EMOTIONS AS BRAIN IMAGES?
Emotions: brain images of bodily states?
Neuroscience states that light reflected from objects activates our retinal receptors in patterns. These patterns are processed as 3D visual images of those objects.
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: 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 neural patterns are like ‘markings’ of ‘images or sensations’ from the body, in Gr:’soma’, and can thus be called
‘somatic markers’
