Gut and Emotions?
An emotion is a collection of bodily responses resulting from the activation of specific brain systems by particular mental images. Feeling an emotion is thus the experiencing of these bodily responses versus the images that caused them.
However, feeling is also the continuous monitoring of how your body reacts to certain specific thought patterns and images. Thus, there are various feelings:
- based on emotions, such as happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust, which correspond to pre-set neural profiles of bodily responses. Parts of this body landscape are now in the foreground of our attention;
- based on subtle variations of the 5 above emotions and pre-set neural profiles just mentioned, such as melancholy, panic or shyness. These subtle secondary feelings and their neural connections are tuned by experience, and respond to intricate cognitive content;
- background feelings, which are representations of the body states between emotions. The body signals reach the insula and other regions, whereby the right hemisphere dominates over the left. They can contribute to a certain mood. Our attention is only drawn to it when we feel a certain impression or sensation. That’s why it is called background.
Discovering internal + external chemicals causing the neural activity of emotions and moods, does not explain the mechanism of how or why we feel happy or sad. There may be 3 players involved in this game:
- the causative entity,
- the representation of the reactive body in the brain,
- momentary cognitive representation of 1 + 2 combined, running parallel and constantly receiving and evaluating feedback from 1 and 2.
