The Brain & Our Emotional Future Part A

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En provenance du cours de Rutgers the State University of New Jersey

Soul Beliefs: Causes and Consequences - Unit 2: Belief Systems

135 notes

Rutgers the State University of New Jersey

Soul Beliefs: Causes and Consequences - Unit 2: Belief Systems

135 notes

Throughout history, the vast majority of people around the globe have believed they have, however defined, a “soul.” While the question of whether the soul exists cannot be answered by science, what we can study are the causes and consequences of various beliefs about the soul and its prospects of surviving the death of the body. Why are soul and afterlife beliefs so common in human history? Are there adaptive advantages to assuming souls exist? Are there brain structures that have been shaped by environmental pressures that provide the foundation of body/mind dualism that is such a prominent feature of many religions? How do these beliefs shape the worldviews of different cultures and our collective lives? What is the role of competing afterlife beliefs in religion, science, politics, and war? This course explores several facets of this relatively unexplored but profoundly important aspect of human thought and behavior. The course consists mainly of 70 to 80 minute lectures, typically broken up into 3 segments, recorded from a course offered by Rutgers University School of Arts and Sciences. These videos include slides and some embedded video clips. Most lectures are accompanied by slides used during the lecture, also including recommended reading assignment which may provide additional opportunities to reflect on your studies. Due to the lengthiness of this class and natural progression, the online course has been separated into 3 units, this is Unit 2.

À partir de la leçon

The Brain and Our Emotional Future

The Brain & Our Emotional Future Part A20:19

The Brain & Our Emotional Future Part B28:04

The Brain & Our Emotional Future Part C23:00

Rencontrer les enseignants

Prof. Daniel M. Ogilvie
Professor of Psychology
Psychology
Prof. Leonard W. Hamilton
Professor of Psychology
Department of Psychology

>> Today's lecture builds a little bit on the last

lecture that Professor Oglevee gave.

Talking about feeling machines that think and

we'll also build a little bit on Professor Musolino's lecture and

the ideas about materialism.

You may recall, although it's been a long time, the last time I was up on stage,

I started the lecture sitting down in a chair and facing the wall.

And the reason why I did that was because I had a very difficult task at hand and

that was to try to give you some real understanding

that the brain is in charge of our behavior.

It doesn't seem like that and I know from trying this for

many, many years that in some sense,

I feel like I may as well be talking to the wall as talking to you,

because you're not going to believe that the brain is in charge of your behavior,

but Professor Mussolino I think did a marvelous job of building on that and

providing a lot of additional information.

So I think we're on a little better footing right now in

terms of our understanding that the mind is what the brain does and

it's really for me, a privilege to be able to have as colleagues

people like Professor Oglevee and Professor Mussolino who are still

teaching me a whole bunch of stuff as we go through all of this.

[COUGH] William James,

often referred to as the father of psychology.

Wrote extensively, wrote books and articles and

was one of the truly great thinkers in the field.

Basically, he said, sit all day in a moping posture and

sigh and say everything in a dismal voice and

your melancholy will linger.

If you're feeling down in the dumps and want to feel better,

basically, he's saying, you have to act better and

go through the outward movements of those contrary dispositions,

which we prefer to cultivate.

He said that back in 1890 and

nearly 100 years later,

people began to agree with him and

one of the people who agreed with him was Carole King.

>> [COUGH]

[MUSIC]

>> [LAUGH]

[MUSIC]

>> So Carole King said that and

grandmothers throughout the ages,

I'm sure have been saying that.

You've probably heard your own grandmother or your parent or some other adult in your

life when you was a little kid, moping around,

just paste a smile on your face and you'll feel a lot better.

Paste a smile on your face.

Well, you might also be surprised to find out

that a whole bunch of serious scientists are also

in agreement with William James ideas and

with Carole King's ideas and

emotions have been a very difficult topic,

because if you think about emotions they are very personal.

