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Is.
This gone?
Can you hear me.
Out the back?
Yes.
Speak up.
Raise the volume.
And.
I'll just speak louder.
I can't see the volume switch on this.
Is it actually coming through the thing?
Kind of.
Or I'll just try and speak Labs.
Or is it?
I'm not here to help you understand how the brain
helps you love someone like this.
We're here to try and understand a bit about how
we might try and study emotions in the brain.
And to do that, we need to define emotions in
a way that make them scientifically tractable.
And this slide tries to help you do that.
I want to consider emotions that are consistent and discrete
responses to an event of significance.
We need something that's consistent.
We need them to be discrete if we're trying to
understand how they represent in the brain.
I will argue that emotions are important because they help
direct an appropriate course of action.
The most obvious thing in this case is threat.
If you're under threat, you want to fight.
You want to flee.
You need to elevate your blood pressure so that your
body is more prepared.
You need to change your galvanic skin resistance.
You actually need to redirect the blood supply to your
body.
You need to do a bunch of things that are
associated with sympathetic arousal.
It makes sense.
Then, if you start to feel an emotion of fear
that that is associated with a physiological response.
But emotions are also important because they help organise other
aspects of cognition, not just make your body ready for
a particular course of action.
They help you maybe remember things that help you pay
attention to particular aspects of your surroundings.
In humans, we know that emotions are associated with feelings
that might feel sad.
It's a bit hard to ask an animal what feelings
they have.
So we need to, when we study and want to
understand the neuroscience of emotions, we need to examine those
emotions or those aspects of emotions which are reportable, not
those which are subjective and unavailable to scientific analysis.
And I should just mention here that you find in
the literature the word affect and emotion or affective neuroscience
used interchangeably, and it's a little bit discombobulating for the
first few times to read that.
But you just need to think of ethics and emotion
as effectively meaning the same thing.
So there are many ways of describing emotions.
I like this and it is a very influential model
of how emotions can be represented.
This model was developed by asking several hundred, maybe even
thousands of participants in the early 1980s to describe the
relationships between different named emotions, which we'll see in a
second.
And effectively, the mathematical fallout of that experiment was that
most emotions or most emotional states that people recognise could
be described as lying along a space in a space
that's formed by two axes, the two dimensional space.
And those two axes are one of arousal.
So you can vary between being aroused and being sleepy
and one of balance that is between pleasure or positive
affect and misery or negative affect.
So these two axes, it turns out, as sufficient to
describe or at least to place most of the emotional
states that we encounter.
So if we put the various words that were used
in this analysis onto this space, they all kind of
make sense.
So, for example, when you have positive valence and high
arousal, emotions that are associated with those two things, for
example, excited or astonished or delighted and depending on the
relative balance of violence and arousal, you lie at different
points in this.
Similarly, if you have positive violence but low arousal, then
you might have things like serene content at ease, things
that are associated with low arousal but still positive.
So they lie down here, low valence, sorry, low arousal
and negative valence, on the other hand, means things like
sad, gloomy, depressed, those kinds of words.
And finally, high arousal and negative valence means things like
annoyed, afraid, fear.
So it makes sense, the space makes sense, and it's
become a very influential and powerful model for trying to
explain the relationships between different emotions.
And we'll be getting back to that in a in
a few slides time.
What I would like to provide you, though, with the
caveat is that it is still a matter of substantial
debate about whether emotions in the brain represented along these
two axes.
In other words, maybe you have one brain system that
focuses on arousal, another one that focuses on violence.
And together these two brain systems, for example, may represent
all the possible emotions or whether you have dedicated brain
systems for particular emotional states.
So those are the two contradictory hypotheses.
The evidence is still not in about which one describes
brain function better.
But this is a convenient way to think about the
different emotions and the relationship between them.
The study of emotions is had in cognition, and psychology
has had a long and checkered history.
Often called the folk perspective of emotions is the following.
There's a stimulus out there in the world.
We perceive it that then gives that perception and gives
rise to some form of emotional response.
And that emotional response in turn drives physiological actions like
increased blood pressure.
It's not to be pejorative to say this is a
folk explanation, but this is the typical one that we
might if we introspect.
Think about what happens.
This folk, so-called folk was challenged in the late 19th
century.
And indeed, a very popular theory from William James and
Carl Long, which I'll describe in a second, but which
is nicely described in this paragraph, not all of which
are read out.
