Consciousness may start in the body's feelings, not in abstract thought
Pollan, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Lisa Feldman Barrett and Allan Schore all root conscious experience in bodily feeling and regulation rather than in cortical reasoning. That shifts how we think about emotion, learning and what other creatures might experience.
Where does consciousness begin, on the view Michael Pollan describes? Show answer
With feelings registered in the upper brainstem, such as hunger, warmth, cold and itch. The cortex gets involved only afterward.
Why would consciousness exist at all, on this theory? Show answer
For homeostasis. The brain exists to keep the body alive, and feelings are how the body tells the brain what it needs.
How does Pollan separate sentience from consciousness? Show answer
Sentience is a ground floor: awareness of the environment and of whether changes are good or bad, possibly shared by all life. Consciousness is how humans do sentience.
What evidence suggests experience does not require a cortex? Show answer
Children born without a cortex and decorticated animals still show signs of conscious experience in their expressions and behavior.
What did Immordino-Yang's brain scans of admiration and compassion show? Show answer
These complex emotions recruited the same basic systems as physical pain, including the hypothalamus and the anterior insula, which senses the viscera.
What is Immordino-Yang's central principle about emotion and learning? Show answer
Whatever you are having emotion about is what you are thinking about, and so what you learn about. Emotions are the drives of thinking.
Why does learning need safety? Show answer
The default mode network, which supports imagination and other perspectives, is incompatible with vigilance.
What is affect, in Barrett's account? Show answer
The brain's low-dimensional summary of the body's state: pleasant or unpleasant, worked up or calm. It is always present.
Where does Barrett differ from the idea that emotions live in the body? Show answer
She says we feel everything in the brain, just as we see with the brain. The body supplies signals and stakes; experience is the brain's construction.
What does Schore say about unconscious motivation? Show answer
The right brain processes emotional information beneath awareness, and 90 to 95 percent of why we do what we do is unconscious.
What does Schore say changes people in therapy? Show answer
Emotionally laden connection, with therapist and patient synchronized right brain to right brain. Cognitive understanding alone makes no changes.
What does the feelings-first view imply for animals and machines, according to Pollan? Show answer
Many more animals are probably conscious, since lots of species have brainstems. Computers probably won't have feelings, because feelings depend on a vulnerable body.