And although we have the expression of emotions, which we'll get to and

talk more about a little bit later in today's class.

So we have people who we say are acting angry or acting happy or

whatever, so that's the outward expression of the emotion.

But the feeling of emotion inside is a part of that whole

consciousness, introspective, feelings and

things, that's kind of hard to get a handle on and

it took psychology a while to begin to figure out

the methods of how to study these types of things.

So emotions are learned and for the most part,

maybe entirely, emotions are based on external events.

And these external events can either be real or-

>> Get off.

>> Imagined.

>> [LAUGH]

>> But [LAUGH] as

Professor Musolino

pointed out,

the feelings are just as real.

So, if you think you have a monster under your bed or

a monster on your back and it causes you fright.

That fright is your genuine, real emotion,

even though what the basis of that may be completely in your imagination.

That doesn't matter.

And a lot of our emotional reactions are based on

our experiences and Kind of follow us through and

develop and grow as we go through our life story.

One of the ways that these emotions

are established is through classical conditioning.

Now many of you I know have had psychology courses and

you know about Pavlov and his dogs and classical conditioning.

It's widespread in the general world as well, but

one of the famous examples of classical conditioning in

the psychology literature goes back to the early 1900s

at the University of Chicago with a psychologist named

John Watson who did the famous study with Little Albert.

Little Albert was an infant.

And they had available a very tame, docile,

white rat that was kind of a laboratory pet.

So they bring little Albert out, and the white rat is scurrying

around the table there, and little Albert reaches out because it's cute, And

tries to pet the rat, at which point Watson hits

a big gong with a hammer and just scares the bejeeberz out of poor little Albert.

And of course little Albert cried and

cried as any infant would because of the loud noise.

Later, if little Albert just saw the rat he would start crying.

If he saw a white stuffed toy, he would start crying.

If he saw a Santa Claus mask with a white beard, he would start crying.

It's called generalization.

So the specific fear that was established because of the pairing

of the loud noise and the white furry object.

Now other similar white furry objects are also

frightening to little Albert.

Psychologists would get in big trouble if they did that experiment today.

But it was an experiment that has lasted through the ages as a really good example

of these learned fears through classical conditioning.

We can also learn, and this will kind of be a recurring theme today,

we can also learn through observation about various types of emotions,

learn the types of things that we like and the types of things that we dislike

by seeing other individuals respond to those things.

My mother-in-law,

and I think I'm allowed to talk about this because she has told the story many times.

My mother-in-law doesn't quite know how it happened, but

she developed a pretty severe fear of thunderstorms.

And being a bright and intelligent woman,

she did not want to pass that on to her daughter, my wife.

So when my wife was little, Mom sat her down

in front of the picture window when they were having an electrical storm and

screwed up her courage to not act at all fearful and

go through the explanation about how the lightning causes the thunder and then you

have rain and pretty flowers, and this was all just a part of nature, and everything.

And going through this whole story when lightning struck the house across

the street, and it burned down.

[LAUGH] So it was an unplanned lesson.

My wife still has a bit of anxiety when thunderstorms come around

because of that particular experience gone wrong.

We also have biological preparedness.

Many of you are probably afraid of snakes and

spiders and things of that nature, maybe cockroaches,

but I'll bet hardly any of you have ever

actually been harmed by a snake or a spider.

You probably don't even know anybody who's been harmed by a snake or a spider.

But it's still just unbelievably easy

because of our long natural history of living with these

creatures that used to be dangerous in the environment where humans live.

We are biologically prepared to be afraid of them.

We are not nearly afraid enough

of the really dangerous things like guns and automobiles and

tall buildings and things of that nature that actually do

pose some real statistical serious risk to us.

It's hard to get people to believe and understand.

And we have whole national campaigns to convince people to wear seat belts and

to convince people to stop smoking because we are not biologically

prepared to immediately respond to those kinds of risks.