I just want to highlight a particular sentence.
If I begin to tremble because I am threatened with
a loaded pistol.
That first person is to carry me.
Does terror arise?
And is that what causes my trembling confrontation of the
heart and confusion of thought?
Or are these bodily phenomenon produced directly by the terrifying
cause so that the emotion consists exclusively of the functional
disturbances in my body?
This is a long describing alternative way of looking at
how we start to experience the emotional event.
And in this kind of model, then the stimulus, for
example, a loaded pistol is perceived by axons of the
cerebral cortex.
That perception, in turn drives a physiological response, trembling, increased
blood pressure.
And the emotion that you experience is effectively you reading
out that visceral response with your brain.
I trembled, therefore, I am afraid.
A very popular and and still a model with some
some evidence we process it's the planted in the early
20th century by Canon Bard who suggested that instead of
this model which seemed to be inconsistent with some of
the measurements they were making instead the stimulus, this motor
pistol may still be perceived by the action of the
cerebral cortex, but then its perception of its action in
the cerebral cortex drove two distinct pathways.
In one pathway we get the emotional response and in
the other pathway we get the physiological response.
So this is kind of a parallel description, that descriptor
of emotions and the associated physiological responses arising in parallel
circuits.
And there's some evidence for and against this hypothesis as
described here.
Finding this insufficient to describe some of the experiments of
the kind that you would only probably do in the
1970s sector.
And seeing I came up with a slightly different way
of describing this process that is that that stimulus to
load a pistol again leads to perception again in the
cerebral cortex.
But this then drives a physiological response and there is
a contextual modulation of that and those things are read
out to provide the motion.
So for example, in the famous experiment conducted here, participants
were given an injection of adrenaline, which increases blood pressure.
And then were asked to describe their emotional state.
And some partisans describe it as being excited and aroused.
And others did not.
And it turned out that the particular label, the emotional
state that the people gave, depended on the context in
which they were provided.
That arousing steam was that increase in blood pressure.
So the blood pressure itself was actually generating.
You did seem to be reading that out as a
kind of emotional state, but the label that you attached
to it was that dependent on the context that you
found yourself in.
So this is where we found ourselves in the late
1970s and 1980s.
Not much has changed too much because we haven't had
a huge amount of evidence to decide among these different
alternatives.
It turns out it's quite difficult to study the analysis
of emotions in the brain.
And indeed, almost all the work that we have or
the understanding that we have come from the study of
a very particular brain area, the amygdala.
And we'll be spending a lot of this lecture on
that area to give you a bit of context for
understanding the brain of the amygdala.
I need to introduce you to the limbic system hypothesis.
Has anyone come across the limbic system before?
I presume you have.
Who has not?
Is a few of you who has as a few
more of you, would someone care to describe to me
what you understand the limbic system to be?
The description on here without reading that out.
Back when you when you were talking about the Olympics
this summer, when you encountered it, what did you imagine
it to be?
Yes.
You know.
So the general idea is the limbic system is this
kind of state of something that drives your emotional states.
The kind of larger idea is that the limbic system
that's common, by the way, and if you do study
clinical psychology, you find a lot of clinical psychology still
uses this, what shall we say, simplistic description of the
brain to understand some of the descriptions that I want
to make.
The kind of larger idea is that the limbic system
seemed to evolve long ago.
It's part of the history of our evolution and that
during evolution we have supplanted or added to this limbic
system things like the cerebral cortex and the expansion of
the cerebral cortex in humans.
The idea being that this ancient reptilian brain, which has
continued to be there even as we have evolved and
added in all these other systems.
So the kind of first idea that you have sometimes
the limbic system is this is this ancient pathway or
part of the brain that evolved in reptiles and lower
animals is preserved, still is unconscious, or we have no
access or awareness of its activity, but it drives our
emotions and cognitions.
That, I think, is the kind of idea of the
limbic system that we usually have.
I think know, by the way, that the limbic system,
which is a circuit which includes the hypothalamus, anterior thalamus,
the finger gyrus and we'll get on to that in
the next slide, has over the years had things attached
to it.
So for example, the amygdala, the septum, the orbitofrontal cortex
and portions of the basal ganglia, turns out, as we
see in the next slide.
