12/10/2010 by admin.

“And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.” - T S Eliot

There is a bit of this sentiment in embodied cognition theory. We can see this in the way our language is riddled with heart metaphors implying that the heart is the seat of some emotions. The idioms show that once it was natural to include more than the brain in our feeling/knowing/aware selves. “He has a broken heart”; “my heart is not in it”; “she is all heart”; “they are hard hearted”, “my heart tells me to do it”. These saying hark back to a time when we did not separate ourselves at the neck, but thought of ourselves as an indivisible whole.

One way to look at the connection of the brain with the rest of us, is to notice, that our conscious awarenesses know our emotional state through its effects on our bodies. We are conscious of our excitement because our heart rate rises. We are conscious of our displeasure because we feel our brow frown. We are conscious of our fear by our breathing becoming weak. The easiest route to consciousness is through the senses and that includes our sensing our own bodies.

Another way to view the connection is to look at where our conscious thoughts come from. We can think of everything having a predecessor. We start with what can be felt by a newborn and assume that growing up provides layer upon layers of elaboration of the things a baby can know. We use nested metaphors and analogies. So the feeling of social comfort can be tapped by feelings or warmth or closeness. Physical pain and social rejection are related.

Embodied cognition research has found many connections. Recently there was an article in the Scientific American by Adam Waytz that elaborated on the heart-brain connection. (here)

Psychology’s recognition of the body’s influence on the mind coincides with a recent focus on the role of the heart in our social psychology. It turns out that the heart is not only critical for survival, but also for how people related to one another. In particular, heart rate variability (HRV), variation in the heart’s beat-to-beat interval, plays a key role in social behaviors ranging from decision-making, regulating one’s emotions, coping with stress, and even academic engagement. Decreased HRV appears to be related to depression and autism and may be linked to thinking about information deliberately. Increased HRV, on the other hand, is associated with greater social skills such as recognizing other people’s emotions and helps people cope with socially stressful situations, such as thinking about giving a public speech or being evaluated by someone of another race. This diverse array of findings reflects a burgeoning interest across clinical psychology, neuroscience, social psychology, and developmental psychology in studying the role of the heart in social life.

We are returning to ways of knowing ourselves that are very old, but, hopefully, we are returning with more understanding.

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13/08/2010 by admin.

In the spring, Neurophilosophy had a post on the research of D. Havas into the effects of botox on emotion. (here).

Do you smile because you’re happy, or are you happy because you are smiling? Darwin believed that facial expressions are indeed important for experiencing emotions…Botox, which is used by millions of people every year to reduce wrinkles and frown lines on the forehead, works by paralyzing the muscles involved in producing facial expressions…it impairs the ability to process the emotional content of language, and may diminish the quality of emotional experiences…

Havas recruited 40 women for the new study, all of whom were seeking first-time botox injections as a cosmetic treatment for frown lines on the forehead. These participants were asked to read sentences describing happy, sad or emotionally neutral situations. Immediately afterwards, they were taken to the physician, who gave them a single injection of botox into the corrugator supercilii, or “frown” muscle. (Botox acts by inhibiting the release of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine from motor neurons, leading to temporary muscle paralysis 24-48 hours later. Typically, the procedure is repeated after 3-4 months; with time, the muscles may atrophy, or waste away, through disuse.) Two weeks after the injection, the participants returned to lab to read another set of similar sentences.

The reseachers found that botox slowed the reading of the sentences containing sad emotional content, which, as the earlier work showed, would normally cause the frown muscle to contract. The reading time for the happy and neutral sentence was the same in both sessions. The researchers assume that the increase in reading time means that paralysis of the frown muscles hindered the participants’ understanding of the emotional content of the sad sentences. They also argue that their findings support the hypothesis that feedback from the muscles involved in producing facial expressions is critical in regulating emotional experiences.

…news stories completely overlook the more profound implication of the results - that by paralyzing the muscles involved in producing facial expressions, botox may actually diminish the experience of emotion in those who use it.

This is another piece of evidence that consciousness is primarily concerned by perception. In this case it is registering an emotional state primarily from the perception of movement of facial muscles.

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26/07/2010 by admin.

