From affective neuroscience a new paradigm emerges, that is doomed to change the concept we have about ourselves. Seven fundamental emotions have been identified as definite parts of the nervous system: fear, rage, lust, care, grief, play and seeking. These emotions are the roots of consciousness and the premise of our sociality. They offer us a new key to the understanding of phenomena as depression and mania, drug addiction, sexual identity, and the social bond.
The theory of emotional systems finds an organic arrangement thanks to the work of Jaak Panksepp (1943-2017), a neuroscientist and psychobiologist who emigrated from Estonia to the United States. The first part of the book describes, in an easy to understand language, this new vision of the mind and the fundamental traits of each basic emotion. The second part of the book is a reflection which focuses on the relevance in respect to the aim of personal growth and of the quest for a new social synthesis, touching on topics such as the relation between soul and technology, Rawls’ veil of ignorance, Horkheimer and Adorno’s dialectic of Enlightenment, and Lévinas’ face.
INTRODUCTION: MY MEETING WITH PANKSEPP’S WORK
It was a long time that I searched for scientific knowledge that could be fruitful to travelling a path of self-understanding. In 2013 I was fascinated by the theory of Giulio Tononi, who promised a mathematical formula capable of grasping the essence of consciousness. After studying some articles about the so-called information integration theory however, I realized that it wasn’t what I was looking for.
The complex statistical calculations of which the theory is composed lead in fact to numeric parameters similar to the “signatures of consciousness” about which Stanislas Dehaene speaks in his recent book about the brain. Unfortunately, they don’t supply us with an illuminating vision for the self-perception of ourselves.
After my immersion into statistics, I therefore searched for an interpretation of the brain more akin to lived experience, and it was in this way that I met Jaak Panksepp, who doesn’t attempt to obtain the essence of consciousness by elaborating the combinations of switched on and switched off neurons, but speaks about emotional systems that we can connect on the fly with our own experience.
The work of Panksepp includes a lot of experimentation on laboratory animals, and he is famous for, among other things, identifying a vocal emission in rats equivalent to laughing, characterized by a frequency of about 50Khz, thus above the range of sounds audible by human ears. Such vocal emissions are typically produced while play-fighting, or chasing.
According to Panksepp’s formulation, fundamental emotional systems are the same for all mammals, hence from the study of animals one can gain data usable for human beings too. This said, we have to point out that Panksepp doesn’t adopt a reductionist approach that brings us to lose the most precious traits of humans, but he supplies us with a description of the foundation upon which the spiritual building can soar. The human attitude of Panksepp is recognizable in the portraits depicting him in the act of smiling nose to nose with the rodents with which one meets so often in his studies.
Panksepp calls his field of study affective neuroscience, and he employs a threefold approach to the investigation of emotions, consisting of research into the physical-chemical functioning of the brain, the observation of behaviour in animals, and the introspective reports of human subjects. For example, in the case of fear one might have a rat with two electrodes reaching the relative subcortical zones of the brain. When applying a low level of current the rat immobilizes, while with a higher level of current the animal flees. To this observation of immobilization and flee behaviours, we can add reports of men to whom an electrical stimulation is applied similar to the one of the rat, reports in which the subjects involved say they are scared.
The first studies of this kind date back to the 1950’s, but it took a lot of time for a comprehensive vision of emotional systems to emerge, such as the one elaborated by Panksepp. In the following pages you will find an introduction to his results, based upon the book The Archaeology of Mind, a text which is not easy to read because of the abundance of chemical and anatomical details described in it. On the basis of the points discussed previously, in the second part of the book we will develop some philosophical reflections to explore the possibility of connecting Panksepp’s ideas to a new understanding of the social dimension.
1 – THE BRAIN AS PANKSEPP SEES IT
At the beginning of his discourse, Panksepp provides us with a historical reconstruction to justify the fact that scientific research focused upon emotions has occurred only in recent years.
The desire for a knowledge that is unassailable and that satisfies an unfailing standard of truth can push one to distrust every reference to the invisibile depths of human subjectivity. This is what unfortunately happened with the school of thought of behaviourism, which rules the field of academic psychological studies up till the sixties of the last century, and which means to study only the observable behaviour, forbidding the use of introspective reports. For such reasons, Panksepp identifies behaviourism as one of the factors hindering the study of emotions.
Starting from the middle of the 20th century, the practice of using calculating machines allows us to see man as a machine equipped with software, establishing a metaphor with which one can conceive the invisible thought inside the head in a scientifically acceptable way. Software is actually an implementation of that part of philosophy called formal logic, which deals with rules of reasoning equivalent to exact operations upon symbols. Using the metaphor of thought as software is a typical trait of the school of thought that in psychology is called cognitivism, which replaces behaviourism as the dominant trend starting from the seventies
Therefore, in psychology we have first a behavioural tradition which bans referring to personal experience, and then a cognitivism which allows speaking of invisible subjective worlds, but only to pick out the rational aspects more akin to logical thought. According to Panksepp the influence of behaviourism and cognitivism delayed till today a systematic scientific study of emotions, and this influence is still working in many scholars in the field of neuroscience.
Coming to the description of the current situation of studies about the brain, Panksepp notices that it’s hard for scholars and experts across different fields to understand each other, since the use of similar terms is different. For this reason he proposes to clarify the situation by distinguishing the biological structures of the brain in three levels: the primary level (the one with which Panksepp is usually concerned) corresponding to the raw emotional experience, the secondary level, composed of memory mechanisms and learning, and the tertiary level, where we find the cognitive complexities of reasoning.
As an example we can correlate the primary level with the immobilizing terror or the flight that arises after meeting a tiger, the secondary level with the memory of signs, places and smells of the predator, and the tertiary level with the discussion of a project to capture the tiger.
Thinking about the brain we are used to imagining those grey folds forming the cerebral cortex, while the work of Panksepp is concerned with what is located under them. An empirical principle to which Panksepp often refers is one which relates the position of the components of the brain with their evolutionary age. The ones nearer to the backbone are the most ancient, while the ones farther away are more recent. Among these, there is the cerebral cortex, which we can conceive as a mantle which came to wrap preexisting structures.
Determining the location of emotional circuits is accomplished by the insertion of some electrodes into the brain to stimulate exact areas. Fundamental to the emotional systems is the role of that subcortical zone called periacqueductal grey (PAG), with the negative emotions located on its back, and the positive ones located on the opposite side.
Panksepp circumscribes the subject of his studies by means of identifying the formal traits of emotional systems. Initially, each of these systems can react to some simple innate stimulus, and then they can learn to activate in accordance with other external stimuli such as objects or situations found in the environment. Every emotional system is featured by the capacity to elaborate many input stimuli at the same time. When we look at the output, we note that every emotional system produces a particular kind of response in the form of a behaviour that is not linked with fixed objects, as can be seen with the destructive disposition of rage, which can be vented upon different objects. Another point is that emotional systems don’t answer immediately to the environment; conversely in respect to the lamp which istantly turns on and off after pressing the switch, emotional systems behave as wheels which once put into motion go on rotating by inertia, and need time to stop. Another important feature is that emotional systems are subject to regulation from the rational zones of the brain, and, in turn, they have a significant influence upon the functioning of these zones. Finally, it’s considerable the fact that we directly perceive the affective and specific quality of each emotion, its particular mental taste.
Panksepp has identified a total of seven fundamental emotional systems, and to each of them we will dedicate a brief chapter in the following pages. Some of these emotions are used as a normal part of psychological discourse, while others will appear unusual. Their identification as a physical part of the brain establishes them all as important tools for self-understanding. These emotions are seeking, fear, rage, lust, care, grief and play.9 Their cognitive elaboration in secondary and tertiary processes can give place to a multiplicity of diverse manifestations such as, for example, courage, envy, guilt, jealousy, pride, shame and disdain.
Emotional systems don’t exhaust the whole affective spectrum, which is completed by considering also…
You just read the first pages of the book “Basic Emotions according to Panksepp and Neuroscience.” The translation from Italian is in progress. The original Italian version is here.