That first time that basically the limbic system now encompasses
much of the brain and I think its explanatory power
is therefore substantially reduced.
There's other reasons to think that this explanatory power is
not very strong, and that is that actually the idea
that we have evolved on top of this limbic system
is not really a correct reading of evolution.
So this is a graphical description.
By the way, I encourage you to read this article
because it has perhaps the best I've ever seen.
Your brain is not an onion with a tiny reptile
inside.
The classic view of the limbic system.
It's kind of described amber here.
The idea is that evolution is the fishes evolve into
rodents, evolve into humans, and that fishes, which have this
pronounced limbic system, which is still substantially preserved in mass
and then only slightly elaborate and then slightly inverted, sorry,
and then further elaborated in humans that this limbic system
we've inherited from this ancestor.
That's not how evolution works.
We are not so linearly related.
We are not the end product of the chain of
evolution whose goal is to create stupid human beings.
Instead, evolution is a series of parallel processes, and indeed
we diverge from the evolutionary lineage that links us with
fishes.
Before my did.
And indeed, if you look at the brains of each
of these three different species, species, humans and mice, you
actually find shared components there in all the systems more
pronounced or less pronounced in different species, but still same
components.
So the idea that this limbic system is something that
was the kind of entirety of the cognitive system of
teachers and sits there in that sort of unconscious awareness
in ourselves is not really an accurate description of evolution
nor of the brain structure of these animals or ourselves.
So for that reason, I would argue that the idea
of thinking the limbic system has only limited value.
Nevertheless, this is the limbic system and in particular the
circuit here, which you can read about in your letter.
But the idea here is that there's a circuit, as
I said before, the single cortex, the hippocampus, the hypothalamus
and the anterior thalamus missing the four words or working
together in a circuit to produce some emotional state.
This was the state of play in the 1970s, 1980s.
It's now been largely supplanted mainly by studying particular brain
areas such as the amygdala.
And and we'll go through that in the next set
of the lecture.
Before I get on to that, I just want to
make a digression into understanding emotions through emotional phases, because
most of us communicate our emotions through our facial expressions,
and most of us understand the emotions of others by
looking at this facial expressions.
This seems to be the major route through which we
communicate emotions, and also animals can also recognise and communicate
emotions through similar facial expressions.
Turns out that you can actually train computer programs to
recognise categorise very accurately the emotions that people might be
experiencing by simply reading the visual image of their face.
This was now a few years ago.
This particular one technology is substantially improved, but effectively the
kinds of neural networks that bound artificial intelligence that are
bound in our world now are quite capable of using
images of you through your video camera and your computer
or your phone to read, or at least try and
classify your emotional state.
And they do this, unfortunately, very accurately, not always accurately,
but pretty accurately.
That is, there is a set of facial configurations that
we all seem to share when we experience certain emotions.
We've actually known that for a long time.
It's these lovely photos doing the work of Titian in
the mid 19th century who discovered one of the very
first uses of electricity in experimental science discovered that you
can actually create facial expressions on individuals simply by stimulating
particular groups of muscles on the face.
So these in this picture here, this is Dustin.
Again, we don't really do experiments like this anymore, unfortunately.
Maybe.
But these are little electrical stimulating devices being attached to
the muscles.
I told you many lectures ago, the muscles of the
other electrically excitable cell in the body of the nerve
cells.
And it turns out that by passing current into muscles,
we cause them to contract.
And if we cause these contractions in particular muscle groups
in the face, we can provide these things that look
like almost realistic expressions, fear, smiles, etc..
The point I want you to take from this is
that the organisation of the facial muscles seems to be
such that it simplifies and allows expression of emotion through
expressions.
We seem to have developed our face muscles for that
purpose.
Sometime later, Ekman and colleagues discovered that there was actually
a proposal and then provided evidence for the hypothesis that
there are actually universal emotional faces that we can all
recognise, and that we may all just claim that largely
the these emotional faces, the six faces.
So the universally accepted is universal and another couple that
are more controversial.
If you look at these posed actor that faces anger,
fear, disgust, surprise, happiness, sadness.
You should or maybe not, but you should probably recognise
the same expressions and the emotions in those expressions in
work that my wife just published actually yesterday in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
She challenges this distinction.
Turns out that actually these posed acted out expressions are
not very good ways of testing, emotional recognition, and that
if we allow each other to evolve the expressions in
images, devolve the expressions that we think relate to anger
or fear or sadness.