There is a trick that sometimes helps to make a decision. When we have thought about two options for a long time and mulled over many different aspects of each and have no decision. When we have even taken a pencil and paper and organized the pros and cons and get still no decision. The options are perfectly balanced. Then we flip a coin to decide. In the instant that the result of the coin toss is known, there is a feeling of contentment and relief or there is a feeling of disappointment and dissatisfaction. We really did have a preference even if we were not aware of it. So we follow our feeling rather than the result of the coin toss. Of course, we only do this because we have established that the options are almost equal in attractiveness.

I was reminded of the way this feeling is so immediate and strong, yet fleeting – very different to a slowly growing feeling – when I read a blog by Neurosceptic (here).

Schopenhauer’s trick relies on the fact that emotion is faster than thought. A letter takes you by surprise: even if you’re expecting to hear from someone, you don’t know exactly when it will arrive. It arrives: in that first second your emotions have a chance to show through, before your thoughts have got into gear. It works with emails and phone calls as well, of course, but not with any encounter which is planned out in advance.

What is happening here? Why would an unsuspected emotional reaction be triggered so fast and strong? The feeling had never risen to consciousness before and so it probably had not risen to a bodily emotion before either. Some part of the situation had been dealt with but had never needed the use of working memory and so was hidden from awareness. Maybe – on the other hand –

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11/07/2010 by admin.

FrontalCortex has a great posting on the magic of Wii games. (here) Lehrer connects the player’s movement with the emotional feeling of the game as an illustration of the embodied mind.

To understand how the Wii turns stupid arcade games into a passionate experience, we have to revisit an old theory of emotion, first proposed by William James. In his 1884 article “What is an emotion?” James argued that all of our mental feelings actually begin in the body. Although our emotions feel ephemeral, they are rooted in the movements of our muscles and the palpitations of our flesh. .. For most of the 20th century, James’ theory of bodily emotions was ignored. It just seemed too implausible. But in the early 1980s, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio realized that James was mostly right: Many of our emotions are preceded by changes in our physical body. Damasio came to this conclusion after studying neurological patients who, after suffering damage in their orbitoprefrontal cortex or somatosensory cortex, were unable to experience any emotion at all. Why not? The tight connection between the mind and body had been broken. Even though these patients could still feel their flesh-they weren’t paraplegic-they could no longer use their body to generate feelings. And if you can’t produce the bodily symptoms of an emotion-the swelling tear ducts of sadness, or the elevated heart rate of fear-then you can’t feel the emotion. .. As Damasio puts it, “the essence of feeling an emotion is the experience of such [bodily] changes in juxtaposition to the mental images that initiated the cycle.” The resulting state of consciousness-an emulsion of thought and flesh, body, and mind-is our feeling of fear.

The content of consciousness is largely, perhaps almost totally, derived from the process of perception. It may be that emotions must be sensed in order to be felt consciously.

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15/05/2010 by admin.

Simoleon Sense has a post with a link to an interesting paper (here), Power Posing: Brief Nonverbal Displays Affect Neuroendocrine Levels and Risk Tolerance , by D. Carney.

In research on embodied cognition, some evidence suggests bodily movements, such as facial displays, can affect emotional states. For example, unobtrusive contraction of the “smile muscle” (i.e., the zygomaticus major) increases enjoyment (Strack, Martin, Stepper, 1988); the head tilting upwards induces pride (Stepper & Strack, 1993); and hunched (vs. upright) physical postures elicit more depressed feelings (Riskind & Gotay, 1982). Approach-oriented behaviors, such as touching, pulling, or nodding “yes,” increase preference for objects, people, and persuasive messages (e.g., Briñol & Petty, 2003; Chen & Bargh, 1999; Wegner, Lane, & Dimitri, 1994); and fist clenching increases men’s self-ratings on power-related traits (Schubert & Koole, 2009). However, no research has tested whether expansive versus constrictive power poses cause mental, physiological, and behavioral change in a manner consistent with the effects of power. Specifically, we hypothesized that high- versus low-power poses would cause individuals to experience: (1) elevated testosterone, (2) decreased cortisol, (3) increased feelings of power, and (4) higher risk-tolerance. Such findings would suggest that embodiment goes beyond cognition and emotion and could have immediate and actionable impacts on behavior. ..

Results show that posing in high-power (versus low-power) displays causes physiological, psychological, and behavioral changes consistent with the literature on the effects of power on power-holders – elevation of the dominance hormone testosterone, reduction of the stress hormone cortisol, and increases in behaviorally demonstrated risk-tolerance and feelings of power.

