Self Comes to Mind

wound acquired on the run will paralyze the runner with intense pain.
    The mechanism is so exquisite that yet another structure, the cerebellum, will struggle to modulate the expression of fear. This is why if one has been trained as a navy SEAL or as a marine, one’s fear reaction will play out differently from that of someone who grew up as a potted plant.
    Last, the processing of images in the cerebral cortex is itself affected by the ongoing emotion. For example, cognitive resources such as attention and working memory are adjusted accordingly. Certain topics of ideation are made unlikely—one is unlikely to think of sex or food when one runs away from a gunman.
    Within a few hundred milliseconds, the emotional cascade manages to transform the state of several viscera, the internal milieu, the striated musculature of face and posture, the very pace of our mind, and themes of our thoughts. A disturbance indeed, as I am certain everyone will agree. When the emotion is strong enough, upheaval , the term used by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, is an even better word. 1 All this effort, complicated in its orchestration and costly in the amount of energy it consumes—that is why being emotional is so bloody tiring—tends to have a useful purpose, and it often does. But it may not. Fear may be nothing but a false alarm induced by a culture gone awry. In those instances, rather than saving your life, fear is an agent of stress, and stress over time destroys life, mentally and physically. The upheaval has negative consequences. 2
    Some version of the entire collection of emotional changes in the body is conveyed to the brain via the mechanisms outlined in Chapter 4 .
The Strange Case of William James
     
    Before I turn to the physiology of feelings, I think it is appropriate to invoke William James and discuss the situation that his own words on the phenomena of emotion and feeling created, for himself and for emotion scholarship ever since.
    A lapidary quote from James summarizes the issue, quickly and to the point.
     
Our natural way of thinking about these emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion. 3
    This is verbatim James, in 1884, including the capitalization of perception and is .
    The importance of this idea cannot be overemphasized. James inverted the traditional sequence of events in the emotion process, and he interposed the body between the causative stimulus and the experience of emotion. There was no longer a “mental affection” called the emotion “giving rise to the body effects.” There was, instead, the perception of a stimulus causing certain body effects. This was a bold proposal, and modern research entirely supports it. But the quote contains a major problem. After referring, in no uncertain terms, to “our feeling of the same changes,” James confuses the issue by saying that the feeling, after all, “IS the emotion.” This amounts to conflating emotion and feeling. James rejects emotion as a mental affection that causes body changes, only to accept emotion as a mental affection made of feelings of body changes, an entirely different arrangement from the one I presented earlier. It is unclear if this was unfortunate wording or an accurate expression of what James actually thought. Be that as it may, my view of emotions as action programs does not correspond to James’s view as expressed in his text; his concept of feeling is not equal to mine. However, his idea of the mechanism for feeling is very much the same as my body loop mechanism of feeling. (James did not entertain an as-if mechanism, although a footnote in his text suggests that he saw the need for one.)
    Most of the criticism that the James theory of emotion was to endure in the twentieth century was due to the wording of that paragraph. Leading physiologists such as Charles Sherrington and Walter Cannon used James’s words literally to conclude that their experimental data were incompatible with James’s mechanism. Neither Sherrington nor Cannon was correct, but one cannot entirely fault them for their misprision. 4
    On the other hand, there are valid criticisms to be made of James’s theory of emotion. For example,