The Godly Amygdala

[Isn’t it amazing, now to read about the brain and have a visual image of what it is we are talking about?!]
We have arrived at our concluding chapter of Le Doux and much was learned until this point and much is still open to discussion. I wonder if we will ever know for certain and how helpful it may be in our advancement and aid us at selfcontrol?
Le Doux has now turned our attention to the feeling of the emotion, and by doing so has come a full circle from where he began. He is zooming in on the picture of emotions with feelings in the foreground. He emphasizes with his ‘simple idea’ that we need to understand conscious experiences in order to grasp what and where subjective emotions arise, and vice versa. I think this is crucial in understanding the theory he builds upon this base, in which working memory becomes more than just a short momentary memory system, but rather is a storage system and an active processing mechanism necessary in conscious thought. Stephan Kosslyn adds: ‘also the interplay between information that is stored temporarily and a larger body of stored knowledge’ is part of the ways in which the working memory intertwines information, like a puzzle maker. Is this not one of the most fundamental points of being a conscious human being; having the ability to place immediate received information into the idea of what the world should be or is like? Take the idea of the snake, if we have fear because we know by some previous knowledge that this animal might harm us we will be frightened at its sight. But what when the snake is just a log and we are convinced it is a snake, is our fear response not as valid or real to the feeler same as if the stimulus would be a real snake? What is it that makes our emotional body correspond with reality, and where does our mind play tricks on our emotional body?
Another interesting point is the idea that different buffers (=potential inputs in working memory) which are combined with long term memory, seem to me to be the reasoning to why people react and differ emotionally in the same experience. It is akin to the idea that two people can walk down the same road and ‘pick up’ completely different reflections. This, in the emotional world, would be due to the fact that the prefrontal cortex and the anterior cingulated are both part of the frontal lobe attention network: ‘a cognitive system involved in selective attention, mental resource allocation, decision making, and voluntary movement control.’ The connection between the outside input world and the interior emotional processing amygdala, is what enables us to be conscious of an experienced event; as I understand it, the mental self needs to be a conscious agent of the event for the emotion to affect us feelingly. Can an unconscious emotion occur? Or do we need consciousness to have an emotional experience as we have named the process of feeling? What about animals such as fish, can they have emotions that they are not conscious of, or are they aware of the feeling but it cannot be compared to an experience as such?
The idea that some part of consciousness remains inaccessible to us is overwhelmingly complex. If some of the subsymbolic processing remains unintelligible to us as the conscious agents, it must be concluded that there probably is no possibility of full awareness and this is our curse and our blessing. It is what most perplexes and frustrates us in trying to understand the phenomena of our mind, but it also would be very exasperating if every time we wanted to take a step, we would be aware of the dialogue between the muscles and brain. Hence my title, it seems like the amygdala’s activation and projection is what makes it possible for the forebrain to react to arousal. And as said the prolonged arousal is an indicator to emotional stimuli and has probably to do with the involvement of the amygdala. What I wonder is what agent if not our conscious decides upon a ‘meaningful’ stimuli, and when arousal must or mustn’t occur? By Le Doux’s theory the body is the ‘feedback’ to the amygdala and not the other way around as has also been argued. The body responds by visceral and behavioral expression giving feedback to the brain as emotional agent. However let’s remember, Le Doux is ‘placing his bets’ in favor of the bodies feeling in reacting to emotions. Much more will need to be solved in the future and I think evolutions will decide when best to let us in on its grand plan.