Notes from: Joseph LeDoux.

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The kinds of experiences humans call conscious feelings—that

is, emotions—I propose are a much more recent development,
possibly emerging via evolutionary changes in the human brain
a mere few million years ago that brought language, culture,
and self-awareness to our species.

Brain researchers have, for the most part, misunderstood what

emotions are, and have searched for them in the brain in the
wrong way

Theories of emotion, and of the emotional brain, in contrast,

have suffered because they adopted Darwin’s psychological
ideas.

Darwin’s concept of psychology, rather than explaining human

qualities on the basis of animal traits, called upon human
psychological features, especially mental states, such as
emotions, to explain the behavior of other animals

Darwin himself noted that arguing for humanlike traits in

animals, rather than animal-like traits in humans, allowed him
to make his point about animal-human continuity in a more
“cheerful” way.*

For me, the subjective experience—the feeling—is the emotion.

These are not hardwired states programmed into subcortical
circuits by natural selection, but rather cognitive evaluations of
situations that affect personal well-being. They thus require
complex cognitive processes and self-awareness.

I think that the usual explanation of how flexible instrumental

behavior evolved—that the evolution of the limbic system gave
mammals emotional feelings that they could use to assess the
good and bad situations in the world—is wrong, and I have a
different hypothesis.

The machinery of self is established at an early age, and

enables even an infant to respond in a “self-protecting” or “self-
serving” way. Such responses are sometimes viewed as
evidence of self-awareness, but I don’t think they are, as they
do not depend on the mental state of self. The mental state of
self, according to Lewis, arises later, typically between eighteen
and twenty-four months of age, as the child’s brain attains
cognitive wherewithal, including linguistic competence with
personal pronouns—me, myself, I, and mine.

Antonio Damasio discusses a related view of the mental

state self—the idea of the self-as-subject, as the knower,
the “I,” the “me.” This is more than simply a mind capable
of knowing when sensations (including body sensations)
or images are present and exist. It is also capable of
knowing that “I” exist, and the sensations and images
exist within “me.

Anthropomorphic thinking . . . is built into us. . . . It is dinned

into us culturally from earliest childhood. It has presumably also
been ‘pre-programmed’ into our hereditary make-up by natural
selection, perhaps because it proved to be useful for predicting
and controlling the behavior of animals.

Since consciousness is not always necessary for human

perception and behavior, evidence that animals produce
appropriate behavioral responses to visual stimuli does not
qualify as evidence that they are conscious of what they are
seeing.

Perhaps a nonverbal form of noetic awareness might exist in

nonhuman primates, and possibly other mammals, and maybe
even in birds.With this kind of consciousness, an animal could
be aware of being in the presence of danger, food, or mates,
and perhaps be aware of memories about objects and
situations; it might have a sense of familiarity in recurring
situations, and, as Antonio Damasio has suggested, possibly
even a sense of self versus other based on memories of body
sensations (self as object) but without the knowledge that the
experience belonged to it, and it alone (self as subject).
it might allow the animal to be aware of the presence of
nutritious versus poisonous food, or of friend versus foe, or of a
potential mate, and also of body sensations, but without also
having the more elaborate capacities underlying the ability to
be reflectively aware of themselves as a participant in such
states in the present or past, or in the imagined future.

One of those archaic notions is the idea that behavioral and

physiological responses that occur in connection with our
emotional feelings are actually caused by those feelings.
Darwin, as we’ve seen, ascribed to this long-held bit of folk
wisdom.

If the responses could indeed be elicited without the person

feeling fear, it seemed that fear itself could not be responsible
for the responses

We do have instinctual circuits in our brains that control

behaviors that occur when we have certain emotions. They just
don’t make those emotions.

Emotional feelings, on the other hand, are, in my view,

cognitive interpretations of the situations in which we find
ourselves, a capacity that I propose was made possible by the
evolution of consciousness.

Human emotions are autonoetic conscious experiences that are

cognitively assembled,
Being autonoetic experiences, emotional feelings are personal
—they crucially involve the self and thus engage one’s self-
schema. Without the self being part of an experience, the
experience is not an emotional experience. Although every
experience that involves the self is not necessarily an
emotional experience, all emotional experiences involve the
self.

The noetic awareness that danger is present is not the same as

a state of autonoetic awareness in which you know that you are
the one in danger.