It turns out we can evolve very divergent expressions.
There is many commonalities, but there's a lot of differences
such that two individual people may recognise the one face,
for example, this one here as two different emotions fear
or surprise might be.
However, the reason that Ackman's work became so popular and
influential is that these studies conducted in groups of people
who had had limited cultural contact with other parts of
the world.
In this case, the tribesmen of Papua New Guinea, a
small island just north of the Queensland in Australia, very
densely vegetated, a lot of hills and valleys.
A number of tribes within them who had had very,
very limited contact with any part of the Western world,
even in the 1970s.
And this famous study sought to see whether or not
the facial expressions they produce were similar to those that
we in the West might produce for similar kinds of
emotional states.
And the conclusion was that they were indeed suggesting that
it's not just about cultural conformity or spread of between
different cultures.
That leads us to a commonality in our facial expressions
and emotions, but actually that these are something innate, all
inbuilt in humans.
If we try to put these universal of emotions on
that axis of arousal and violence that we described earlier,
we find that actually, somewhat surprisingly, almost all of them
are associated with higher arousal.
I'm not exactly sure why this is.
I have a feeling that these emotions that I'm feeling,
the emotions that are associated with high arousal that are
most important for us to communicate and for us to
respond to.
It also turns out that the way that we make
these expressions depends on somewhat different brain systems, or at
least a couple of different brain systems.
That's, well, well-established in looking at people with small brain
lesions in appropriate parts of the brain.
And you can see here the two types of emotional
paralysis that you can see in people with these small
lesions, one brain called facial motor paralysis, that's one on
the left here.
The other emotional motor paralysis and emotional motor paralysis.
People have very much difficulty forming the actual expression associated
with an emotion.
In face of murder paralysis.
Since dead people have difficulty in forming emotions if they
are asked to generate that emotion without the appropriate stimulus.
Whereas if they had provided an appropriate stimulus, they can
actually produce a smile.
And the inference from this work is that there's two
strains of facial emotion, a volitional system and law of
Matic system.
And the automatic system is one that includes the hypothalamus,
the amygdala in the frontal cortex, i.e. the limbic system
or its components.
So I want to introduce that because this is the
normal way that we trying to out someone else's emotional
state is to look at the facial expressions or to
communicate.
The emotional state is through that.
And we're going to spend a little bit of time
in the next part of the lecture going through some
of the mechanisms that might be important in trying to
bring these two things together the recognition of textual emotions
and the production of emotion through responses.
So we mentioned the amygdala before.
It's part of the enlarged to kind of larger limbic
system, not the original one.
It was actually discovered in the late 1930s, early 1940s
by Coover and Bucy, who did some experiments on monkeys
in which they removed large fractions of the temporal lobes.
And they discovered very complex behavioural changes in these animals,
including noses, sexuality, inappropriate eating and the lack of fluency
in the constellation of these symptoms is often called Clifford
syndrome.
Now these were very large lesions appropriate to the surgical
techniques at the time.
It took several decades before more improved surgical techniques could
remove smaller parts of the brain.
And asked the same kind of questions.
And indeed, it was Larry Weiss Prince, who's a very
famous and important neurosurgeon, who discovered that by removing a
little bit of the brain called the amygdala, amygdala means
almond.
So it's an almond shaped part of the brain.
But by removing this component, you could reproduce the emotional
symptoms that these animals had experienced.
So this part of the brain, the amygdala from then
on became a very much of the focus for trying
to understand how emotions are represented in the brain.
The other paradigm I want to introduce you to is
that that's been popularised by Joe LeDoux.
Joe to do is at New York University.
He developed and continues to use this paradigm called conditioned
fear.
Now.
I saw Joe.
I invited Joe to give a lecture once, and at
the end of the lecture, I'm about to describe to
you the condition of the part.
On the end of the lecture, someone asked, Have you
ever thought of doing another type of experiment rather than
this conditioned fear?
And his answer was briefly, no.
He said no.
And I get asked that question all the time.
The reason I like this paradigm and why I continue
to use it is that I can predict now the
experience of every animal.
I don't need to do the actual behavioural experiment any
more.
This is such a reproducible behavioural experience experiment that it's
no longer necessary to conduct experiments on animals to actually
look at the behaviour itself.
