Emotions are not innately
programmed into our brains, but, in fact, are cognitive states resulting from
the gathering of information, researchers revealed from New York University and
City University of New York. They argue that conscious experiences, regardless
of their content, arise from one system in the brain. The differences between
emotional and non-emotional states are the kinds of inputs that are processed
by a general cortical network of cognition, a network essential for conscious
experiences. As a result, the brain mechanisms that give rise to conscious
emotional feelings are not fundamentally different from those that give rise to
perceptual conscious experiences.
While emotions, or feelings, are
the most significant events in our lives, there has been relatively little
integration of theories of emotion and emerging theories of consciousness in
cognitive science. Existing work posits that emotions are innately programmed
in the brain’s subcortical circuits. As a result, emotions are often treated as
different from cognitive states of consciousness, such as those related to the
perception of external stimuli. In other words, emotions aren’t a response to
what our brain takes in from our observations, but, rather, are intrinsic to
our makeup. However, after taking into account existing scholarship on both
cognition and emotion, researchers conclude that emotions are “higher-order
states” embedded in cortical circuits.
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