obyvatel
The Living Force
Dr Jaak Panksepp is the pioneer of affective neuroscience. Affective neuroscience takes an experimental neuroscience based approach to study feelings and emotions. It has been relatively well-known that one could electrically stimulate sub-cortical (or phylogenetically older) portions of the brain of animals to get emotional responses. Panksepp has isolated emotional circuits in the sub-cortical sections of mammalian brains to identify what he calls primary affective systems. He uses capital letters to denote these systems to indicate that they are primary and unconditioned. He has identified SEEKING, FEAR, ANGER, CARE, LUST, PANIC (separation distress) and PLAY as the primary affective systems.
These primary affective systems are the biophysical substrate on which emotional experience happens and do not depend on cognitive abilities which are governed by neo-cortical areas of the brain and are thoroughly conditioned by life experiences and language processes. The primary responses can be conditioned - like what Pavlov did with fear conditioning of dogs. With conditioning, one gets secondary and tertiary level processes which are studied extensively in scientific literature. Doing a survey of research conducted on emotions, one is confronted with a mind-boggling number of different theories - some based on philosophical speculations alone , while some are based on experimental evidence on conditioning - but they primarily study the mixed bag where cognitions are mixed up with emotions with little hope of extricating the two. This agrees very well with the 4th Way Work views of Gurdjieff and Mouravieff which states the problem of not having a pure emotion or pure thought. I think the work of Panksepp which goes very well with Porges' polyvagal theory (Porges endorses Panksepp's work) gives us some valuable insight into what constitutes our instinctive substratum. This also ties in to the foundation of System1 described in Kahnemann's "Thinking: Fast and Slow".
Here is a podcast for an interview with Dr Panksepp.
http://www.brainsciencepodcast.com/bsp/2010/1/13/affective-neuroscience-with-jaak-panksepp-bsp-65.html
He talks about the the grant-dominated scientific research process that pervades the field as well as interesting highlights of his findings. He mentions experimental evidence which challenges the mainstream view that "thoughts create feelings". Here is an excerpt where he is talking about the primary response patterns being independent of higher cognitive processes
[quote author=Dr Panksepp]
No one can get these types of responses by stimulating higher parts of the brain. And you can do radical surgery on some laboratory animals, and take away the whole top of the brain. You literally take away the whole neocortex. It’s not difficult surgery, because the animal in a laboratory doesn’t need the neocortex to live. That’s for reason and for intelligent responses to the world— complex memories—and a rat in a lab doesn’t need those. And, lo and behold, you cannot tell the difference.
Once I had an undergraduate laboratory class on animal behavior and the brain. I had 16 students, and I said, ‘The last experiment you are going to do is I’m going
to bring two animals into the lab; one of them is missing the whole neocortex— taken away at three days of life—and the other animal will have gotten sham
surgery. And the mother takes care of them, and they grow just like normal.’
‘Your job is to tell me who’s who. You have spent a semester studying animal behavior, and you make your choice in whatever way you wish.’ When the two hour lab was finished, 12 of the 16 students had selected the decorticate animal as being the normal one. That was a statistically significant error. Unbelievable! I did not expect that—I expected a coin toss.
When I debriefed the students and we discussed what they were basing their decision on, the bottom-line answer was that the decorticate animal was more
interesting. It was moving around, looking, poking its nose here and there. It was lively. Its emotional systems were disinhibited.
And that’s what they based their decision on—that an interesting animal must have its full brain. Well, the intact animal was sitting in a corner, kind of scared,
acting a little stupid. What this tells us is that the emotional system simply cannot be upstairs.
[/quote]
Dr Panksepp's work is stimulating psycho-therapeutic approaches. He writes
[quote author=Dr Panksepp in Healing Power of Emotions]
An understanding of how primary-process emotion can either enrich or derail human lives is essential for scientific progress of all types of psychotherapy, as well as a new generation of a new neuroscience foundation for psychiatry and psychotherapy.
.................
Currently, psychotherapeutically relevant cognitive issues remain more slippery than our understanding of basic emotions. We can easily reach moments of therapeutic clarity in the midst of clinical sessions only to rapidly have all that progress slip away when clients, on their own between sessions, regress to their old cognitive-affective habits. This is because each of the primary process emotions has enslaved large cognitive territories for its own self-serving purposes. The stranglehold that self-centered emotional systems can have on cogniitive processes can be overwhelmingly robust.
Reconsolidation of affective-cognitive memories needs to be a prime concern for therapy. ..It might also be possible to solidify therapeutic change if we learn to infuse therapeutic emotiona-cognitive change more directly from affectively rich body dynamics into the process of restructuring the mind.
[/quote]
The above dynamic is very familiar to those undertaking self Work along 4th Way lines. Here we use EE and journalling to approach the reconsolidation of such memories. Levines' work and other body oriented therapies also work on the same problem from a different focus area.
[quote author=Dr Panksepp in Healing Power of Emotions]
I would anticipate that clients will often experience enormous relief to be simply educated about their emotional primes and to recognize how they can become masters over these primes rather than being mastered by them. The mere act of learning about them as ancient evolutionary tools for living can take an enormous burden off troubled minds. A better understanding of our ancient emotional energies may allow individuals to better deal with the upsetting feelings of the brain and develop cognitive habits that help engender more positive feelings.