You can just assume that that is what would have
happened and conduct other measurements that would look at the
neuroscience involved in that.
But conditioned fear in paradigms in love cells which are
incredibly powerful, are very simple.
The basic idea is to put an animal, a rat
usually, or a mouse in a little box, and that
box will have a little grid on the floor and
a little speaker on the wall.
And through the grid, you can pass the small amount
of current that's aversive to the animal, although not actually
painful.
And if you put current through that grid, the animal
will generally freeze.
It's an aversive stimulus, a potentially threatening stimulus.
Now, if you play the sound in of itself before
you without pairing it with that electric stroke, the animal
generally maybe the first time and he was like, what
the hell is going on there?
But very rapidly habituate and then ignores the sound because
it's a neutral, unthreatening stimulus.
However, if you pair or associate that sound with the
electric shock over several trials, the animals then replay the
sound by itself.
The animal is now displays just the reactions that it
would have otherwise displayed to the electric shock.
In other words, it freezes.
So this is a condition.
It's a classic paradigm.
It's been used to elucidate the role of the media.
It's not necessary to do this only in mice or
rats.
You can also do this in humans.
I love this video.
I'm dying to know.
That we have.
Period of classical conditioning I'm trying to get.
This will be the same thing.
And then I've got experience with this.
We learn the relationship.
Between a sounds and it's got more of a super.
Duper so that we can take for are going to
look like that.
Mastery works so you don't need to use rats.
You can use humans.
Let down some ethics people.
Okay.
So this.
Yes, it's a very good question.
And actually fear is the wrong this is what's what.
The conversation goes around every about ten or 15 years.
We just keep on going around the circles.
The question is, is there an emotional response or is
the animal responding to the potential threat?
Okay, so distinguishing between those two hypotheses is almost impossible.
So there's a subjective ness to fear as a concept
that we can't explore in a rat.
So this goes around and around.
Is is fear simply described as a response to a
threat or is it something in addition to that?
And unfortunately, there's been no resolution of that particular discussion.
You do know that the animal is exhibiting all the
signs of having had of of experiencing a potential threat.
Now, whether that is associated with fear in and of
itself is another question.
So it is a good question and unresolved still.
And it goes around this discussion goes around in the
in the field every ten or 15 years because it
threatens the threat of external stimuli.
So the internal response.
So the amygdala is central to to, as Joe has
worked so extensively, is essential to understanding this responses they
may do is actually have quite a complicated nucleus.
It's consists of at least 13 subdivisions.
We tend to ignore all of them except for two
or three.
The two or three that we're usually interested in, the
lateral nucleus, the basal nucleus and the central nucleus.
Usually, indeed, we actually ignore the base of the nucleus
and just think of the lateral, the central nucleus.
The lateral nucleus is where all this sensory input comes
into the amygdala from the cerebral cortex and from other
parts of the brain.
And central nucleus is the output of the one that
goes in control.
The physiological responses.
There are other outputs from amygdala, from the other parts
of it, which instead of controlling physiological responses, actually project
back to, for example, the cerebral cortex.
And we'll go through that briefly at the end in
humans, the images found around here.
In rats.
It's a slightly different location.
So this schematic turns the outcome of two or three
decades of work from Joe and others, which tells how
you might generate this condition.
Fear response.
We think of the condition stimulus as a sound stimulus.
It's conditioned because it's otherwise neutral, and then it gets
conditioned and then there's an unconditioned stimulus or us, which
is the future.
It's unconditioned.
In other words, the response to that stimulus is an
innate response is an instinctive response you don't have to
associate to get that response.
If you play the conditioned stimulus and the unconditioned stimulus
together, sound and food shock, the signals from these two
things are coming through the auditory pathway and through the
similar sensory pathways.
And these signals converge at the level of the lateral
nucleus in the amygdala.
So you have sound inputs coming through, somatic sensory inputs
coming through together.
These can now work together to find mechanisms of synaptic
plasticity to now convert that or allow that sound stimulus
to cause the same physiological response to the unconditioned stimulus
would have otherwise.
And then that output is then provided by the central
nutrients.
Now, you'll note here that there's actually several potential sources
of input to the amygdala, including the cerebral cortex, but
also subcortical areas such as Solomon's.
And it turns out that that's quite important for understanding
some of the reactions that we animals have to people
or other threatening stimuli.
