The hypothesis right now is that what makes humans special is the fact that nonhuman animals can't get out of their current here and now; they can't get out of the facts of the world. That means they can't think about counterfactuals, they can't think about the future well, they can't think about the past well. They also can't take others' perspectives in the same way that we can. But, as with all these hypotheses, we could be wrong.
I look forward to continuing this in the morning when I am rested. I have found the links added to this thread to be life changing. The explanation of our social behaviors that are both good and bad, is liberating! I am now free to take charge, or as is said in AA, to allow my higher self to rule, because I know those nagging feelings that serve to take away our power so that we fit in and don't rock the boat, are at the animal level of our being, and the sense of confidence we feel when we believe we are right, is from the higher human brain development. I didn't know this yesterday and I am very excited about understanding this today.
It so different from what we were taught isn't it? I could be wrong but has not Christianity taught us we are born in sin and need to be saved, and that we should not be as animals that do terrible things. But the animals are programmed to get along in their groups and to keep their place, and pretty much be as good Christians. The human part of us, the greater brain, is what can lift us to a higher potential. Sometimes we need to stand against the crowd, because the crowd is going in the wrong direction. Sometimes we have make a stand and because our brains enable us to do that, humanity as a group has done better than other animals.
CarolDec 8, 2016 06:18 PM (This post was last modified: Dec 9, 2016 04:33 PM by Carol.)
I woke with this thread on my mind, and want to add information about fast and slow thinking. This is a very good explanation of fast and slow thinking. When we understand this principle we can use it to judge our posts. Are we really giving thought to what someone is saying, and if we agree with the argument, or are we just giving a knee-jerk reply? Are we actually reasoning through a reply and writing sentences that we think are better reasoning, or does our reply put someone on the defensive and exactly how long did it take to do that?
Long term and short term thinking very much involves impulse control, and impulse control is very much about hormones. Did homo sapiens evolve in Africa and not the northern continents because it was easier to have a full belly in Africa than in the ice age north?
Researchers at Sahlgrenska Academy found that higher levels of ghrelin prevented the rats from being able to wait for the greater reward. They further evaluated where in the brain ghrelin acts to affect impulsivity.
"Our results showed that restricting ghrelin effects to the ventral tegmental area, the part of the brain that is a crucial component of the reward system, was sufficient to make the rats more impulsive. Importantly, when we blocked ghrelin, the impulsive behavior was greatly reduced," says Karolina Skibicka. Even a short period of fasting, a more natural way of increasing the release of ghrelin, increased impulsive behavior.
Long-term changes
Impulsivity is a distinctive feature of many neuropsychiatric disorders and behavior disorders such as ADHD, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), autism spectrum disorder (ASD), drug abuse and eating disorders.
I want to add to this thought that baboons have a much lower level of impulse control than chimps, and this also means a decreased ability to learn something like fishing for termites. The chimps ability to learn to fish for termites, means more food for the chimp, more food means more impulse control, and more impulse controls means more capable of learning. Is our evolution tied to this kind of a cycle?
This ties into the ability to learn language and language greatly expands our ability to see patterns and learn.
Click on the video type, which is currently displaying Dailymotion. Change it to Youtube and then insert your link.
You might find this article interesting.
"Here’s where things get difficult. By now the debate over the role reason and emotion play in decision-making is well documented. Psychologists have written thousands of papers on the subject. It shows in the popular literature as well. From Antonio Damasio’s Descartes’ Error to Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, the lay audience knows about both the power of thinking without thinking and their predictable irrationalities.
But what exactly is being debated? What do psychologists mean when they talk about emotion and reason?"
Joseph LeDoux, author of popular neuroscience books including The Emotional Brain and The Synaptic Self, recently published a paper in the journal Neuron that flips the whole debate on its head. “There is little consensus about what emotion is and how it differs from other aspects of mind and behavior, in spite of discussion and debate that dates back to the earliest days in modern biology and psychology.” Yes, what we call emotion roughly correlates with certain parts of the brain, it is usually associated with activity in the amygdala and other systems. But we might be playing a language game, and neuroscientists are reaching a point where an understanding of the brain requires more sophisticated language.
As LeDoux sees it, “If we don’t have an agreed-upon definition of emotion that allows us to say what emotion is… how can we study emotion in animals or humans, and how can we make comparisons between species?” The short answer, according to the NYU professor, is “we fake it.”
With this in mind LeDoux introduces a new term to replace emotion: survival circuits. Here’s how he explains it:
The survival circuit concept provides a conceptualization of an important set of phenomena that are often studied under the rubric of emotion—those phenomena that reflect circuits and functions that are conserved across mammals. Included are circuits responsible for defense, energy/nutrition management, fluid balance, thermoregulation, and procreation, among others. With this approach, key phenomena relevant to the topic of emotion can be accounted for without assuming that the phenomena in question are fundamentally the same or even similar to the phenomena people refer to when they use emotion words to characterize subjective emotional feelings (like feeling afraid, angry, or sad). This approach shifts the focus away from questions about whether emotions that humans consciously experience (feel) are also present in other mammals, and toward questions about the extent to which circuits and corresponding functions that are relevant to the field of emotion and that are present in other mammals are also present in humans. And by reassembling ideas about emotion, motivation, reinforcement, and arousal in the context of survival circuits, hypotheses emerge about how organisms negotiate behavioral interactions with the environment in process of dealing with challenges and opportunities in daily life.
(Dec 9, 2016 05:59 AM)Secular Sanity Wrote: Joseph LeDoux, author of popular neuroscience books including The Emotional Brain and The Synaptic Self, recently published a paper in the journal Neuron that flips the whole debate on its head. “There is little consensus about what emotion is and how it differs from other aspects of mind and behavior, in spite of discussion and debate that dates back to the earliest days in modern biology and psychology.” Yes, what we call emotion roughly correlates with certain parts of the brain, it is usually associated with activity in the amygdala and other systems. But we might be playing a language game, and neuroscientists are reaching a point where an understanding of the brain requires more sophisticated language.
As LeDoux sees it, “If we don’t have an agreed-upon definition of emotion that allows us to say what emotion is… how can we study emotion in animals or humans, and how can we make comparisons between species?” The short answer, according to the NYU professor, is “we fake it.”
With this in mind LeDoux introduces a new term to replace emotion: survival circuits. Here’s how he explains it:
The survival circuit concept provides a conceptualization of an important set of phenomena that are often studied under the rubric of emotion—those phenomena that reflect circuits and functions that are conserved across mammals. Included are circuits responsible for defense, energy/nutrition management, fluid balance, thermoregulation, and procreation, among others. With this approach, key phenomena relevant to the topic of emotion can be accounted for without assuming that the phenomena in question are fundamentally the same or even similar to the phenomena people refer to when they use emotion words to characterize subjective emotional feelings (like feeling afraid, angry, or sad). This approach shifts the focus away from questions about whether emotions that humans consciously experience (feel) are also present in other mammals, and toward questions about the extent to which circuits and corresponding functions that are relevant to the field of emotion and that are present in other mammals are also present in humans. And by reassembling ideas about emotion, motivation, reinforcement, and arousal in the context of survival circuits, hypotheses emerge about how organisms negotiate behavioral interactions with the environment in process of dealing with challenges and opportunities in daily life.
Is this really new info? To me it has long been clear that emotions are an expression of instinct, and that these, alloyed with reason in humans, are distinct from those of animals. Or do we just need all this tortured reasoning to overcome modern assumptions that conflate humans and animals, emotion and reason?
Dec 8, 2016 01:54 AM