Mirror neurons that I just want to mention because it fits on this list here, and

we are going to come back and talk about those later on in the class.

I want to talk to you a little bit about a laboratory study of fear.

Again, kind of a classic study.

And you may recall a quote by Charles Darwin

that Professor Olgilvie gave you a lecture or

two ago talking about the instinctive fear of snakes in monkeys.

And it actually took quite a long time

to find out that it wasn't entirely an instinctive fear.

Something that happened just as a result of being a monkey,

but the monkeys are biologically prepared to be afraid of snakes.

And in this little diagram here,

we have a monkey who was wild-reared, captured from the jungle.

And if you bring a snake in, the monkey will literally climb the wall out of fear.

Meanwhile, a monkey that has been born and

raised in a laboratory setting, sees the snake and just looks at it,

it's an object of curiosity, not something that elicits fear.

So it's not instinctual.

But now we go to the next phase of that experiment, and allow this lab-reared

monkey to see this monkey being afraid of a snake, and

apparently the lab-reared monkey comes to the conclusion that hey,

these long slimy creatures are actually kind of dangerous.

I'm going to stay away from them.

And then the control here is to allow the lab-reared monkey

to see the other monkey being afraid, but can't see

the object of the fear and is just sitting there wondering what's up with you?

Why are you climbing the wall, there's nothing to be afraid of.

So this is a good example of the types of ways that we can do experiments and

begin to systematically unravel the source of the emotion

that is being shown by monkeys in response to snakes.

And begin to get a better understanding of how these things develop and

how they can be altered under different conditions.

So the part of the brain that is doing all of this.

Is the Limbic system.

You've seen pictures of the Limbic system a couple times, and

we've talked about the triune brain way back in the early part of the course.

And this is really kind of the middle portion of the brain.

So we've got the very ancient, old life-supporting

structures of the brain stem, and then some of the newer bells and

whistles that were added evolutionary to the brain, covering the brain stem

are the Limbic system, and then on the outside the modern cortical areas.

And each of these have different types of functions and more and

more complex functions.

But the limbic system is in an interesting

position there in terms of the information that it receives.

Once source of information that the limbic system receives

comes from the outside world.

So all of our five senses,

the way that we monitor and experience the world, are fed into

the limbic system as a part of the way the brain processes it.

Now obviously, our visual system goes into the visual cortex back here for

the various things that we do with vision, and the auditory system goes into special

areas of the brain and stuff, but in addition to these specialized things,

they also send some of that information into the limbic system.

And we all then have the internal milieu

that Professor Oglebey has talked about on several occasions here.

The information that's taking place in the body,

a lot of which Is something that escapes our consciousness.

Not all of it, but some of it escapes our consciousness.

So we've got the heart beating, and blood pressure, digestive processes,

all of those types of things.

That information gets fed into the brain in

the same way that information about vision and hearing gets fed into the brain.

And so the brain then is monitoring this inside

world in the same way that we more consciously monitor the outside world.

And in emotional situations, this part of the brain is in communication,

mostly down through the brain stem regions,

it's in communication with the output systems of the brain, and

can prepare us to respond to an emotional situation.

So what I'm doing here is showing you kind of the foundation of the types

of information that goes into an emotion, that we have to know what's going on in

the outside world, we have to know what's going on in the inside world,

and in most cases, we end up producing some sort of a response to that.

And part of that response is going to be a movement response where we

decide to flee and run away from the snake or

we might decide to pick up a stick and beat the snake to a pulp.

So it's a fight-or-flight type of response.

And we also,

as a part of that, have a whole bunch of internal changes that go on.

So a good example, of this, and you've all read and heard about it, and

you've all had this type of an experience before where your body gets energized and

you can do, not superhuman things, because you can actually do them, but

sometimes in these emergency situations you can do things that you can't

voluntarily do if you don't have the anger or the fear associated with it.

So these are some of the things we'll be developing.

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