Brain #

• Brain has 4 major parts
• If brain is so descriptively known, why mind?
• Comparison with cell phones - made up of hardware, but the behaviour cannot be explained with hardware - another level of abstraction
• The neurons that shaped civilization
  • Mirror neurons - subset of mirror neurons: Send signal to do the same thing when we see other person doing an action
  • Culture and civilization: people imitated and emulated other people's actions, e.g. fire, tool making.
  • Polar bear takes 1000s of years to develop fur, humans imitate by seeing elders wearing fur to protect from cold
  • Empathise touch, but skin receptors say don't worry it's not an actual touch
  • Humans "connected" in a way
• Mirror neurons (biological evolution) ↔ imitation, empathy (cognitive evolution) ↔ civilization (cultural evolution)
• Extending CRUM (computer representational understanding of mind)

Emotions #

• Mental and physiological state associated with feelings
• Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions: (+ and -)
  • joy and sadness
  • acceptance and disgust
  • fear and anger
  • surprise and anticipation
• Theories
  • James-Lange
    • First physiological arousal -> emotion
  • Cannon-Bard
    • Physiological and emotions come together
  • Schachter-Singer
    • Physiological arousal -> think -> emotion
  • Lazarus
    • Think -> both
• Stress
  • Eustress: short-term, positive
  • Distress: short or long negative
  • Hyperstress: More for one person to handle
  • Hypostress: Less, bored
• Optimal stress: eustress
• Emotions in CRUM?
  • Emotion as concentration of attention
  • Short-term and long-term memory
  • Emotion leads to allocation of resources to a single thing (e.g. fear)
  • Emotion focuses on one task and puts it in the short-term memory to give it the highest attention (appraisal - focus - action).