Way back in 1989, one day, I knew this was Intuition.
Abraham Thomas

KNOW YOURSELF PODCAST Listen each week, to one podcast. Based on practical self improvement principles. From the insight of an engineer, back in 1989, about the data processing structure of the human mind, recognizing, filtering, storing patterns, without stopping.  Patterns of guilt, shame, fear.  How to silence painful subconscious patterns and become self aware.

What Causes Emotions?

For centuries, science has asked "What causes emotions?" The answer is revealed, when you view your mind as a pattern recognition network. Special organs within your limbic system recognize the patterns of events in your life and respond. Their signals trigger emotions, which instantly decide your attitudes and modify your behavior. Aroused emotions trigger restlessness, excitation, and agitation, preparing you for action.

Anger and fear are such emotions. Anger is blind to consequences and lashes out. Fear ignores successes and withdraws from confrontation. Despair envelops you in gloom, switching off pleasant avenues of thought. It is possible to still such negative emotions and be ruled by your common sense. Freed from fear, anger and despair, you can become calm and savor the positive emotions like joy and laughter. The Buddhists believe this state of mind to be one of the highest levels of consciousness.

• Emotions are pattern recognition signals from your reptilian and mammalian brains.
• They take control of your motor systems and modify your behaviors.
• Emotions dominate your behavior, but are not your visceral or facial responses.
• Emotion signals originate from the limbic system and provide a multitude of competing controls added from early history.
• Emotion signals trigger bodily responses as well as feelings and sensations, which make you experience cold fear or warm love.
• Emotions trigger sequences of motor responses, which act with focused strategies for survival.
• At any point in time, a single family of emotions take control and act ahead of your awareness. A massive inherited wisdom guides these actions.
• While emotions have a blinkered access to memories, your PFR sees the whole and is neutral.
• The nobler emotions are nature's greatest inventions. They motivate the system to achieve excellence.

Can An Algorithm Be Controlling The Mind?
I am not a physician, but an engineer. Way back in 1989, I catalogued how the ELIMINATION approach of an AI Expert System could reveal a way by which the nervous system could store and retrieve astronomically large memories.  That insight is central to the six unique new premises presented in this website. 

These new premises could explain an enigma.  A physician is aware of thousands of diseases and their related symptoms.  How does he note a symptom and focus on a single disease in less than half a second?  How could he identify Disease X out of 8000 diseases with just a glance?  

First, the total born and learned knowledge available to the doctor could not exist anywhere other than as the stored/retrieved data within the 100 billion neurons in his brain.  The perceptions, sensations, feelings and physical activities of the doctor could only be enabled by the electrical impulses flowing through the axons of those neurons.  The data enabling that process could be stored as digital combinations.

Second, combinatorial decisions of neurons cannot be made by any entity other than the axon hillock, which decides the axonal output of each neuron.  The hillock receives hundreds of inputs from other neurons.  Each hillock makes the pivotal neuronal decision about received inputs within 5 milliseconds.  Axon hillocks could be storing digital combinations.  It could be adding each new incoming digital combination to its memory store.  The hillock could fire impulses, if it matched a stored combination. If not, it could inhibit further impulses.  Using stored digital data to make decisions about incoming messages could make the axon hillocks intelligent.

Third, combinations are reported to enable a powerful coding mode for axon hillocks.  Olfactory combinatorial data is known (Nobel Prize 2004) to store memories for millions of smells.  Each one of 100 billion axon hillocks have around a 1000 links  to other neurons.  The hillocks can mathematically store more combinations than there are stars in the sky. Each new digital combination could be adding a new relationship link.  In this infinite store, specific axon hillocks could be storing all the symptom = disease (S=D) links known to the doctor as digital combinations.

Fourth, instant communication is possible in the nervous system.  Within five steps, information in one hillock can reach all other relevant neurons.  Just 20 Ms for global awareness.  Within the instant the doctor observes a symptom, feedback and feed forward links could inform every S=D link of the presence of the symptom. Only the S=D link of Disease X could be recalling the combination and recognizing the symptom.

Fifth, on not recognizing the symptom, all other S=D hillocks could be instantly inhibiting their impulses. The S=D links of Disease X could be continuing to fire. Those firing S=D link would be recalling past complaints, treatments and signs of Disease X, confirming the diagnosis.  This could be enabling axon hillocks to identify Disease X out of 8000 in milliseconds.  Eliminating improbable (unrecognized) prospects to arrive at a possible (recognized in the past) solution powers the powerful inductive logic of the mind!

Worldwide interest in this website is acknowledging its rationale. Not metaphysical theories, but processing of digital memories in axon hillocks could be explaining innumerable mysteries of the mind.  Over three decades, this website has been assembling more and more evidence of the manipulation of emotional and physical behaviors by narrowly focused digital pattern recognition.  It has also been receiving over 2 million page views from over 150 countries.