These findings advance our understanding of embodied cognition in two important ways. First, they suggest that the effects of embodiment extend beyond emotion and cognition, to physiology and subsequent behavioral choice. For example, as described above, nodding one’s head “yes” leads to more persuasion, and smiling increases humor responses; we suggest that these simple behaviors, a head-nod or a smile, might also cause physiological changes that activate an entire trajectory of psychological, physiological, and behavioral shifts—essentially altering the course of that person’s day. Second, these results suggest that any psychological construct, such as power, with a signature pattern of nonverbal correlates may be embodied.

The idea that we have, first, a conscious feeling of power, then take a powerful pose is not shown in experiment. Instead we have, first, the unconscious signal to take a powerful pose, then the conscious feeling of power. Embodiment appears to be attitude-bodily response-conscious feeling, in that order.

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09/05/2010 by admin.

Genevieve Wanucha wrote a very interesting article in Seed magazine, “Emotion’s Alchemy”. (here) Following on from the last post, more from this article.

…Damasio’s team found that people reported feeling emotional only after the eruption of a physical emotion. “It’s very important for you to think of emotion as an action, so crying is a component of emotion, never as a part of feeling. Feeling is a perception of the action we have,” he told me….

In that same study, Damasio found that the body-sensing region of the brain, the somatosensory cortex, came online as the feelings arose. Later, in 2006, he reported that for each basic emotion (e.g., happiness, sadness, anger, and fear) there is a distinct cardio-respiratory pattern. Linking these data sets together, in a technology-age tweaking of the James-Lange theory, Damasio suggests that feelings arise from “maps” continually forming in brain regions such as the somatosensory cortex. The brain doesn’t have simple “on” and “off “emotional switches. It is always in flux. Feelings are more than the brain’s perception of emotion; they are a constant process of mapping shifting body states.

What appears to be happening is that consciousness registers a perception of emotional states as a fringe feeling. Consciousness does not contain emotion – it contains a model of emotion existing in the body using the form of a feeling.

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12/04/2010 by admin.

The Scientific American site had an article by M. Shermer on sensed presence effects. (here) He puts forward a list of possible causes:

Whatever the immediate cause of the sensed-presence effect, the deeper cause is to be found in the brain. I suggest four explanations: 1) The hallucination may be an extension of the normal sensed presence we experience of real people around us, perhaps triggered by isolation. 2) During oxygen deprivation, sleep deprivation or exhaustion, the rational cortical control over emotions shuts down, as in the fight-or-flight response, enabling inner voices and imaginary companions to arise. 3) The body schema, or our physical sense of self—believed to be located primarily in the temporal lobe of the left hemisphere—is the image of the body that the brain has constructed. If for any reason your brain is tricked into thinking that there is another you, it constructs a plausible explanation that this other you is actually another person—a sensed presence—nearby. 4) The mind schema, or our psychological sense of self, coordinates the many independent neural networks that simultaneously work away at problems in daily living so that we feel like a single mind.

Neuroscientist Michael S. Gazzaniga of the University of California, Santa Barbara, calls this the left-hemisphere interpreter—the brain’s storyteller that pulls together countless inputs into a meaningful narrative story. In an experiment with a “split-brain” patient (whose brain hemispheres were surgically disconnected), Gazzaniga presented the word “walk” only to the right hemisphere. The patient got up and began walking. When he was asked why, his left-hemisphere interpreter made up a story to explain this behavior: “I wanted to go get a Coke.”

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07/11/2009 by admin.

A little while ago Jonah Lehrer (here) posted a blog on the work of A. Damasio and A. Bechara.

Why would being able to count your heartbeats lead to better performance at a card game? The answer tells us something interesting about the “body loop,” and the importance of eavesdropping on those subtle emotions reverberating through our flesh. As William James hypothesized back in 1882, every emotion begins as a series of physiological changes in the body; our metaphysical feelings have a very carnal source. “What kind of an emotion of fear,” James wondered, “would be left [after seeing a bear in the woods] if the feeling of quickened heart beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of goose bumps nor of visceral stirrings, were present?” James’ answer was simple: without the body there would be no fear. We need the body in order to feel.

Damasio believes that emotion has a central role in rational thought. Feelings are indispensable.

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23/09/2009 by admin.

