Sunday, 3 March 2024 ------------------------ Continuing with the fourth chapter, I'll briefly explain 'interoception' functionally, highly simplified. The brain, involving multiple regions, has a system called the 'interoceptive network'. The goal of this system is to regulate the resources of your body to give you the best chance of survival. It does this by two subsystems. The first, the 'body-budgeting' brain regions. This subsystem predicts inner-body changes (like heart rate) or can be seen as predicting the resource requirement changes (like standing still to sprinting will change inner-body movement like heart rate and breathing to meet higher demand of oxygen and glucose to muscles). This subsystem also predicts the sensory result from the predicted inner-body movement, like heart rate to feeling chest pounding. The predicted sensory input flows to the second subsystem, the 'primary interoceptive cortex', that simulate the prediction (what you will feel like chest pounding), and receives the actual sensory input (from body/organs) to compare with for prediction error resolving. The system is a prediction loop for inner-body movement but not just for the experience but regulating the body's resources by telling the body to do stuff like release cortisol if it is predicted more energy is quickly needed. Now in terms of our conscious experience, this doesn't tell us more than how our physical feeling of heart pounding or stomach ache is a prediction and simulated like our other sense like hearing, that takes sensory input like air molecule pressure and represents it as the loudness of the sound in our simulation. What are we suppose to use this info with? How should I act differently or take action on these physical sensations? In order for that, we need some sort of tangible thing to give us a hint. A feeling perhaps? First, what is the difference between a feeling and an emotion? Now, the word feeling is used to also describe the experience of the physical representations of sensory input, like I feel my chest pounding, but for some we don't, like we don't say we feel the brightness, the physical representation of the height of light wave. This is just to be clear, we're not talking about that, but the type that relates to emotion. But emotions are not the simplest form of this type of feeling. Instead that is something called 'affect' which is very easy to understand as it has only two well defined dimensions, called 'valence' and 'arousal'. Valence is just whether the feeling is pleasant or unpleasant. Like the physical feeling of sun on our skin is felt as pleasant, or can feel pleasant. Likewise, physical feeling of coldness is usually felt as unpleasant. Arousal can be defined as how intensely we feel the feeling, like walking can be pleasant and feel calm or low arousal, while running can also be pleasant but more intense or high arousal. Same as feeling a little cold on your way home and being a passenger on a plane crashing down the sky can both be unpleasant but one is a tad bit more intense or arousing. To specify that we're talking about the feeling of affect, we use the word 'affective-feeling'. So how do emotions relate to affective-feeling? Emotions are first of all constructed concepts that have more complexity and more dimensions than affect. It is abstract and has variations between single instancse of feeling an emotion, and more variations from person to person, and even more from culture to culture. That is why it is easier to start with understanding feeling with affect because it's more tangible and understandable. Differentiating between pleasant and unpleasant is easier to do as a shared human experience. So emotions is something that can arise from affect. A combination of physical sensations like holding hands with a significant other while walking on a sunny day with thoughts like how special they are and how grateful I am to have them in my life will create an affect that is pleasant with maybe medium-high arousal, that then leads to you feeling/simulating an instance of an emotion or many, like happiness, love, gratitude, so on. Notice in this example how I'm mentioning specific physical sensations, because from experience and sometimes physical sensations (They tell you to pay attention to the birds chirping), your brain is selective in what it pays attention to. It's the things you notice affect your affective-feeling. This is called your 'affective niche', which can change from moment to moment in relation to what your brain predicts is most important to pay attention to. Most important for what? Regulating the resources of your body and that makes sense when you consider how important it is for your survival. Your affective-feeling influences many unconscious movements (like the intricate inner-body movements, even your immune system), but as we all experience, affective-feeling is also a part of our consciousness. But affect is a very simple and ambiguous feeling (it would be overwhelming/impractical to represent all the needs and changes in body resources as one to one distinct feeling metric). So this means that our brain must with its experience try to predict what exactly is the reason why we feel as we do together with the simulated physical sensations in the moment. But it can be very hard to predict how the sum of all physical sensations exactly make up our affective-feeling, and knowing this is critical to prevent harm to ourself but also as a society as a whole. To make it clear, your brain has no inherit knowledge of what causes your affective-feeling. Your brain takes the physical sensations in your affective niche and makes the best prediction from experience. This is called 'affective realism' and is why it's easy to missattribute the reason for why one is feeling like they are, like the classic example of judges statistically giving harsher judgments before lunch, because the brain wrongly predicts their unpleasant affective-feeling is associated with their thoughts (like the crime seems worse due to unpleasant feeling) and not because they have physical sensations of hunger (the attempted reason for the affective-feeling was to motivate eating). This is why the idea of separation between feelings and rational thought is flawed, that people have rational thought independent from their feelings or the regulation of your body resources. As explained in the book, this misunderstanding has major implications, not only for ourselves but society, such as a lot of economic models work only if it's assumed the actors/people are rational. This also impacts all other places of society. I tried my best to write my understanding of this chapter, it had many new things but I feel I got an all right big picture understanding. I'll probably relate the ideas written today to some other stuff tomorrow as I didn't really have more time for it and I found myself consumed by the ideas as I found it to make much sense, clearing some confusion I had because I've only heard the primal/limbic vs. rational/cortex idea which didn't fully match with my personal experiences and related ideas pointing to this new understanding I'm learning more thoroughly now.