Emotion as Body Representation

Similar conclusions are reached by the neurobiological studies of Antonio Damasio, who is focusing on the relation between memory, emotions and consciousness. What is novel about his approach is the distinction between emotions and "feelings". A feeling is a private experience of an emotion, that cannot be observed by anybody else. An emotion is the brain process that we perceive as a feeling. An emotion can be observed by others because it yields visible effects (whether the facial expression or a movement) and because it arises from a brain process that can be observed and measured.

The difference is crucial. Emotions are fixed genetically, to a large extent: evolution has endowed us with a basic repertory of emotions that help us survive. My personality (which is mostly shaped by my interaction with the environment) may determine how I express and react to those emotions, but the emotions that I feel are the same of my whole species. Emotion is a genetically-driven response to a stimulus: when that stimulus occurs (for example, a situation of danger), a region of the brain generates an emotion (fear) that is spread through the brain and the body via the nervous system and therefore causes a change in the state of both the brain and the rest of the body. This change of state is meant to somehow cope with the stimulus. Some emotions are acquired during development (eg, through social interaction) but they too are grounded in the universal, primary emotions of the species.

Therefore the relationship between the individual and the environment that has been posited by many thinkers as the cause of emotions is here reduced to the interaction between the body and the brain, which is only indirectly related to the interaction between the organism and the environment. Emotion is, indeed, about homeostatic regulation, is indeed about maintaining equilibrium, but the equilibrium is, more specifically, between external stimuli and internal representations.

Feelings, on the contrary, are perceptions. Damasio argues that feelings are views of the body's internal organs: feelings are percepts. This follows from his view of what the mind is: the mind is about the body. The neural processes that I experience as "my mind" are about the representation of my body in the brain. The mental requires the existence of a body, and not only because it has to be contained in something. Feelings express this function of the mind. This also explains why we cannot control the feelings of emotions: we can't because we can't change the state of our body, or, better, we can control emotions to the extent that we can change the state of our body that caused that emotion.

Of course, that representation of the body is always present in the brain, but it is mostly dormant. It takes a specific stimulus to trigger it and generate an emotion, which in turn will yield a feeling.

William James had already argued that feelings are a reflection of a change in the state of the body. Damasio gives it a detailed model: first an external stimulus triggers certain regions of the brain, then those regions cause an emotion, then the emotion spreads around the body and causes a change in the state of the body, and finally the "mind" perceives that change of state as a feeling.

Since feelings are percepts, they must be considered as cognitive as any other percept, as cognitive as an image or as a word.