Are Emotions The First Layer of Meaning in Mind-Space?

Are emotions the primary filters or categories for meaning in experience?
Are experienced sense data recorded into long-term-memory and rendered recallable only after they are tagged with emotional meanings? Learning and remembering may require us to sort among experiences, sorting them by our associations to their emotional meanings, in order to create our knowledge and understanding of the world. I suspect that we depend upon the strength of our emotional responses to direct and mediate the assignment of experiences to memory, and for building connections among those experiences.

Feelings and emotions appear to define and determine the meaning of sensory events (or percepts). It is hard to think of any exceptions. Mathematical thinking, the realm of ‘purest’ logic, comes first to mind as a system of thought so removed from everyday life that emotion could hardly play any role in mathematical thinking. Were it true it might offer proof that this, at least, might be the exception where emotion holds no sway in meaning or memory. However, mathematicians are often moved or motivated by the beauty and elegance of great mathematical propositions. Mathematicians and musicians (music is a first cousin to mathematics) share similar aesthetics of form, order, proposition (musical theme), development, and resolution. Our aesthetic responses to music are rich with emotional overtones and impressions. To be motivated by these same aesthetic qualities in mathematics, engineering, physics, chemistry, or any ‘pure’ science may provoke deep emotional responses to discoveries of the order and patterns in the universe we explore: Q.E.D.; ahhh!

Indeed we have subtle emotions associated with even the most erudite and abstract subjects. Everything passes through the evaluating filter of our emotional self. What passes for intellectual opinion always contains necessary trace-elements of feelings and emotion. These felt attachments maintain our point of view and our biases, keeping us imbedded in a familiar context. Emotions provide the ground of meaning that binds us, through belief and created meaning, to the lessons born of experience. These same feelings also tend to set limits on our intellectual efforts. The history of the sciences supplies many examples of theories and beliefs held too long in the face of new contradictory evidence. Scientists (perhaps especially scientists) tenaciously hold to convictions. We hold on to our emotionally held preconceptions and biases sometimes at great cost to ourselves, society, and to the truth. Intellect is not easily dissected away from emotional belief, from bias, or from the doings of the unconscious. The process of first storing experience and later sorting experience by it’s meaning probably dominates and precedes all higher conscious intellectual criteria for sorting patterns (and writing theories).

A Hypotheses of Value, Valence, and Vector:
Feelings and emotions may be envisioned as a many-dimensioned contour map of all the vector-potentials, values, and valences (hills or valleys of experienc) that are derived from clusters of meaningful experiences in the experiential history of a personality.

Some mind experiments and examples of what I am describing here:

Value:
Very—very strong smell, give it a 9!
Emotional value may be the primary sorting criterion for experience. While incoming sensory data must be processed in the functional area for perception to become cognition and concept, (for instance, in the visual cortex for vision), I should like to suggest that lower brainstem emotional responses (pain, pleasure, satisfaction of bodily-need) may somehow be required to begin, tag, or set, first order sorting within the brain. A strong emotional reaction to an experience may attach a scaled value to that experience.

The value of an experience may be scaled according to the degree of need we have for that experience. If there exists some need at any level in the life cycle of the individual, and that need is either satisfied or denied by a particular experience, then the value of that experience may correspond to the it’s fit with the range of needs present in the individual at that time. Needs may occur in many forms, they may be genetically programmed, developmental, life cycle related, psychological, or physical needs and hungers. If the organism is driven by it’s state to perform an action, and that action is satisfied by an experience, then the impression of that experience may come to bear a value related to the urgency and importance of the drive. Survival, for instance, is almost always a primary ‘drive’; any event that secures or threatens survival is likely to acquire a place high on the value scale. Another way to think of value is as the latent strength of an impression, or a weighting, or even as a measure of force or charge.

Valence:
Sweet and Delicious smell, I like it.
A strong emotional reaction to experience may also attach a simple valence to the incoming sensory impression, directing the incorporation of this new experience into the overall patterns in the brain. Once acquired, and established in the brains patterns of activity, each experience is recallable partly by it’s valence (such as the simple example: positive-pleasure or negative-pain).

Vector:
Go-to: strong/sweet/delicious/smells, & go everywhere similar from there.
Go and interact among smells and other impressions that are very very strong and smell sweet and delicious and connect with all of them. Find other places I should look for this experience. Is there anything else like it?)

It is through emotionally valued and valenced sensory channels that experience is vectored to memory, and memory is vectored to awareness.
The hungry expatriate yearning to return home may describe the smells, foods, sounds, and sights of his home-place with great vividness and feeling.

Perhaps emotions and feelings are not only represented by or at memory loci or nodes that have potential, but by also by the pathway potentials which connect them. Emotional processing might initially allow impressions to be set, and later to be recalled through dynamics that combine the values, valences, and vector potentials present within the whole neural-network. Emotionally bound impressions would thus initially determine, and also be represented at a still higher order in the brain, by the result of the dynamic interactions of all potentials present within the connections among the many groups of locations for each of the impressed signals, and for all signals having any similarity along any dimension or quality. This high level combinatorial process may provide the process substrate for language; and at a higher level —— for abstraction; and even higher still —— for abstract metaphor. This highest level may be one of the substrates for invention and creativity.

According to this hypothesis, information would not then be stored only in the nodes and connections themselves, but less tangibly, as a mathematical function of the probabilities in the network connecting them. These connections are not real physical transmission lines or neural matter, but a flowing probabilistic and chaotic pattern of patterns. This is quite different from suggesting that impressions in the brain are synomorphic with the physical connections among nerve cells. They may instead be equivalent to the path-potential among or between any set(s) of points in the network, no matter how distant, complex, or seemingly unrelated.

Node Value/Valence/Vector- Potentials are a High Order.
Path Value/Valence/Vector- Potentials are a Still Higher Order.
Are there Still Higher Orders?

One may fruitfully re-examine all the foregoing arguments in this paper from this perspective, and wonder: Are there still more complex relationships between nodal-potentials and path-potentials that may be proposed and discovered than I have suggested? In any case I am at least willing to assume, lacking further clues or evidence, that path-potential is a higher order force in the dynamic of brain function than is node-potential.

Comments

[Nova Spivack]

Your point about the valence and vector is good -- actually it defines a multidimensional space in which memories are stored and can later be easily looked up. There could be any number of "valence dimensions" for good-bad, pleasure-pain, wan't-don't want, like-dislike, etc. There are also dimensions for each major feature or attribute of the memory (the nouns that describe what it is such as "an odor" or "an image" or "a person" etc.). So now you have multiple dimensions. Every memory is essentially a point -- or a set connected points (a network) within that space. Retrieval then becomes very fast and efficient. It is also easy to do associations because all memories with similar valences and attributes intersect at various points. So at every intersection "spreading activation" can take place leading to nearby (intersecting) memories being recalled. I like the idea of representing a memory as a graph of connected nodes in higher-order feature-space. This is probably what the brain is doing. I would even go so far as to suggest that many of the peculiarities of our thought processes may be simple side effects of the graphs and the algorithm used to pack them in.

[Nova Spivack]

Interesting point. Actually this could be tested experimentally by giving 2 groups of subjects a memorization task, each using a different type of memorization routine. In group A they use a traditional mnemonic method such as assigning images or phrases to things to remember. In group B we they use a novel memorization scheme that associates emotional states with things they need to remember. The we can test them on recall and see who performs better. Note that it's always interesting to test both for near-term and long-term recall. I have a hypothesis the emotionally-charged memories will persist longer.