Emotions not innately programmed in our brains subcortical circuits: Study

The reaction is never decided, it goes with the flow of state of mind. According to a new study, it has been found that emotions are not innately programmed in our brains, but in fact, are cognitive states resulting from the gathering of information.

In the reports that were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The research team has observed that "the brain mechanisms that give rise to conscious emotional feelings are not fundamentally different from those that give rise to perceptual conscious experiences."

"We argue that conscious experiences, regardless of their content, arise from one system in the brain," said Joseph LeDoux from New York University's center for neural science.

"Specifically, the differences between emotional and non-emotional states are the kinds of inputs that are processed by a general cortical network of cognition, a network essential for conscious experiences," LeDoux added.

The findings in the research suggest that emotions are innately programmed in the brain's subcortical circuits.

As a result, emotions are often treated as different from cognitive states of consciousness or in other word emotions are not a result to what our brain takes in from our observations but instead, it is intrinsic to our makeup.

However, after taking into account existing scholarship on both cognition and emotion, the researchers saw a quite different architecture for emotions - one more centered on process than on composition.

They concluded that emotions are "higher-order states" embedded in cortical circuits.

Therefore, unlike present theories, they see emotional states as similar to other states of consciousness.

This report was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 
(With PTI Inputs)