Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain

Likewise, feeling sad is not just about a sickness in the body or about a lack of energy to continue. It is often about an inefficient mode of thought stalling around a limited number of ideas of loss. Figure 3.1: The continuation of the diagram in figure 2.5, now leading all the way to feelings of fear. The transmission of signals from the body to the brain (the outer arrow moving from box E at bottom left to box F in upper right) can be influenced by the triggering and execution sites (arrows from box 1 marked modification of signal transmission). The triggering and execution sites also influence the process by creating changes in cognitive mode and related recall (box 2), and by making direct changes in somatic maps (box 3) that constitute the proximate neural substrate for feelings. Note that both the appraisal/evaluation stage and the final feelings stage occur at the cerebral level, within sensory association and higher-order cerebral cortices. Feelings Are Interactive Perceptions Feelings are perceptions and, in some ways, they are comparable to other perceptions. For example, actual visual perceptions correspond to external objects whose physical characteristics impinge on our retinas and temporarily modify the patterns of sensory maps in the visual system. Feelings also have an object at the origin of the process and the physical characteristics of the object also prompt a chain of signals that transit through maps of the object inside the brain. Just as in the case of visual perception, there is a part of the phenomenon that is due to the object, and a part that is due to the internal construction the brain makes of it. But something that is different—and the difference is not trivial—is that, in the case of feelings, the objects and events at the origin are well inside the body rather than outside of it. Feelings may be just as mental as any other perception, but the objects being mapped are parts and states of the living organism in which feelings arise. This important difference begets two others. First, in addition to being linked to an object at the origin—the body—feelings also are linked to the emotionally competent object that initiated the emotion-feeling cycle. In a curious way the emotionally competent object is responsible for establishing the object at the origin of a feeling. Thus when we refer to the “object” of an emotion or of a feeling we must qualify the reference and make clear which object we mean. The sight of a spectacular seascape is an emotionally competent object. The body state that results from beholding that seascape x is the actual object at the origin x, which is then perceived in the feeling state. Second, and no less importantly, the brain has a direct means to respond to the object as feelings unfold because the object at the origin is inside the body, rather than external to it. The brain can act directly on the very object it is perceiving.

Likewise, feeling sad is not just about a sickness in the body or about a lack of energy to continue.