[/quote]
He talks about Affective Body-oriented Therapies (ABT) and identification of "emotional endo-phenotypes" to develop a sensitive, well-informed therapeutic approach for wholistic treatment of human maladies.
There is an affective neuroscience personality scale (ANPS) which is used to evaluate status of people on emotional primes (except LUST). I have not looked into it but overall, Panksepp's approach towards understanding emotions seems helpful.
These primary affective systems are the biophysical substrate on which emotional experience happens and do not depend on cognitive abilities which are governed by neo-cortical areas of the brain and are thoroughly conditioned by life experiences and language processes. The primary responses can be conditioned - like what Pavlov did with fear conditioning of dogs. With conditioning, one gets secondary and tertiary level processes which are studied extensively in scientific literature. Doing a survey of research conducted on emotions, one is confronted with a mind-boggling number of different theories - some based on philosophical speculations alone , while some are based on experimental evidence on conditioning - but they primarily study the mixed bag where cognitions are mixed up with emotions with little hope of extricating the two. This agrees very well with the 4th Way Work views of Gurdjieff and Mouravieff which states the problem of not having a pure emotion or pure thought. I think the work of Panksepp which goes very well with Porges' polyvagal theory (Porges endorses Panksepp's work) gives us some valuable insight into what constitutes our instinctive substratum. This also ties in to the foundation of System1 described in Kahnemann's "Thinking: Fast and Slow".
Here is a podcast for an interview with Dr Panksepp.
http://www.brainsciencepodcast.com/bsp/2010/1/13/affective-neuroscience-with-jaak-panksepp-bsp-65.html
He talks about the the grant-dominated scientific research process that pervades the field as well as interesting highlights of his findings. He mentions experimental evidence which challenges the mainstream view that "thoughts create feelings". Here is an excerpt where he is talking about the primary response patterns being independent of higher cognitive processes
[quote author=Dr Panksepp]
No one can get these types of responses by stimulating higher parts of the brain. And you can do radical surgery on some laboratory animals, and take away the whole top of the brain. You literally take away the whole neocortex. It’s not difficult surgery, because the animal in a laboratory doesn’t need the neocortex to live. That’s for reason and for intelligent responses to the world— complex memories—and a rat in a lab doesn’t need those. And, lo and behold, you cannot tell the difference.
Once I had an undergraduate laboratory class on animal behavior and the brain. I had 16 students, and I said, ‘The last experiment you are going to do is I’m going
to bring two animals into the lab; one of them is missing the whole neocortex— taken away at three days of life—and the other animal will have gotten sham
surgery. And the mother takes care of them, and they grow just like normal.’
‘Your job is to tell me who’s who. You have spent a semester studying animal behavior, and you make your choice in whatever way you wish.’ When the two hour lab was finished, 12 of the 16 students had selected the decorticate animal as being the normal one. That was a statistically significant error. Unbelievable! I did not expect that—I expected a coin toss.
When I debriefed the students and we discussed what they were basing their decision on, the bottom-line answer was that the decorticate animal was more
interesting. It was moving around, looking, poking its nose here and there. It was lively. Its emotional systems were disinhibited.
And that’s what they based their decision on—that an interesting animal must have its full brain. Well, the intact animal was sitting in a corner, kind of scared,
acting a little stupid. What this tells us is that the emotional system simply cannot be upstairs.
[/quote]
Dr Panksepp's work is stimulating psycho-therapeutic approaches. He writes
[quote author=Dr Panksepp in Healing Power of Emotions]
An understanding of how primary-process emotion can either enrich or derail human lives is essential for scientific progress of all types of psychotherapy, as well as a new generation of a new neuroscience foundation for psychiatry and psychotherapy.
.................
Currently, psychotherapeutically relevant cognitive issues remain more slippery than our understanding of basic emotions. We can easily reach moments of therapeutic clarity in the midst of clinical sessions only to rapidly have all that progress slip away when clients, on their own between sessions, regress to their old cognitive-affective habits. This is because each of the primary process emotions has enslaved large cognitive territories for its own self-serving purposes. The stranglehold that self-centered emotional systems can have on cogniitive processes can be overwhelmingly robust.
Reconsolidation of affective-cognitive memories needs to be a prime concern for therapy. ..It might also be possible to solidify therapeutic change if we learn to infuse therapeutic emotiona-cognitive change more directly from affectively rich body dynamics into the process of restructuring the mind.
[/quote]
The above dynamic is very familiar to those undertaking self Work along 4th Way lines. Here we use EE and journalling to approach the reconsolidation of such memories. Levines' work and other body oriented therapies also work on the same problem from a different focus area.
[quote author=Dr Panksepp in Healing Power of Emotions]
I would anticipate that clients will often experience enormous relief to be simply educated about their emotional primes and to recognize how they can become masters over these primes rather than being mastered by them. The mere act of learning about them as ancient evolutionary tools for living can take an enormous burden off troubled minds. A better understanding of our ancient emotional energies may allow individuals to better deal with the upsetting feelings of the brain and develop cognitive habits that help engender more positive feelings.
[/quote]
He talks about Affective Body-oriented Therapies (ABT) and identification of "emotional endo-phenotypes" to develop a sensitive, well-informed therapeutic approach for wholistic treatment of human maladies.
There is an affective neuroscience personality scale (ANPS) which is used to evaluate status of people on emotional primes (except LUST). I have not looked into it but overall, Panksepp's approach towards understanding emotions seems helpful.