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Brains and Emotions - CogSci

March 24, 20242 minutes readnotes cognitive-science omscs

# 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).

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