unifying motivation and emotion

[From Bruce Nevin (2017.05.22.12:53)]

David Goldstein (Sun, May 21, 2017 at 7:51 AM) –

  1. An experience is controlled when the experience is what a person wants it to be. Good feelings are associated with controlled experiences which are significant for a person. Bad feelings happen when controlled experiences which are significant for the person are not adequately controlled.

**Importance: This unifies the areas of motivation and emotion. **

I don’t think we can unify the areas of motivation and emotion until we model the relationship between the fast, emotionally categorical functions of the amygdala and the slower cortical functions.

We have heard about the larger amygdala of political conservatives. One of the studies is https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3092984/

There is a summary here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biology_and_political_orientation

The converse effect of a small or underdeveloped amygdala may be sociopathy, as suggested by this less formal article about clinical experience:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/when-your-child-is-a-psychopath/524502/

Daniel Goleman (Emotional intelligence) coined the term ‘amygdala hijack’ for a kind of cognitive jamming of the gears that we have all experienced at one time or another.

The general issue for PCT maybe can be expressed as how parallel ‘families’ of control functions (limbic and cortical) can come into conflict, and how such conflict is resolved.

···

/Bruce

[From Rick Marken (2017.05.25.1510)]

···

Bruce Nevin (2017.05.22.12:53)–

David Goldstein (Sun, May 21, 2017 at 7:51 AM) –

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DG: Importance: This unifies the areas of motivation and emotion.Â

BN: I don’t think we can unify the areas of motivation and emotion until we model the relationship between the fast, emotionally categorical functions of the amygdala and the slower cortical functions.

 RM: Too Late! The unification has already taken place. The control loop is a model of “motivation” and the physiological consequences of persistent error driving output is a model of the “feeling” component emotion (the imagination connection being the cognitive component).Â

BN: We have heard about the larger amygdala of political conservatives. One of the studies is https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3092984/

RM: This is flimsy stuff; the correlations are on the order of .2. And even of there were a perfect correlation between the size of the amygdala and political conservatism what would we now know about conservatism that we didn’t already know (which is, per John Kenneth Galbraith, that the modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness). Well, I guess we would know that we could reduce the incidence of conservatism to some extent if we could develop a pill that would shrink the amygdala;-)

BestÂ

Rick

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The converse effect of a small or underdeveloped amygdala may be sociopathy, as suggested by this less formal article about clinical experience:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/when-your-child-is-a-psychopath/524502/

Daniel Goleman (Emotional intelligence) coined the term ‘amygdala hijack’ for a kind of cognitive jamming of the gears that we have all experienced at one time or another.Â

The general issue for PCT maybe can be expressed as how parallel ‘families’ of control functions (limbic and cortical) can come into conflict, and how such conflict is resolved.

/Bruce

Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery