Reddit mentions of Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (Series in Affective Science)

Anything from Oliver Sacks always worth reading imo.

• Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain!
  
  
• The Compassionate Brain: A Revolutionary Guide to Developing Your Intelligence to Its Full Potential: How Empathy Creates Intelligence!
  
  
• Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain!
  
  
• Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions!
  
  
• In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind!
  
  
• The Man with a Shattered World: The History of a Brain Wound!
  
  not really neuroscience, but interesting imho:
  
  
• How the Mind Works!
  
  
  *(hopes formatting works)

I just wanted to add something that I felt would be fitting here. This is simply my perspective on the collective unconscious so take it as you will, but it seems relevant.

I see the collective unconscious as being a good basis for spiritual ideas, and I have my own beliefs based around it. The reason I see it as a good basis is 1.) much of it is empirically supported, and 2.) the idea of a collective unconscious itself to some extent implies a universal realm of existence.

First I would like to briefly cover relevant literature which substantiates the collective unconscious. The point of this is to show which aspects of this idea are supported enough to branch off of. The information I’m going to sum up is from the field of research called Affective Neuroscience, which was coined by Jakk Panksepp, who I believe is Jungian himself based on his reference to archetypes, and both Freud and Jung. I believe his book is a must read for all Jung enthusiasts and I’ll be linking it below. After this I’ll present my little theory of what this means from a spiritual perspective.

Summation of Relevant Literature

Affective Neuroscience is a field of study which combines three major disciplines of psychology: Cognitive, Behaviorial, and Neuroscience. What the study’s and experiments have generally shown is that there are distinct anatomical neural structures which illicit consistent patterns of behavior in animals when stimulated, and are shared to varying degrees by all species (the degree of variation becomes larger as species become farther apart on the phylogenetic tree, with the nervous system becoming more complex rostrally as it progresses through species). On top of this, due to the nature of the behavior patterns showing approach/avoidance tendencies, it’s reasonable to conclude that it is an emotional response which is evoked from stimulation that influences the corresponding pattern of behavior.

To simplify, this shows that organisms are preprogrammed with mechanisms to properly respond to environmental triggers. These systems were refined and passed down through millennia’s of adaptations. In a sense, these systems are an ancestral record or bank of knowledge, passed down through generations of offspring to better equip them for the obstacles presented by the physical world. These systems inspire organisms to hunt, forage, seek security, reproduce, as well as many other things.

To show an example of how it works in practice, one of these systems is responsible for dealing with danger; the fight or flight system (more broadly speaking, FEAR). This systems goal is to help organisms detect threats in the environment and react accordingly. Now imagine an archetypal situation: you are hiking through the woods when all of sudden you hear a suspicious crackle in the leaves not to far from you. Upon looking you notice your being stalked by a mountain lion. You freeze up and your heart beats faster as your body prepares to run or fight. What happened here? First, your perception was triggered by an environmental trigger, the mountain lion. Without you putting any effort, your body naturally prepares you to deal with this threat by altering your physiology to better facilitate active movement. On top of this, your phenomenologically struck by an overwhelming sense of fear, your body’s way of not letting you ignore the immediate threat your faced with; painting your perception with a relevant and meaningful narrative: the hunted.

The Parallels

I will now attempt to draw the connections between this information and Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious to show what aspects of it are empirically supported. First, you must understand the concept that brain and mind are intimately connected. Monism or dualism are not important here, just understand that when something occurs in the brain there is a reaction in the mind, and vice versa. Now for the connections:

1.) The neural systems detailed above are shared by all species to varying degrees. What this implies is that there is a template of mind, which is indeed true. All minds share these unconscious operating systems which interpret environmental events in a meaningful way, and evoke a proper response out of the organism. With these systems being homologous throughout species, we could reasonably conclude that these systems make up the neural/physical representation of the collective unconscious.

2.) These systems imbue our perception with meaning. The idea of meaning is almost indistinguishable from archetypes, with Jung describing how these unconscious contents are essentially the source of all meaning. And just as archetypes are all around us, the products of these neural systems are too. It seems these systems project archetypal narratives onto the world around us to allow us to move through the world in a meaningful way. This is seen in the mountain lion example, with the fight or flight system projecting the archetype of the beast onto the mountain lion. This could also be seen in the systems responsible for love projecting the archetype of the anima/animus onto the object of desire.

