Human evolution: the evolution of emotions (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, November 07, 2020, 19:01 (1477 days ago) @ David Turell

A study involving our brain to relate our emotions to the past:

https://aeon.co/essays/human-culture-and-cognition-evolved-through-the-emotions?utm_sou...

"The field of affective neuroscience isolates emotional brain systems (largely in regions of the brain that we share with other mammals) that undergird adaptive behaviours in vertebrates. With the help of neuroscientific and behavioural research, we are beginning to appreciate how the ancestral mammal brain is alive and well inside our higher neocortical systems.

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"Some historians and anthropologists argue that we learn our emotions from our cultural experience, and that they are thus constituted by very particular circumstances. If that’s the case, then our argument for the importance of emotional wellsprings in the evolution (and therefore the nature) of the human mind comes unmoored. So is the basic emotional structure of the mind a universal, biological fact?

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"Affective science posits a layered brain that is plastic enough to account for diversity, without having to throw out the biology of emotions. The reason why we classify a handful of behaviours, expressions and feelings as ‘anger’ is because an identifiable physiological pattern underlies them, and such patterns evolved in mammal brains to aid their survival. Brain scans reveal some diversity of neural pathways during anger or lust, for example, but not enough diversity to confound the density distributions of the data. The higher (or tertiary) level of language, culture and conscious deliberation does have an effect on how our emotions are manifested, but the range of possible emotional states and interpretations is fairly strict and limited.

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"Crucially, over the past three decades, affective neuroscientists have engaged specialised technology to diligently map distinct neural pathways for the most basic, primary emotions. Extensive research on the amygdala, for example, reveals that fear has a clear brain signature. And precise localised electrical stimulation of the brain reveals specific affective and behavioural responses in animals.

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"Rather than seeking linguistic confirmation that a creature is indeed experiencing an emotion, observation of its behaviour proves more revealing. The clear implication of tying the experience of emotions to the possession of concepts is that all animals and babies do not have emotions because they lack language. This seems remarkably inconsistent with evidence from animal studies, developmental psychology, as well as common sense.

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"For at least 200 million years, the emotional brain has been under construction. By comparison, the focus of the cognitive approach, the expansion of the ‘rational’ neocortex around 1.8 million years ago is a latecomer on the scene, and the development of our language-symbol system is younger still. As a suite of adaptive tools, the emotions have been at work substantially longer than rational cognition, so it makes little biological sense to think about the mind as an idealised rational cost-benefit computer, projected into deep time.

"A sufficient account of the evolution of mind must go deeper than our power of propositional thinking – our rarefied ability to manipulate linguistic representations. We will have to understand a much older capacity – the power to feel and respond appropriately. We need to think about consciousness itself as an archaeologist thinks about layers of sedimentary strata. At the lower layers, we have basic drives that prod us (and other animals) out into the environment for the exploitation of resources. Thirst, lust, fear and so on are triggers in evolutionarily earlier regions of the brain that stimulate vertebrates toward satisfaction and a return to homeostasis (physiological balance). At the lowest primary level, fear, for example, is radical. Under threat, the fearful animal voids its bowels, and a surge of activity in the amygdala and hypothalamus readies it for defence or escape.

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"It is probably most accurate to say that primary and secondary emotions have phenomenal consciousness (experiential feeling), but lack access consciousness (the ability to rationally access, manipulate and reflect upon emotions).

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"Humans would not be such masterful cooperators, especially in non-kin social groups, if they did not undergo some significant emotional domestication that sculpted our motivations and desires towards prosocial coexistence. As the primatologist Richard Wrangham argues in The Goodness Paradox (2019), compared with our primate cousins, humans domesticated themselves by significantly reducing their reactive aggression. Besides anger, we think that similar selective processes of cultural evolution sculpted other emotions such as lust and care over evolutionary time."

Comment: There is lots of truth here. Our enormous cortex is built upon an ancient layer of animal feelings in brains. On the ranch we can see animal emotions all the time.