So, for example, one of the early studies from Joe
showed that auditory cortex was not required for responding in
this condition fear, paranoia.
So if you remember before, when we were talking about
versus theories of emotional response, the idea was that you
perceive the stimulus with your cerebral cortex, and then that
generates that cascades through into other events.
What does work started is that at least in rodents
and as we'll see in a minute or so in
humans.
You don't need the cerebral cortex to respond to these
threatening events, suggesting that some of these threatening events could
be communicated to the amygdala via pathways that have no
access to perception or cognition themselves that are below the
level of awareness.
The particular experiments here were to lesion the bit to
the auditory cortex of the retinas, the way the auditory
cortex is in the rat.
And then to put them in this condition fear paradigm
and to measure several variables, including the freezing response, but
also things like blood pressure increases and so forth, and
become long story short.
Effectively, all the components of the threat, response or fear
response in rats were preserved in those animals that had
auditory cortex and didn't have auditory cortex.
In other words, cortex was not required for the animals
to exhibit this condition.
Fear that suggests that subcortical pathways are sufficient.
And indeed, the dominant hypothesis from Joe and others now
is that there are two votes for sensory input to
the amygdala.
One that goes through the thalamus and one that goes
through the cerebral cortex.
So for example, in human brain, the visual thalamus is
here, this blue blob.
The visual cortex is here.
The back of the brain and the amygdala.
It's here down the temporal lobe.
There are some either direct or indirect inputs from the
thalamus to the media, as well as inputs from the
visual cortex, but indirect and direct.
And the idea here is the central idea here is
that for some kinds of stimuli that you need, a
rapid response to those stimuli might be included in this
pathway that simply requires the farmers.
So, for example, snakes on a path in front of
you, you don't want to hit this guy.
It was like a snake.
Maybe it's a tiger snake round snake.
Instead, you want to get out of the way.
Actually, literally, you should freeze.
Many people try to get out of the way, but
if you get out of the way, they'll come for
you actually should just freeze.
That's one of the life tips you learn in Australia.
So the snake is there.
Maybe the signals for the snake were actually passed through
this thalamic pathway, this rapid pathway, the middle rather than
through the cerebral cortex, requires a perception that you can
react to that snake without actually having perceived it yourself.
It's sometimes called the high road and the low road,
the low road from the thalamus to move to the
highway through the sensory cortex.
And that's basically what I've just told you.
In humans, there is some evidence, as in rodents, there
is some evidence that the pathways are sufficient to activate
the amygdala.
This is a fascinating study of a person with blind
sight.
We discussed neglect, a couple of lecture lectures, go blind
sites of different phenomena.
If you lose part of your central cortex, you become
blind spot that you're not unaware of something like this.
You neglecting something be actually, at least according to people
who have these lesions you experience as an absence, a
blackness.
Basically in the US, in that part of the visual
world, people with lesions, the visual cortex report not being
able to perceive anything in the appropriate part of the
visual world.
So, for example, if your lesion on the left part
of your visual cortex, you won't see anything on the
right path of your visual field.
Nevertheless, people with these lesions can still respond appropriately, sometimes
to visual objects presented in that blind part of the
visual field.
A fascinating phenomena.
For example, they can actually navigate through obstacles in a
corridor or tell or actually respond reliably and see what
orientation opinions operate or mind to assign.
In addition, if you put someone in the scanner and
MRI scanner and conduct measurements whilst this person's images in
this case facial images of facial expressions, you can find
that in this part of the brain where the least
means this is a simple cortex is lesion.
The image was nevertheless activated by in this case, people
faces.
So for some reason or some pathway that bypasses visual
cortex, the primary visual cortex allows people to actually get
see moving to the Middle East.
Similarly, in humans with an intact amygdala, you can do
experiments such as backward masking this as you rapidly present
a stimulus and mask it with noise.
People report not being able to see the stimulus that
was presented briefly present a stimulus.
Turns out if you do that and you construct the
stimulus appropriately, you can find different.
You can find responses in the amygdala in mind that
seem to resemble fearful faces.
This is also evidence that you do not need perception
or cognition to actually activate.
So this is evidence that even in humans, as in
rats, there is some subcortical pathways as well as cortical
pathways.
And indeed, if you look at facial mimicry, when we
see people make expressions, we tend to make those expressions
ourselves.