Spiritual Speculation (Creation Story)

Based on these parallels, the idea that the collective unconscious is universally shared and the source of all meaning is not at all unreasonable, and is empirically supported to a large degree. So we now have a base to branch off of: there exists and aspect of consciousness that is universal and home to all which is meaningful. On the other hand, we have physical reality which exists independent of this realm of consciousness.

From this we can form a sort of story. There exists two worlds: an objective reality, cold and void; and a subjective realm, deep and rich with meaning. Objective reality is finite and exists in certainty, while the subjective realm is amorphous and infinite, being simultaneously beautiful and horrid. Between this chasm of worlds exists a bridge: organisms. The organism is a part of the objective world existing as a sort of vessel for the subjective realm to inhabit. As the subjective realm inhabits this vessel it takes on all its finities by conforming to the structure of its biological limitations (for example, sensory organs). In doing so, the subjective realm takes on the form of an individual, in a sense becoming a soul. The soul walks its path through the objective world, experiencing it from the shoes of its vessel, in the process turning the once cold dead world into a place of meaning and potential, leaving behind it stories of good and bad. But in the end all vessels face the inevitable faith of reality: death. And all souls return to there source, the heavens and hells of the collective unconscious.

Link to Jakk Panksepps Affective Neuroscience:

https://www.amazon.com/Affective-Neuroscience-Foundations-Emotions-Science/dp/019517805X

So I think a natural progression to this topic is to ask "What makes human intelligence unique?"

Again, this is a very active area of research. By no means is there a single consensus. We are constantly learning new things about ourselves and animals.

Animals are complex beings, and scientists for the past few decades have come to understand that the divide between us and them is not black and white, but rather a continuum of shared abilities. Animals exhibit a lot of similar behaviours and can even do things that we can't do (even on a cognitive level). They have morals; they have emotions; they make and modify tools; they can solve multi-step problems; they have culture and traditions; they can lie and cheat; they know when they are being treated unfairly; they mourn the dead; they have complex communication systems; they feel empathy; and some recognized themselves in a mirror (e.g. mirror test) and are able to distinguish self from other. So these aspects of intelligence and cognition, and very likely many other aspects that we have not fully explored, are not unique to humans. Given the complexity of other animals, it is very likely were are not the only species to have consciousness, that is to say other animals also have theory of mind. It may be more akin to the consciousness of a 3-5 year old, but none the less, they still know themselves from others. So what does make us unique? What led to our unique kind of intelligence?

We know of some factors that contributed to our awareness and unique intelligence as compared to other living species. It is important to know that this is a very active area of study in many different disciplines (psychology, biology, animal behaviour, psychiatry, physiology, anthropology, neurology, linguistics, genetics, archeology...).

• Traits we inherited from our distant ancestors. Obviously all species are a cumulation of inherited traits. Who we are today is largely due to who "we" were in the distant past. We inherited a strong tendency to be a very social species from our mammalian ancestry. Mammals are social beings, humans included. We inherited opposable thumbs from our early primate ancestors. Humans are not the only species with opposable thumbs so it is not a trait that is unique to our species. However, the inheritance of thumbs enabled us and the other primates to develop fine motor skills like precision grip. This enables us to manipulate objects, and make/modify tools. Humans also inherited an upright bipedal posture from our early ancestors. Humans are not the only bipedal species (after all, all birds are bipedal!) but our upright posture has given us many advantages, namely that it frees our hands to do other tasks.
  
  
• Brain/body size ratio & exceptional brain gyrification is a somewhat useful indicator of how intelligence a species is. The correlation is decent among related mammal species, but it breaks down when applied to distantly related animals. It underestimates intelligence in heavy animals like horses and overestimates small animals like mice and birds. You also have to consider what the animal's brain has evolved for. Bird's typically have very large brains for their body but may not be exceptionally smart. A lot of that large bird brain is used for flight calculations and isn't available for higher level processing. Fruit flies have enormous brains compared to their mass, but that brain is simply too small to have any real thought processes. Humans are highly intelligent because they have an extremely large brain for their normal body mass and that brain has evolved specifically to perform complex thought. Size isn't the only factor, scientists also consider the degree of specialization, complexity of neural connections, and degree of brain gyrification. Humans score high on all these physical qualifiers associated with increased intelligence.
  
