Self Comes to Mind

James left out stimulus appraisal altogether and confined the cognitive aspect of emotion to the perception of the stimulus and of body activity. For James, there was the perception of the exciting fact (which is equivalent to my emotionally competent stimulus), and the bodily changes followed directly. We know today that although things can actually happen this way, from fast perception to triggering of emotion, steps of appraisal tend to be interposed, a filtering and channeling of the stimulus as it makes its way through the brain and is led eventually to the trigger region. The appraisal stage can be very brief and nonconscious, but it needs to be acknowledged. James’s view in this regard becomes a caricature: the stimulus always goes to the hot button and sets off the explosion. More important, the cognition generated by an emotional state is by no means confined to images of the stimulus and of the body changes, as James would have it. In humans, as we have seen, the emotion program also triggers certain cognitive changes that accompany the body changes. We can regard them as late components of the emotion or even as anticipated, relatively stereotyped components of the upcoming feeling of emotion. None of these reservations diminishes in any way James’s extraordinary contribution.
Feelings of Emotion
     
    Let me begin with a working definition. Feelings of emotion are composite perceptions of (1) a particular state of the body, during actual or simulated emotion, and (2) a state of altered cognitive resources and a deployment of certain mental scripts. In our minds, these perceptions are connected to the object that caused them.
    Once it becomes clear that feelings of emotion are primarily perceptions of our body state during a state of emotion, it is reasonable to say that all feelings of emotion contain a variation on the theme of primordial feelings, whatever the primordial feelings of the moment are, augmented by other aspects of body change that may or not be related to interoception. It also becomes obvious that the substrate of such feelings in the brain should be found in the image-making regions of the brain, specifically in the somatosensing regions of two distinct sectors: the upper brain stem and the cerebral cortex. Feelings are states of mind based on a special substrate.
    At the level of the cerebral cortex, the main region involved in feelings is the insular cortex, a sizable but quietly hidden part of the cerebral cortex located under both the frontal and parietal opercula. The insula, which does look like an island as the name implies, has several gyri. The front part of the insula is of old vintage, is related to taste and smell, and, just to confuse matters a bit, is a platform not only for feelings but also for the triggering of some emotions. It serves as a trigger point to a most important emotion: disgust , one of the oldest emotions in the repertoire. Disgust began its days as an automatic means of rejecting potentially toxic food and preventing it from entering the body. Humans can be disgusted not just by seeing spoiled food and the foul smell and taste that accompany it but by a variety of situations in which the purity of objects or behavior is compromised and there is “contamination.” Importantly, humans are also disgusted by the perception of morally reprehensible actions. As a result, many of the actions in the human disgust program, including its typical facial expressions, have been co-opted by a social emotion: contempt . Contempt is often a metaphor for moral disgust.
    The back part of the insula is made of modern neocortex, and the middle part is of intermediate phylogenetic age. The insular cortex has long been known to be associated with visceral function, representing the viscera and participating in their control. Along with the primary and secondary somatosensory cortices (known as SI and SII), the insula is a producer of body maps. Indeed, relative to the viscera and internal milieu, the insula is the equivalent of the primary visual or auditory cortices.
    In the late 1980s I hypothesized a role for the somatosensory cortices in feelings, and I pointed to the insula as a likely provider of feelings. I wanted to move away from the hopeless idea of attributing the origin of feeling states to action-driving regions, such as the amygdalae. At the time, talking about emotion evoked sympathy if not derision, and suggesting a separate substrate for feelings evoked