Self Comes to Mind

give them flesh in their own body. That is what inhabiting a role is all about, and when that process of transfer is decorated by unexpected, invented details, we get a performance of genius.
The Body-Minded Brain
     
    The situation that emerges from the preceding facts and reflections is strange and unexpected but quite liberating.
    We can all have our body in mind, at all times, providing us with a backdrop of feeling potentially available at every instant but noticeable only when it departs significantly from relatively balanced states and begins to register in the pleasantness or unpleasantness range. We have our body in mind because it helps govern behavior in all manner of situations that could threaten the integrity of the organism and compromise life. That particular function draws on the oldest kind of life regulation based on a brain. It harks back to simple body-to-brain signaling, to basic prompts for automated regulatory responses meant to assist with life management. But we simply have to marvel at what has been accomplished from such humble beginnings. Body mapping of the most refined order undergirds both the self process in conscious minds and the representations of the world external to the organism. The inner world has opened the way for our ability to know not only that very inner world but also the world around us.
    The living body is the central locus. Life regulation is the need and the motivation. Brain mapping is the enabler, the engine that transforms plain life regulation into minded regulation and, eventually, into consciously minded regulation.

5
Emotions and Feelings
     
Situating Emotion and Feeling
     
    In the quest to understand human behavior, many have tried to overlook emotion, but to no avail. Behavior and mind, conscious and not, and the brain that generates them, refuse to yield their secrets unless emotion (and the many phenomena that hide under its name) is factored in and given its due.
    A discussion on the topic of emotion returns us to the matter of life and value. It requires a mention of reward and punishment, drives and motivations, and, of necessity, feelings. A discussion of emotions entails an investigation of the extremely varied devices of life regulation available in brains but inspired by principles and goals that anteceded brains and that, by and large, operate automatically and somewhat blindly, until they begin to be known to conscious minds in the form of feelings. Emotions are the dutiful executors and servants of the value principle, the most intelligent offspring yet of biological value. On the other hand, emotions’ own offspring, the emotional feelings that color our entire life from cradle to grave, loom large over humanity by making certain that emotions are not ignored.
    In Part III, when I will address the neural mechanisms behind the construction of the self, I will often invoke the phenomena of emotion and feeling because their machinery is used in the building of the self. The purpose of this chapter is to introduce that machinery briefly rather than present an overall review of emotions and feelings.
Defining Emotion and Feeling
     
    Conversations on emotion face two major problems. One is the heterogeneity of phenomena that qualify for the label. As we have seen in Chapter 2 , the value principle operates via reward and punishment devices as well as by drives and motivations, which are part and parcel of the emotion family. When we talk about emotions proper (say, fear, anger, sadness, or disgust), we talk, of necessity, of all those other devices too because they are constitutive components of each emotion and are independently involved in life regulation. Emotions proper are merely an integrated crown jewel of life regulation.
    The other important problem is the distinction between emotion and feeling. Emotion and feeling, albeit part of a tightly bound cycle, are distinguishable processes. It makes no difference what words we choose to refer to these distinct processes, provided we acknowledge that the essence of emotion and the essence of feeling are different. Of course, there is nothing wrong with the words emotion and feeling to begin with, and they do perfectly well for the purpose, in English and in the many languages in which they have a direct translation. Let us begin, then, by defining those key terms in light of current neurobiology.
    Emotions are complex, largely automated programs of actions concocted by evolution. The actions