Emotions Network
PART V
THE NETWORK OF EMOTIONS
Dr. Antonio Damásio, a neuroscientist and clinician at UCLA, has published a few books on his team’s "body to brain" feedback research on people with brain damage. these decades of experiences have led him to conclude that:
Patterns in the external world correspond with patterns of nerve cell activity in the brain. We experience these patterns as thoughts and images.
Our senses of vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell function as patterns of nerve activity that only represent the state of our external environment.
Emotions are patterns of nerve activity that only represent the state of the internal milieu. When feeling fear, all neural and hormonal feedback from our body is recorded by our brains as patterns of nerve cell activity.
These patterns are like ‘markings’ of ‘images or sensations’ from the body (Gr. ‘soma’). Damásio named them therefore
‘somatic markers’.
