMOTION
The number of alternative variants of behavior
increases
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Behavior is a simultaneous realization of a set
of systems
ranging from the most archaic to the newest ones
Hippocampus
Position
EMG
Actogr. front
Actogr. rear
Behavioral Act 1
Behavioral Act 2
Neuron
SYSTEMS
NEW
Motor cortex
Neuron
Individual development
Actogr. front
SYSTEMS
OLD
Actogr. rear
Neuron
Actogr. front
Actogr. rear
from a hand
from the floor
Trigeminal
mesencephalic nucleus
Neuron
Jaw mov.
EMG
500 msec
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CONSCIOUSNESS
INDIVIDUAL DEVELOPMENT
LEVELS OF DIFFERENTIATION
EMOTION
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CONSCIOUSNESS
INDIVIDUAL DEVELOPMENT
LEVELS OF DIFFERENTIATION
EMOTION
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Early Ontogeny and Emotion

• Emotions (pleasant and unpleasant) find their
  origin in sensations that infants and even
  fetus experience. H. Wallon
• We were born with the machinery of primary
  emotions emotion as scaffolding arisen during
  development and indispensable for what exists
  now they are the ground for conscious
  processing. A. Damasio
• Facial expressions of emotion are innate. Ch.
  Darwin
• Clear manifestation of facial expressions of
  emotion may be observed in prematurely born
  infants. P.K. Anokhin
• The newborn infant, in the very first hours of
  extrauterine life (before the first feeding),
  manifests differential (pleasure, dislike) facial
  expressions to different qualities of gustatory
  substance. Ganchrow et al.

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Systemic complexity and differentiation can be
used as measures of conscious experience. To
sustain Conscious Experience, it is essential
that a functional cluster of neurons be highly
differentiated. (G. Tononi G.M. Edelman,
Science, 1998)
CONSCIOUSNESS
INDIVIDUAL DEVELOPMENT
LEVELS OF DIFFERENTIATION
EMOTION
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CONSCIOUSNESS
INDIVIDUAL DEVELOPMENT
LEVELS OF DIFFERENTIATION
EMOTION
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CONSCIOUSNESS
INDIVIDUAL DEVELOPMENT
LEVELS OF DIFFERENTIATION
EMOTION
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Continuity in the united concept of
Consciousness (C) and Emotions (E)

• The notion of continuity in the concept means
  that
• there are no moments in development when C
  suddenly appears or E suddenly disappears.

CONSCIOUSNESS
EMOTION
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Buddhism versus Western contrast between emotion
and thought

• The natural category was the Western contrast
  between emotion and thought, rather than to see
  them as integrated, as in Tibetan system.
• Perhaps initially the Enlightenment the motive
  for labeling something as emotion was to enhance
  reason by identifying something that is
  unreasonable, something that is irrational.
• The Dalai Lamas challenge to the Wests
  separation of emotion and cognition has support
  in current findings from neuroscience. The
  circuitry for emotion and cognition are
  intertwined just as Buddhism posits that these
  two elements are inseparable.
• Destructive emotions. How can we overcome them? A
  scientific dialogue with the Dalai Lama. Narrated
  by D. Goleman. Bantam Bell, New York, 2003, pg.
  159.

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Continuity in the united concept of
Consciousness (C) and Emotions (E)

• The notion of continuity in the concept means
  that
• each developmental and differentiation level is
  characterized by both C and E. However, the
  relative amounts of these two characteristics are
  different at each level.

CONSCIOUSNESS
EMOTION
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Continuity in the united concept of
Consciousness (C) and Emotions (E)

• The notion of continuity in the concept means
  that
• E- and C-characteristics are most marked at the
  opposite ends of the systemic continuum.

CONSCIOUSNESS
EMOTION
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• Anything at all can be said and thought with
  various degrees of precisionin an infinite
  variety of ways. But there are only a handful of
  emotions and feelings that can be felt, and they
  can be felt only in some few constrained
  ways.R.B. Zajonc, 1980, pg. 170

CONSCIOUSNESS
EMOTION
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Consciousness and different domains

• All conscious states come to us in the
  pleasure/unpleasure dimension
• John R. Searle

CONSCIOUSNESS
EMOTION
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Consciousness and different domains

• Although it is commonly assumed that both
  consciousness and intentionality are indivisible
  that is, they are either thing one is or is not
  capable of it is conceivable that they are
  acquired gradually, or even differently across
  different domains.
• Philip D.Zelazo and J. Steven Reznick. Ontogeny
  and intentionality. BBS, 1990, 134, 631-632

CONSCIOUSNESS
EMOTION
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Perceptual activity
Higher spatial frequency fine resolution, but
slow response Lower spatial frequency rapid,
but coarse visual signals emotion
CONSCIOUSNESS
EMOTION
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• it is doubtful that emotion is valid category
  of cerebral function. There is little scientific
  basis for the common belief that folk psychology
  concepts such as emotion or motivation
  actually correspond to natural anatomical and
  functional entities in the brain. Consequently,
  traditional psychological concepts may often
  provide misleading guides for the investigation
  of the control of behavior by the brain(p.46).
• C.H. Vanderwolf, M.E. Kelly, P. Kraemer, A.
  Streather, Are emotion and motivation localized
  in the limbic system and nucleus accumbens?
  Behavioral Brain Research 27 (1988) 45-58.

