Self Comes to Mind

constitute the substrate of a composite, multisite image. 8
    For the feeling state to be connected to the emotion, the causative object and the temporal relation between its appearance and the emotional response must be properly attended to. This is remarkably different from what happens in vision or hearing or smell. Because those other senses are focused on the world outside, the respective map-making regions can wipe their slates clean, as it were, and construct an infinity of patterns. Not so at the body-sensing sites, which are obligatorily turned to the inside and captive to what the body’s infinite sameness feeds them. The body-minded brain is indeed a captive of the body and of its signaling.
    The first way of generating feelings, then, requires what I call a body loop. But there are at least two other ways. One depends on the as-if body loop, introduced in Chapter 4 . As the name suggests, it is a sleight of hand. The brain regions that initiate the typical emotion cascade can also command body-mapping regions, such as the insula, to adopt the pattern they would have adopted once the body signaled the emotional state to it. In other words, the triggering regions tell the insula to shape up, to configure its firing “as if” it were receiving signals describing emotional state X . The advantage of this bypass mechanism is obvious. Since mounting a full-fledged emotional state takes a considerable amount of time and consumes a lot of precious energy, why not cut to the chase? No doubt this emerged in the brain precisely because of the economies of time and energy it introduced, and because smart brains are also extremely lazy. Anytime they can do less instead of more, they will, a minimalist philosophy they follow religiously.
    There is only one hitch with the as-if mechanism. Like any other simulation, it is not quite like the real thing. I believe as-if feeling states are commonplace in all of us and certainly reduce the costs of our emotionality, but they are only attenuated versions of body-looped emotions. As-if patterns cannot possibly feel like the body-looped feeling states because they are simulations, not the genuine article, and also because it is probably more difficult for the weaker as-if patterns to compete with the ongoing body patterns than for the regular body loop versions to do so.
    The other way of constructing feeling states consists of altering the transmission of body signals to the brain. As a consequence of natural analgesic actions or as a result of the administration of drugs that interfere with body signaling (painkillers, anesthetics), the brain receives a distorted view of what the body state really is at the moment. We know that in situations of fear in which the brain chooses the running option rather than freezing, the brain stem disengages part of the pain-transmission circuitry—a bit like pulling the phone plug. The periaqueductal gray, which controls these responses, can also command the secretion of natural opioids and achieve precisely what taking an analgesic would achieve: elimination of pain signals.
    In the strict sense, we are dealing here with a hallucination of the body because what the brain registers in its maps and what the conscious mind feels do not correspond to the reality that might be perceived. Whenever we ingest molecules that have the power to modify the transmission or mapping of body signals, we play on this mechanism. Alcohol does it; so do analgesics and anesthetics, as well as countless drugs of abuse. It is patently clear that, other than out of curiosity, humans are drawn to such molecules because of their desire to generate feelings of well-being, feelings in which pain signals are obliterated and pleasure signals induced.
The Timing of Emotions and Feelings
     
    In recent studies my colleague David Rudrauf has investigated the time course of emotions and feelings in the human brain using magnetoencephalography. 9 Magnetoencephalography is far less precise than functional magnetic resonance in terms of spatial localization of brain activity, but it offers a remarkable ability to estimate the time taken by certain processes in reasonably large sectors of the brain. We used this approach in these studies precisely because of the time feature.
    Looking inside the brain, Rudrauf followed the time course of activity related to emotional and feeling reactions to pleasant or unpleasant visual stimuli. From the moment the stimuli were processed in