  
• Two cognitive traits thought to be unique to humans - shared intentionality and cumulative culture. Shared intentionality "sometimes called ‘we’ intentionality, refers to collaborative interactions in which participants share psychological states with one another". It goes one step beyond being able to solve problems as a group, it involves anticipating the needs of others and the situation in order to solve a common goal. This requires incredible foresight, flexibility, and excellent problem solving skills. It requires an almost hyper-social group structure. We couldn't stick 100 chimpanzees on a plane and expect it to land in one piece...but you can stick 100 human strangers and all, for the most part, get along just fine. This level of cooperation is rarely seen among other animals (save for the Eusocial insects, naked mole rats, and perhaps Callitrichid monkeys). Shared-intentionality enables us to achieve what other species cannot. Cumulative culture goes beyond the cultures exhibited by other animals. Other animals have culture where [non-essential] traditions are passed on from one generation to the next and are typically modified slowly over many generations. Humans also have traditions, but these are past on much more easily between individuals. Moreover, these traditions are quickly modified, almost unlimited times within a single generation. We are able to rapidly build upon the ideas of others and modify these ideas to suit new problems. Moreover, our adults, as compared to the adults of other species, are much better at learning and retaining new skills or traditions. Generally speaking, the age old adage "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" applies well to the non-human animal kingdom.
  
  These two traits, shared intentionality and cumulative culture, led to the development of other aspects of our being which are unique (e.g language). Everything else that we can do is just a happy by-product of these two traits: being able to go to the moon, or build a super dam, or create art, or think in the abstract, maths, industrial agriculture...Those things are by-products of our level of cognition. Our uniqueness is derived from shared intentionality and cumulative culture plus a couple of random physical traits that we were lucky enough to inherit from our distant ancestors - a big brain, bipedalism, and opposable thumbs. We are not the only species with a large brain-to-body ratio, we are not the only bipedal species, and we are certainly not the only species with opposable thumbs - these are physical characteristics that we inherited from our distant primate ancestors. These traits built the foundation for what was to come.
  
  Whatever the pressure around 40,000-50,000 years ago we notice a significant shift in the archeological record. All of a sudden humans are making cave art, our hunting tools are changing rapidly, we began to engage in long distant trade, we made jewellery and we even had symbolic figures - perhaps the seeds of language. This is known as the period of behavioural modernity. Not only did these humans look like us, they acted like us too. Its hypothesized that an infant from this time could be raised in a modern context with little to no intellectual deficit...we wouldn't be able to pick them out of a crowd. Humans haven't gotten more intelligent over time. It is hypothesized that a human from 50,000 years ago is anatomically and behaviourally modern.
  
  So, if we aren't any smarter - why do we have cell phones and galaxy print jeggings and people didn't way back then? Increasing complexity - we know more than people in the past because we've built upon what they've learned. Humans have always been smart, and our great benefit is that we build on other people's discoveries. Someone figured out how to domesticate plants, someone figured out how to sew cloth, someone figured out how to weave materials, someone figured out synthetic materials and dyes, someone put it all together in those jeggings. We just build on what other people have found out. This is cumulative culture in action. Humans today are not more intelligent than humans living 50,000 years ago - we both have the same potential. The difference between us and them is we have a wealth of shared knowledge to draw upon, and they did not. Humans 5000 years from now could be asking the very same question..."Why didn't they invent warp travel, its so easy!"...well we don't have the wealth of another 5000 years of experience and scientific study to draw upon. We only have what our ancestors gave us. As more and more knowledge is accumulated we should in theory progress faster and faster (without consideration to other limitations to progress).

