Self Comes to Mind

the visual cortices to the moment the subjects first reported feelings, nearly five hundred milliseconds passed, or about half a second. Is this a little or a lot? It depends on the perspective. In “brain time” it is a huge interval, when one thinks that a neuron can fire in about five milliseconds. In “conscious mind time,” however, it is not very much. It sits between the couple of hundred milliseconds we require to be conscious of a pattern in perception and the seven or eight hundred milliseconds we need to process a concept. Beyond the five-hundred-millisecond mark, however, feelings may linger for seconds or minutes, obviously reiterated in some sort of reverberation, especially if they are, well, big-time feelings.
The Varieties of Emotion
     
    Attempts to describe the full range of human emotions or to classify them are not especially interesting. The criteria used for the traditional classifications are flawed, and any roster of emotions can be criticized for failing to include some and overincluding others. A vague rule of thumb suggests that we should reserve the term emotion for a reasonably complex program of actions (one that includes more than one or two reflexlike responses) triggered by an identifiable object or event, an emotionally competent stimulus. The so-called universal emotions (fear, anger, sadness, happiness, disgust, and surprise) are seen as meeting those criteria. Be that as it may, these emotions are certainly produced across cultures and are easily recognized because one part of their action program—their facial expressions—is quite characteristic. Such emotions are present even in cultures that lack distinctive names for the emotions. We owe to Charles Darwin the early recognition of this universality, not only in humans but in animals.
    The universality of emotional expressions reveals the degree to which the emotional action program is unlearned and automated. At each performance, the emotion can be modulated, for example, with small changes of intensity or duration of component movements. The basic program routine, however, is stereotypical, at all the body levels at which it is executed—external motions; visceral changes in the heart, lungs, gut, and skin; and endocrine changes. The execution of the same emotion can vary from occasion to occasion but not enough to make it unrecognizable to the subject or to others. It varies as much as the interpretation of Gershwin’s “Summertime” can change with different interpreters or even with the same interpreter on different occasions. It is still perfectly identifiable because the general contour of the behavior has been maintained.
    The fact that emotions are unlearned, automated, and predictably stable action programs betrays their origin in natural selection and in the resulting genomic instructions. These instructions have been highly conserved across evolution and result in the brain’s being assembled in a particular, dependable way, such that certain neuron circuits can process emotionally competent stimuli and lead emotion-triggering brain regions to construct a full-fledged emotional response. Emotions and their underlying phenomena are so essential for the maintenance of life and for subsequent maturation of the individual that they are reliably deployed early in development.
    The fact that emotions are unlearned, automated, and set by the genome always raises the specter of genetic determinism. Is there nothing personable and educable about one’s emotions? The answer is that there is plenty. The essential mechanism of the emotions in a normal brain is indeed quite similar across individuals, and a good thing too because it provides humanity, in diverse cultures, with a common ground of fundamental preferences on the matters of pain and pleasure. But while the mechanisms are distinctly similar, the circumstances in which certain stimuli have become emotionally competent for you are unlikely to be the same as for me. There are things that you fear that I do not, and vice versa; things you love and I do not, and vice versa; and many, many things that we both fear and love. In other words, emotional responses are considerably customized relative to the causative stimulus. In this regard, we are quite alike but not entirely. And there are other aspects to this individuation. Influenced by the culture in which we grew up, or as a result of individual education, we have the possibility of controlling, in part,