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• Comparison of the actual parameters of
  intermediate results (r) with the predicted ones
  during the realization of a behavioral act
  corresponds to the first level (1) of
  consciousness.
• Transitional processes (T) from one behavioral
  act to another (comparison of the actual and
  predicted parameters of the result (R) of the
  behavioral act) correspond to the second, higher,
  level (2).

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The Contents and Significance of Consciousness

• The contents and significance of Consciousness is
  the evaluation by an individual of its relation
  to environment during the realization of
  behavioral act (external or internal) and after
  the realization during transitional processes -
  this evaluation depends on individual memory
  structure and results in its updating.

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• The process of matching of predicted and actual
  parameters of an event has been considered a
  basic content of Consciousness also by others,
  but regarding stimulus as an event (Edelman,
  1989 Ivanitsky, 1995 John et al., 1997
  Grossberg, 1999 Gray, 1995).

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Degrees of Consciousness

• There can be indefinite range of different
  degrees of consciousness
• I am not paying much attention to the details of
  the road and the traffic. But it is simply not
  true that I am totally unconscious of these
  phenomena. If I were, there would be a car crash.
  (p. 635)
• John R. Searle. Consciousness, explanatory
  inversion, and cognitive science. BBS. 1990. V.
  13, 585-642

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• A. Damasio considers behavior as the result of
  several biological systems performing
  concurrently 2000, pg. 87, and emotion as
  scaffolding arisen during development and
  indispensablefor what exists now, the ground
  for conscious, cognitive processing Damasio
  1994, pg.234, 222

CONSCIOUSNESS
EMOTION
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Common Acts

• While some new systems develop as an element of
  withdrawal (black) or approach (white) memory
  domain, subserving realization of only a
  withdrawal or only an approach behavioral act,
  other systems subserve behavioral acts that may
  be used in both kinds of behavior (see the area
  of white-black overlap).

CONSCIOUSNESS
EMOTION
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Common Acts

• Realization of such common acts looks like as
  if the same act would be used in different
  emotional situations. But from the systemic point
  of view, behavioral act is not a brick that can
  be fitted into different behavioral contexts.

CONSCIOUSNESS
EMOTION
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ToneBlue - Uncertainty Red - Reward Black -
Punishment
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Neuroscience Research 39 (2001) 421430Anterior
cingulate activity during pain-avoidance and
reward tasksin monkeysTetsuo Koyama, Keichiro
Kato, Yusuke Zn Tanaka, Akichika Mikami
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• One and the same behavioral act in different
  emotional contexts (approach versus withdrawal)
  is the same only outwardly.
• Different sets of systems and specialized neurons
  subserve its realization in compared emotional
  contexts.

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Emotional feeling ratings

• ADJECTIVES
• VISION SMELL

high middle low
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Consciousness as a "Report" to Society

• Along with 1) the control of subject's activity,
  2) the communicational role of Consciousness is
  stressed The main significance of Consciousness
  is to provide the high-level interactions with
  other conscious being.
• Consciousness is essential for joint activity,
  for the collective achievement of results.
• Consciousness, as an evaluation of individual's
  own behavior in terms of culture, may be
  considered to be a "report" to society which is
  necessarily interested in the results of
  individual's behavior.
• The results of behavioral acts could be
  transformed into subresults in the process of
  automatization of behavior. It may be assumed
  that such transformation was due to the "loss of
  interest" of a society in the given result - it
  may be not controlled any more since it is
  inevitably connected with the achievement of the
  final result which is "socially evaluated".

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Cognition in humans is a collective product

• The truth is that the neuropsychological study of
  the component structure of the human brain has
  not turned up any truly novel structures, in the
  form of lobes, nuclei or ganglia that do not have
  an equivalent homologue in apes. There do not
  appear to be any new transmitter systems,
  neurotubular networks, or even dendritic
  structures that are completely unique to our
  species. Admittedly, the human brain is huge,
  its degree of enlargement is unprecedented but
  the basic architecture of the primate brain has
  not been changed by this expansion.
• Merlin Donald Cognitive evolution and the
  definition of human nature. A lecture delivered
  at the University of Arkansas for Medical
  Sciences, Little Rock, Arkansas

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HEALTHY
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The Regional Cerebral Blood Flow in Man During
Orgasm

• The functional anatomy of human emotional
  responses has remained poorly understood. We
  studied the regional cerebral blood flow with
  semi-quantitative 99mTc-HMPAO single photon
  emission computed tomography in eight healthy ...
  males during orgasm. The results showed decrease
  of cerebral blood flow during orgasm in all other
  cortical areas except in right prefrontal cortex,
  where the cerebral blood flow increased
  significantly J. Tiihonen et al. Neurosci. Let.
  1994, 170, p. 241