Kryklywy, J.H., Ehlers, M.R., Anderson, A.K. & Todd, R.M. (2020) From architecture to evolution: Multisensory evidence of decentralized emotion. Trends in Cognitive Science. IN PRESS
TICS paper through the eyes of the 1st author’s mother
Human feelings are considered to come from the brain, which makes choices about information from our senses to decide how we should feel. In this belief, how we feel about something is not only driven by sensing the thing itself, but also by information about our history with that thing or situation and about the situation we are now in. The parts of the brain deciding those feelings make the choices of good and bad after sensory information is already in the brain. This idea was built on years of people trying to understand feelings using sight, and what sight-information does in the brain, as a stand-in for all senses.
We believe, in senses that are not sight, that we may already know whether stuff is good or bad without using our brain at all!
Studies show humans decide about the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ of things immediately, right as we sense them. Parts of the brain that control how we feel are not second stages of understanding, after the parts of the brain that allow us to hear, see, smell and touch. The ‘feelings’ parts of the brain already know about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ straight from the body itself.
More and more people have been showing that the senses decide about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ before the information reaches the brain, not only in humans, but in other animals as well. Since this seems to be true in other animal, it is most probably how brains worked in the long-ago animals that became humans too, back in time when sensing the world and having feelings about it were the same.
A new understanding about feelings, made by looking at all senses, in both today’s humans and from our long history (really long… hundreds of hundreds of hundreds of years long), says that feelings about the world go beyond the brain, and start as early as the moment our body can sense it.