What Causes Emotions?
Do Emotions Have Control Over Your Behavior?
If, suddenly, you need to walk on a plank a hundred feet above ground, your fear will kick in. That emotion will instantly suppress even your elementary abilities. Fear will stiffen you into immobility. Even slight movements will appear to be life threatening. Instead of walking, you will desperately want to lie down and grip the plank.

Within the blink of an eye, you will have lost your normal capacity to walk a few steps on a plank. Mysteriously, a single emotion will have modified your entire behavior. Every expression on your face reflects a specific family of emotions. Even blind and deaf children show similar facial expressions. Human behaviors and facial expressions are mirrored in the gentle caress of love, or the sharp scowl of anger.

What Causes Emotions? -
Are Emotions Just Visceral Responses?
Initially, scientists discarded emotions as being irrelevant to the rational modern mind, a throwback from primitive times. It was Charles Darwin, who first suggested that emotions have a real world existence, visibly expressed in the behavior of humans and lower animals. He suggested that the existence of an emotion could be derived from an angry face, or even a bad feeling in the stomach. In those days, science viewed emotions as essentially bodily and visceral responses.

What Causes Emotions?
What Happens When The Viscera Is Surgically Removed?
W.B. Canon disproved the idea that emotions were visceral responses. He showed that emotions did not follow artificial stimulation of visceral responses. Emotional behavior was still present when the viscera was surgically or accidentally isolated from the central nervous system. So, emotions existed, but they were not the churning in your gut, or the knot in your stomach.

What Causes Emotions?
Does The Stimulation Of Some Neurons Trigger Emotions?
Excitation of certain parts of the temporal lobe produce intense fear in patients. When other neurons are stimulated, they feel dread. Excitation of other nuclei cause feelings of isolation, loneliness or sometimes of disgust. Electrical stimulation of the septal areas produced a feeling of pleasure for rats. The animals would self stimulate those regions, till they were exhausted, preferring the effect of stimulation to normally pleasurable activities such as consuming food. Emotions originate as distinctive patterns of nerve impulses, which also trigger neurochemical events.

What Causes Emotions?
What Were The Early Beginnings Of The Nervous System?
The Hydra was a primitive branched tubular animal. A net of neurons between its outside and its internal digestive cavity responded to any stimulus applied to any part of its body. That process enabled the animal to vary its length, and use its tentacles to push food particles into its mouth. Strong contractions expelled indigestible material from the same orifice. The stimulus, triggered by the recognition of touch, enabled those animals to approach, accept or reject food and escape. Over millions of years, nerve cells learned to recognize many more patterns, in addition to touch, to achieve more sophisticated survival goals.

What Causes Emotions?
Do Amygdala Signals Predict Possibility Of Pain?
The early reptilian “nosebrains,” decided to avoid, or consume food, by analyzing smells. Fear was another early control system, triggered by the amygdala, an almond sized organ in the limbic system. It stores memories of unpleasant experiences and triggers fear, when it detects the possibility of a repetition of such experiences. Experiments show that just an awareness of the possibility of a painful electric shock activates nerve impulses from the amygdala for rats.

What Causes Emotions?
How Does The Body Respond To Amygdala Signals?
Fear has a huge variety of nuances - alarm, scare, worry, concern, misgiving, qualm, disquiet, uneasy, wary, nervous, edgy, jittery, apprehensive, anxious, trepidation, fright, dread, anguish, panic, terror, horror, consternation, distress, unnerved, distraught, threatened, defensive. Nature has added more emotions to fear, including sadness, disgust, contempt, curiosity, surprise, love, pleasure, embarrassment, guilt, and shame. The fear impulses from the amygdala increase adrenaline, produce shallow breathing, reduce blood pressure, increase heartbeat and inject acids into the stomach.

What Causes Emotions? 
Are Some Emotions Accompanied By Bodily Sensations?
Your body has systems, which recognize a range of feelings, including sharp pain, burning pain, cool or warm temperature, itching, muscle contraction, muscle burn because of lactic acid, joint movements, soft touch, mechanical stress, tickling, flushing, hunger and thirst. These bodily sensations trigger impulses to the insula in the limbic system. This organ is also activated by social emotions - love and hate, lust and disgust. Thus, you experience a variety of feelings along with your emotions. Our literature describes those emotion/feeling combinations as cold calculation, hot temper, or warm love.

What Causes Emotions?
Are Drives Strategic Emotional Signnals?
Competing emotions are continually generated beneath your awareness. Each emotion initiates within your subconscious mind a drive, with a remembered strategy - an inherited or acquired way of coping with problems in life. Anger generates a drive, which navigates aggressively. Fear triggers a defensive strategy. Laughter achieves relaxation of the stresses of life. Jealousy makes the system attack competitors. Love makes it caring and protective. Each emotion focuses the system to take actions, which follow its strategy, These emotions compete with each other for the control of your mind.