re: studies of animal emotions

>Jaak Panksepp (2004, 2005) has been conducting a research program that he calls “affective neuroscience” and that encompasses direct study of animal emotions (2004), exemplified for example in the experimental investigation of rats “laughing” and seeking further contact in response to tickling by humans (Panksepp & Burgdorf 2003). Over several decades, his work (reviewed in Panksepp 2005) has elucidated the neuro- and molecular-physiological bases of several ‘core emotional systems’ including ‘seeking’, ‘fear’, ‘rage’, ‘lust’, ‘care’, ‘play’, and ‘panic’. Panksepp argues that these are shared by all mammals, and may be more widely shared among vertebrates.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-animal/#currsci-emotion

Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

Affective consciousness: Core emotional feelings in animals and humans

'Laughing’ rats and the evolutionary antecedents of human joy? Physiology and Behavior

But yes, the subjective experiences of others, whether human or other kinds of animal are rather hidden from us, so we should withhold absolute credence concerning our beliefs about what's going upstairs in their minds. But, plausibly, morality obliges us to be careful in situations like these, not hazardous, so we shouldn't harm or kill these animals without good reason on the assumption that these animals lack what we may believe to be crucially morally relevant properties that we are actually barred from investigating fully at this time.

Affective Neuroscience, by Jaak Panksepp is a very heavy treatment of the topic, but very good.

The Feeling of What Happens, by Antonio Damasio is a little more coffee table/pop sciencey, but he's a very accomplished neuroscientist who is drawing on his clinical experiences.

Put simply, though, "affect," or emotion, is a subconscious body state. Hunger, fear, desire, rage, sadness, happiness/satisfaction are all collections of biological functions which place our organism in a state appropriate to its environment. Emotion is a fairly primitive degree of control over the entire biological system. Right above reflex.

Feeling is the conscious appreciation of your body experiencing one of these states, and attributing it to a specific perceptual stimulus, or abstracting one from experience.

We as humans also have a further degree of abstraction, where we can imagine ourselves feeling an emotion, and precipitate the physical response as if we were experiencing the stimulus. This is the basis for the emotional weight of things like art, music, and empathy.

I know I'm late to this conversation, but I'd like to add that animals indeed do feel emotions. Dr. Jaak Panksepp has studied this in depth.

Thank you for looking after Tugboat. He's fortunate to have found his way to you. Raccoons are a very demanding animal so it takes a very dedicated individual to be able to have them in their life.

This is going to be a bit of a long post because I feel you have a lot of great questions.

1. Every animal, including humans, is a combination of innate behaviours and learned behaviours. Some species rely more on innate behaviour and instinct (e.g. insects) and some species rely more on learned behaviours and traits from experience (e.g. primates and humans).
   
2. Every animal, including humans, is influenced by both their genes and their environment. Ultimately these two things are what comes together to give each individual its unique Phenotype. "The phenotype of an organism is the composite of the organism's observable characteristics or traits, including its morphology or physical form and structure; its developmental processes; its biochemical and physiological properties; its behavior, and the products of behavior, for example, a bird's nest. An organism's phenotype results from two basic factors: the expression of an organism's genetic code, or its genotype, and the influence of environmental factors, which may interact, further affecting phenotype."
   
3. Animals, but especially mammals, have conserved biological and physiological mechanisms that govern emotional states. In other words animals feel and they do have emotions. Affective Neuroscience: the foundations of human and animal emotions explores this in greater detail. Suffice to say animals feel pain, attraction, love, pleasure, anger, rage, frustration, sadness, depression...they are emotional beings.
   
4. Consciousness is a whole other topic, which I can explore if you like. Suffice to say that some animals are conscious and some probably are not. The list of species that exhibit traits that indicate to us that they are conscious beings is growing.

Affective Neuroscience.

Hm. The website says it's from this book.
http://www.amazon.com/Affective-Neuroscience-Foundations-Emotions-Science/dp/019517805X?tag=quartz07-20
Jaak Panksepp

It was published in 2004. So that data is 2003 and earlier. This isn't new info at all.

Which made me wonder why it was posted, followed by an, "Oh..." I question whether rats are actually doing something like human seeking. On the human side, I think we're zapping ourselves because there's something there. We don't know what exactly but it does have some positive (and negative) effects. It's seeking something better, not just inflicting harm because there's nothing else left in the environment.