BrainBlogger has an posting by M. Meyer discussing research by the N. Eisenberger group on the connection between feeling physically hurt and socially hurt. (here)

…most languages rely on words that represent pain — hurt feelings, heartache, broken hearts — to communicate feelings of social distress. Recent findings in neuroscience suggest that sayings such as these may reflect more than poetic metaphor, and instead indicate an overlap in neural systems used to represent physical and social pain in humans.

… But how sweeping is it to say that social and physical pain share the same neuroanatomy? It is important to stress that the networks are not entirely overlapping. Physical pain researchers have already identified what they call, “the pain matrix,” or, the neuroanatomy that underpins the experience of physical pain. In addition to the dACC (dorsal anterior cingulate cortex), this matrix includes the thalamus, insula, the cerebellum, frontal cortex and primary and secondary somatosensory cortices. Nevertheless, pain researchers suggest that there are two physiological aspects of pain — the actual somatosensory experience and the perceived unpleasantness of that experience. Importantly, a great deal of research has identified the dACC to play a role in the felt unpleasantness of physical pain…Why might the human brain rely on one region, the dACC, to compute the felt unpleasantness associated with both physical injury and social distress? One explanation relies on the observation that humans, and other mammals, rely on social bonds for survival. The unpleasantness associated with physical injury acts like an alarm notifying the animal of ensuing threat to survival. Through the course of evolution, the same alarm system may have been hijacked to also notify the mammal of threat to their social bond, and hence survival.

This is another example of the way our experiences are ‘embodied’ in the very architecture of our brain.

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24/08/2009 by admin.

I have just read an article on being lost (here) and I have to say that the people described were ‘not from Saskatchewan’. There are advantages and disadvantages to having been a prairie girl.

When we were first in Kenya, my husband used to look at a map, decide where he was going, and go out the door of the hotel and within a city block he was hopelessly lost. We couldn’t believe what had happened to him. The mystery was solved when we realized he navigated by the sun and had not corrected for being somewhere where the sun can be in the north half of the sky. I, being a prairie girl, did not get lost. I could go on with story after story (I won’t) but the weird ways in which other people navigate.

Of course, I always know which way is north. If I lose this knowledge of my bearing, I suffer from a deeply lost feeling, a type of panic. This is an abstract panic. I can know where I am well enough to manage to get where I am going, or can have a map, or can be with someone who knows where they are. I am not afraid in that sense. What causes the panic is a loss of contact with my mental map of the universe.

Well maybe one more story: my husband was in a fairly large store in Saskatchewan, in the basement. There was a sign that said, ‘Hardware has been moved to the west wall.’ He was amazed. After walking round on the ground floor, taking one of several escalators down to the basement, and walking around there, he was expected to find the west wall in a windowless basement. He was not amused when I suggested that he could have faced north and then turned to his left and walked in that direction.

The article reviews a number of ways that people find their way or get lost, whichever. I am interested in how navigation and the feeling of being lost registers in consciousness.

Every so often, Sharon Roseman rounds a bend in her suburban Colorado neighbourhood and drives into a new world. It’s a lot like the world she knows - same houses, same street names - but with one critical, maddening difference: everything in it has shifted 90 degrees. Familiar stores at well-known intersections are not where she feels they should be, and the Rocky mountains have migrated from the north to the east.

Roseman’s world has been turning like this since she was 5 years old, and the only sure-fire way to set things right is to close her eyes and spin until everything “clicks” back into place, a remedy she jokingly calls her “Wonder Woman cure”. Despite countless visits to a doctor, prescriptions and brain scans over more than 50 years, nobody has offered a diagnosis. Nobody, Roseman suspects, really believed her. Until now.

Giuseppe Iaria of the University of Calgary, Alberta, and Jason Barton at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, both in Canada, may have finally put a name to Roseman’s condition. They call it developmental topographical disorientation. While people with the disorder have no obvious brain injury or other cognitive problem, they are chronically unable to orient themselves, even in places they know well. The pair have found 400 or so people who may have the disorder, some of whom are so prone to getting lost they fear leaving the house alone.

Well just maybe one more story - When my Grandmother and her children came to Saskatchewan to join Grandfather, the children were mixed up in their directions. So Grandfather’s brother took them out in a horse and sled. He covered them with a blanket. He went round in circles and figure eights and zig-zags on the featureless prairie snow. He would stop the horse (facing north) and ask, ‘is anyone sure they are facing north?’. If anyone was, that child and only them could come out from under the blanket. This was done several times until all the children had emerged and had the correct orientation. And I believe they had it more or less for the rest of their lives.

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