What Causes Emotions?
Does A Single Family of Emotions Control Behavior?
Your moods shift because an intuitive decision making process, within your limbic system swiftly and continually switches control from one group of emotions to another. At any point in time, a single family of emotions rules, actively inhibiting conflicting objectives. Love subdues the onset of anger. These emotions micromanage the fluidity of your muscle movements, your facial expressions and the choice and tone of your words. They exercise subtle and relentless controls over the intensity and nuance of your every gesture and spoken word. The ruling emotion also controls the access of the whole system to its memories.

What Causes Emotions?
Does Conscious Awareness Follow An Emotional Outburst?
The famous experiments of Benjamin Libet showed that your awareness follows a system decision. He studied subjects who voluntarily pressed a button, while noting the position of a dot on a computer screen, which shifted its position every 43 milliseconds. The exact moment of conscious awareness was the noted moment of depressing the button. Each time, Libet had also timed the beginning of motor neuron activity in the brains of his subjects. Libet discovered that awareness occurred 350 milliseconds AFTER the beginning of motor activity. The system always acts and then informs you. When angry, you will act in anger, before you become aware of your action.

What Causes Emotions?
How Large Is The Wisdom Of Your Mind?
The DNA codes in your body contain codes, which instruct your living cells to construct your fingernail, or your eyelash. Scientists reported that if those codes were packed into 500 page books, those books will fill the 450 kilometer long Grand Canyon fifty times over! Over millions of years of evolution and a lifetime of experiences, your system has acquired an immense cache of knowledge. The system also provides such massive stores of inherited wisdom to the nerve cells, which manage your emotions.

What Causes Emotions?
Do Emotions Record And Recall Your Memories?
Emotional impulses trigger myriad finely controlled patterns of behavior. They access from memories the exact knowledge needed for survival. An animal lurking in the bush carries the memories of its encounters over a lifetime. If it feels uneasy, the system extracts memories of the sensory indications of danger. If it is fearful, it gathers memories of escape routes from the battle zone. Its anger extracts memories of muscular responses to battle. By controlling system access to a focused set of memories, emotions restrict your vision and control your response. When you are angry, you will feel convinced that you have every right to be angry. Fully justifying itself, the system blinds you to any other viewpoint.

What Causes Emotions?
Are There Higher Levels of Consciousness In Your Mind?
The mammalian organs in the limbic system generate partisan emotions. They carry you into troubling levels of consciousness with blinkered views. Which one of these levels represents the real you?

A fundamentally rational intelligence, your human heritage, occupies your prefrontal regions  (PFR). They generate the viewpoints of a wise, common sense viewpoint, untrammelled by emotions.

The Buddhists have experienced this perspective. “You will not see something is good or bad, whether it is a beautiful picture or a very ugly picture, a sweet sound or an ugly sound. When you act like this, your mind will stay calm.”

What Causes Emotions?
Does The Nervous System Also Carry Noble Urges?
With the calm wisdom of PFR in charge, searing emotions cannot hijack your system. Free of troubling competition, you can benefit from special purpose circuits, which generate pleasure from a flawless line, the fragrance of a flower, or from harmony in music. When you are calm, nature adds to your delight by not inhibiting the innate surges of neural impulses to your pleasure regions, which enable you to cherish a work of art, or enjoy a lilting song.

What Causes Emotions?
Can You Practice The Positive Emotions?
The Buddhists added value to their lives by cultivating noble emotions. They practiced the experience of compassion for nature by imagining the feelings of a bird, or an animal. Great actors invoke a range of emotions on stage. If you glare at a person, your words will sound hostile. Try it. You can learn to cultivate positive emotions. Amazingly, if you look at an opponent with compassion, his faults will suddenly appear to be pathetic failings.

What Causes Emotions?
Which Emotion Is Nature's Masterpiece?
Nature has coded sophisticated emotional behaviors into your neural network. The incredibly specific behavioral outcome of each emotion is recorded in our culture and literature. Love transforms your behavior as it seeks to cherish and protect. Love is patient and kind. Love suppresses the emotions of anger, irritability, jealousy and rudeness. Your needs are subdued to give way to an awareness of the needs of your loved one. Love forgets and forgives past wrongs. Love persists in spite of problems, keeping faith in the loved one. Love does not gloat over injustice and is happy in the victory of truth. Nature's pattern recognition processes have crafted an incredibly high standard of behavior within the codes of a single emotion, to impel the best in mankind.

This page was last updated on 02-Jan-2014.

KNOW YOURSELF PODCAST Listen each week, to one podcast. Based on practical self improvement principles. From the insight of an engineer, back in 1989, about the data processing structure of the human mind, recognizing, filtering, storing patterns, without stopping.  Patterns of guilt, shame, fear.  How to silence painful subconscious patterns and become self aware.

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