Cognition and Emotion: Interactions

Hello. I'm Dean Burnett.

I'm an honorary research associate that cardiff

University psychology school,

I'm a doctor of neuroscientist and a full time author.

This lecture is about the fundamental link between

emotion and cognition.

What do we mean when we say emotion and cognition,

cognition is the logical rational conscious thinking

process our self awareness, our assessment,

our forward planning, the things we communicate via

language, our ability to think as we would recognize it.

That's what we mean when we say cognition in this context.

Emotion is, our feelings,

our instinctive reaction how we feel about things,

largely a subconscious process. I don't think about anger, fear,

sadness. These are all emotion as we recognize them.

And this lecture is about how these things interact.

It's regularly assumed that emotion and cognition separate

distinct processes, sort of like,

two neighbors who share a garden fence connected, but,

clearly different, different things doing different stuff. However,

more up to date research has revealed this to be largely

incorrect because in truth, emotion,

and cognition overlap a great deal and in any interest in

ways. For one, cognition,

like the ability to think rationally evolved from emotions.

Emotions are essentially a way for the brain process and react

to what's happening to it, what it's experiencing.

Many more primitive or cognitively less complex

species, than us, don't show any sign we've been able to

think, as we know it, not

they don't show the obvious cognition,

but the show behaviors and responses that are strongly

suggestive or at least an emotional awareness and

ability. So,

while rational thinking is relatively recent achievement

of the human brain in evolutionary terms.

Emotions have guided us for a lot longer throughout our history.

It's reasonable to conclude that,

what we recognize as modern cognition evolved from emotions therefore,

like how the head of a mushroom grows out on the stem.

And much like how we share most of our DNA with chimpanzees,

close evolutionary cousins,

so emotions and cognition have a lot fundamentals in common.

It can also be said that Cognition needs emotion in

order to exist and function as it does.

While cognitive processes like rational thought and self

awareness are very impressive and sophisticated in the

neurological sense, they're also be demanded and often,

time consuming in terms of how the brain works and the

resources it requires.

So it's logistically impossible for our cognition to deal with

everything our brain needs to do at any given moment.

As a result, emotions guide us, a great deal.

Influence a great deal of our internal processes at the

subconscious level,

leaving cognition free to focus on important things,

at the conscious level.

It's also been said that emotions allow us to think

logically at all. Why do we think logically and rationally?

Because doing so often feels good, feels rewarding on some

level. And feeling good,

feeling centered reward is an emotional reaction, an emotion.

So rather than being an obstacle or holding it back,

Cognition depends on emotion in so many ways.

Is also evidenced on the anatomical level. For a long

time, it was assumed that certain parts of the brain

handle emotions, while handled cognition.

It were it was and often still is said to by many, the left

and right brain hemispheres who are responsible for logic and

emotion respectively.

We now know that that's not correct. For one,

attributing a whole brain hemisphere to one specific function,

is a very distorted view of the brain works.

But more modern researchers revealed that while there is

actually a left, right, hemisphere reference in the brain,

it's more about big picture versus fine detail processing

as in the left hemisphere SEs of the forest, and right sees the trees.

This will have some impact on cognitive emotion,

no doubt that'll be more indirect.

There's also the notion of the limbic system in the triune brain model,

which is the model which argues that we have a reptile brain,

a mammal, or limbic brain, and a human brain,

bottom middle top.

The limb the middle limbic region was assumed to be

responsible for emotions, another less complex, things,

but ones which are still more complex than basic function

like reflexes and breathing, etcetera,

which are handled by the brainstem, the reptile brain.

Once again,

more modern evidence suggests that this idea or a dedicated

brain layer for emotions is a huge oversimplification at the very least.

In truth, the more fundamental old areas of the brain, and the

complex cognitive new areas at the top,

they intermingle and interact extensively and they overlap a great deal.

So there's no real limbic system in a sense that it's an

anatomically specific thing in the brain.

You still hear the term limbic system used,

but now it more often means that the parts of the brain

that the motions without implying a specific region or location.

And as our brain scan and ability has advanced, even more complex to

proven to be wrong.

The anterior cingulate cortex is a brain region that's long

been known of many key roles in emotion process in particularly

regarding how it influences and interacts with cognition.

And it was often widely believed that this anterior

cingulate cortex handled emotional information and

cognitive information separately via separate neural systems.

But more modern evidence suggests that even here

cognitive and emotional activity overlaps and merges

more often than it doesn't.

Ultimately, as far the brain is concerned,

emotion and cognition arguably have more in common than they

don't. And in many ways,

I'll have the same thing at least at fundamental levels.

Rather than two neighbors share in the fence,

they're more like one river that forks into two different

streams before it reaches the sea.