Also particularly important in the cognitive assembly of

conscious emotional experiences are “emotion schema,”
nonconscious bodies of knowledge about emotions

Antonio Damasio, who also emphasizes subcortical circuits in

primitive basic emotions, similarly noted the importance of
cognition and language in complex human emotions. But I go
further. For me, all emotions, including those typically said to
be basic, involve cognitive interpretation based on pattern
completion of emotion schema by higher-order circuits.

Emotions can’t be unconscious. On the other hand, because

nonconscious schema are building blocks of conscious
emotional experiences, feelings can seem to reflect
nonconscious emotions. And since schema also influence
behavior, actions can seem to have been driven by a
nonconscious emotion. But emotion schema are not emotions—
they are the cognitive launchpads of emotions.

What is actually universal about fear is not the details of how it

is subjectively experienced, but rather the concept of fear.

States of noetic consciousness offer a high level of deliberative

cognitive control over instrumental behavior.

Emotional experience typically results from the processing of

various nonconscious, lower-order ingredients by the prefrontal
higher-order network: (1) perceptual information about the
triggering event; (2) retrieved semantic and episodic memories;
(3) conceptual memories that add additional layers of meaning;
(4) self-information via self-schema activation; (5) survival
circuit information; (6) brain arousal and body feedback
consequences of survival circuit activation; and (7) information
about what kind of emotional situation might be unfolding as a
result of activation of one’s personal emotion schema.

All emotions (whether basic, secondary, or existential) are

cognitively assembled states of autonoetic consciousness. As
such, they are all products of the same higher-order circuits
that underlie all varieties of autonoetic conscious experiences,
not just emotional ones. When survival circuits are part of the
mix, they modulate the experience but do not determine the
experience, except to the extent that they help pattern-
complete emotion schema elements.

I propose that emotions are human specializations made

possible by unique capacities of our brains. They could not exist
in the form we experience them without our early hominid
ancestors having evolved language, hierarchical relational
reasoning, noetic consciousness, and reflective autonoetic
consciousness. These capacities made it possible for activities
of ancient survival circuits to be integrated into self-awareness,
framed in terms of semantic, conceptual, and episodic
memories, interpreted in terms of personalized self and
emotion schema, and used to guide behavior in the present and
also to plan for future emotional experiences.

Emotions, rather than being an inherited vestige of our primate

or mammalian past, may be exaptations that reflect unique
features that first emerged in early members of our species

What makes them all part of the category we call emotions is

thus not that they possess some biological signature, but
instead the fact that they are of personal significance to one’s
self.

That human emotions might be exaptations that were later

selected does not mean that they have no connection to our
animal ancestry. Indeed, the most fundamental emotions are
those to which ancient survival circuits contribute. But, as I
have argued, these survival circuits influence, but do not
define, the content of emotional experiences.

An emotion is the experience that something of value is

happening to you.

Emotions could not exist without autonoesis. No self, no

emotion.

The behavioral survival capacities we have inherited from our

animal ancestors are products of different brain systems than
those unique ones that make emotions and other states of
autonoetic consciousness in humans.

The historical waters of survival behaviors are deep, but the

stream of emotional consciousness is shallow.

Animals and humans are indeed quite similar, not because

animals have human consciousness, but because humans have
inherited nonconscious capacities from them

Perhaps some animals have the capacity for noetic

consciousness. But if, as I contend, emotions are autonoetic
states, they may be ours alone.

Consciousness, especially autonoetic consciousness, has a dark

side—it is the enabler of distrust, hate, avarice, greed, and
selfishness, mental features that could be our undoing.

Something unique happened when selfishness came to be an

isolated capacity in humans—that is, when selfishness became
the basis for conscious decisions that could harm, rather than
simply enable or enchance, the well-being of the organism as a
whole.

The autonoetically conscious human brain is the only entity in

the history of life that has ever been able to choose, at will, to
terminate its own existence, or even put the organism’s
physical existence at risk for the thrill of simply doing so

The selfishness of our genes pales next to the selfishness of our

self-conscious mind and its convictions.

Beliefs are not just products of language or culture. They also

depend on other special capacities that are intricately entwined
with language—hierarchical cognition, self-awareness, and
emotions.

The personal, selfish nature of the autonoetic mind leads it to

assume that it is always in charge.

Self-consciousness, according to Christophe Menant, is also the

root of evil. At the same time it may be our sole hope for a
future.