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, RI sees the whole and is neutral.
The nobler emotions are nature's greatest inventions. They motivate the system to achieve excellence.

What Causes Emotions? - They Rule 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? - The Mystery
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? - Not Visceral Reactions
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? - Neural Signals 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? - They Have Primeval Origins
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? - Emotions Predict Danger
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? - The Amygdala Effect
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? - The Insula And Feeling Links
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? - Emotions Direct Strategic Drives
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? - A Single Family of Emotions Rules
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? - Act First, Inform Later
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? - Massive Inner Wisdom
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? - They Record And Recall 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? - Lower Levels of Consciousness
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. They generate the viewpoints of - the “Real I” (RI). RI has a wise, common sense viewpoint, untrammeled 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? - Noble Urges Too
With the calm freedom of RI 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? - Practice Of 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? - Nature's Masterpieces Too
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

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Once, Decades Ago, I Tripped Over The Divine

For me, the flash of insight into the sublime happened way back in 1989. The vision stunned me with the grandeur of its simplicity. The startling prospect emerged from, of all things, an algorithm! Its potential flickered into my view by accident, while transferring a Prolog AI disease recognition procedure to a Lotus spreadsheet.  I had inadvertently reversed the logic of the Expert System, instructing it to eliminate improbabilities, instead of selecting probabilities. Such algorithms are just repetitive procedures. Cold and logical lines of code. But, they yield dependable results. Algorithms are just mechanical tools. But, this algorithmic code was unique.

The capability of the algorithm was that it could sift a Google sized database of connected facts to instantly recognize patterns. This was 10 years before Google started building its vast data warehouses. But, I knew the mind identified complex patterns when you just opened your eyes!  For the next few months, glimpses of probable neural accomplishments through instant pattern recognition kept waking me up at 3 a.m. I kept adding to the list on paper. The dots just kept connecting. Decades later, more possible links keep opening up new horizons - say, the seat of consciousness or the persistence of working memory. This algorithm could distinguish between good and evil. It could make us weep in anguish or gasp in wonder.  Could it be the fabled divine gift to life?

It worked in the mind. Gray's Anatomy was an exhaustive source and a starting point for me. Its 1500 pages listed the functions of virtually every mental organ. The algorithm could link them all into a single mind that could suture an artery, while recalling a tennis match. Starting at the input level, it focused your senses. The light from the heavens. The songs of the birds. The touch of a loved one. The fragrance of a rose. The taste of chocolate. We were blessed with millions of receptors, which flashed this magnificent perception of the world to the sensory regions of our cortex. There were association regions there, which could use the algorithm on this data to identify a pencil, or a word. We could separate the idea of a gun from the idea of a war in the abundance of incoming sensory patterns.

Object and event recognition. Algorithmic pattern recognition could act at every stage of mental processing. Things were happening all around us. There was a limbic system, where the algorithm could identify between good and bad happenings. It generated emotions. This mammalian region could drive us to attack in anger, or flee in terror. It was the limbic system, which held us in thrall. It filled us with despair, or tortured us in grief. It made us question the very meaning of life. Life was so unfair. Why did we have to suffer so?

Sadly, we lacked the capacity to naturally see our emotions and feelings. The limbic system was invisible to us. It was the algorithm, which caused the motor system to transform those emotions and feelings into actions. Hunger made us raid the frig. We went to work every day to avoid the pain of guilt. Love reminded us to pick up children from school. Hatred built the death camps. In the end, urges from the limbic system drove us out of Eden.

As a precious compensation, algorithmic pattern recognition ascended to higher levels. Our prefrontal regions gifted us with science and logic. Those skills enabled us to understand the vast structures of the cosmos. We built leviathans, which could sail the oceans and fly the skies. We explored the heavens. Our powerful civilizations conquered the continents and explored the cosmos. Even more, the algorithm also pointed us to the divine, which defied logic and definition. We sensed the order and beauty, which, like the laws of nature, existed from the beginning of time.

Pattern recognition dealt with subtleties. Reason and logic could not create great symphonies, or works of art. Why do we stand in awe of the sunset? Or find joy in a lilting song, or in the laugh of a baby?  Nerve cells recognized such patterns without our awareness and fired to initiate the skin tingling thrill. Who, but the Designer, could possibly want to hard wire us to thrill to the astonishing splendor of the design?

Over three decades have passed since my first glimpse of the truth. Like an ancient city hidden by forest cover, the vast and invisible city of the mind has many avenues linking its great palaces and temples. I also realized that those divine pattern recognition paths led to still spaces, untrammelled by the ravages of emotions and feelings.... Life was worth living! Even the great sages of the past advised us to still passions to empower the sublime within us. The divine stillness lives at the core. You too can find your home there.

The information provided in this website is useful for the modification of normal behavioral patterns. Please do get professional help, before applying the advice for the treatment of any abnormal behaviors. Copyright ©2008 by Ebbi Thomas. All rights reserved. This material may be freely published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.