That's called facial mimicry.
You find that facial mimicry is intact in people with
blind side.
Again, further evidence that you don't need to perceive things
to be able to detect and respond to emotions.
There is some.
Caveats.
This thing you should be aware of.
For example, there are very few people in the world
who have had lesions to the amygdala in the one
or two cases that have been studied does not seem
that this is 100% necessary to respond to emotions.
But bear in mind, as we talk about methods lecture
that people with lesions can find compensatory pathways and things
do change.
So it's not clear whether or not these kinds of
responses are true in intact humans.
I want to spend a couple of minutes just illustrating
to you that these emotional networks, such as the amygdala,
impact not only the physiological output, but also other cognitive
processing in the brain.
It turns out actually, that the amygdala is either directly
or indirectly connected to a huge amount of the brain
striatum prefrontal cortex, medial temporal lobe, cerebellum, pixabay neocortex, etc.
There's plenty of opportunity for the amygdala to guide our
cognition via emotional responses, in instance of time.
Because I would just like to introduce something for a
few minutes at the end of this lecture.
I'll skip over these two little slides, but you can
go back to look at them at your leisure.
I want to focus on this one, which describes an
experiment that could have already really been done once or
twice in our history.
As you all know, on September the 11th, 2001, perhaps
before you were born, the Twin Towers in New York,
the World Trade Centre, were destroyed in a terrorist attack.
This was a very emotional experience for many people.
My wife, for example, was based in New York University
at the time.
She stood on the top of the building and watched
those towers come down.
She still remembers that day very clearly.
The question that was asked in these experiments by researchers
whose prioritisation might be slightly strange was the day after
2001 researchers in Duke University.
Contact of Duke students.
The Duke is not New York itself.
Nevertheless, everyone of us was kind of watching these these
attacks and ask very simple questions.
Do you remember what do you remember about the events
on September 11th?
And what do you remember about other unrelated events?
The idea is that these events on September 11th might
be associated with flashbulb memories, things that are emotionally salient.
And the question is, do these emotionally salient events last
longer than nonstate ones, and do they have different content,
the most salient ones?
The answer to the first question is yes.
They seem to be more vivid for longer than non
emotionally salient events.
So these on this graph on the left here for
224 days after September 11th, these ratings were made, some
people for September 11th or other events.
You can see that the vividness for the subjective experience
of remembering events around September 11th was much greater than
that for other events, suggesting that emotion colours, memory, makes
things vivid, makes things more memorable.
On the other hand, the actual number of details that
we were able those people were able to remember about
the 11th and other events didn't seem to be much
different.
So what's the vividness and therefore importance of that memory
for people was higher.
The actual structure, the clarity of that memory was not
necessarily higher.
This has importance for understanding things like, for example, eyewitness
testimony.
So what I wanted to bring you here is that
clearly emotion does colour memory does it in complex ways.
Does this suggest that those circuits within the amygdala and
similar structures influence aspects of the hippocampus and other formation?
The final slide I want to show you simply reinforces
that by looking at some imaging studies.
But I will just mean the time link to go
through that yourself.
Q Would you like to just come down and help
people understand what we want you to do during your
reading week?
So thanks for that.
I hope we've both understood it.
Something about emotions and the brain.
I can't tell you about life, but we can tell
you about one of those things anyway, right?
Q Do.
You think you're going to find something to that.
Effect?
I don't think.
So, but I'm just going to take us through the
process of feedback for this module.
Before I do that, I just would like to take
on you had this lecture and it could take good
care of your brain and your amygdala otherwise ends up
in lots of dangerous situations.
Has anyone seen Die Another Day?
Great James Bond film from the mid-nineties.
Robert Carlyle.
Okay, can watch that.
Yeah.
So the best thing most I think if we see
one of these patients who has no MC to their
fitness emerges loving, playing dangerous snakes and tarantulas and whatever,
there's there's this lack of inhibition and we'll be picking
up that topic in lectures following this.
And the memory system is sound is just getting onto
memory at the end there.
And we'll be looking at methods where they've been able
to implant false memories into rats brains, where they can
turn on the memory, the flash of light, using that
fear conditioning approach and make rats afraid of places that
are completely normal, but they've just inserted false memories.
So we'll come back to that as the great play
into that memory circuits.
So this is the Moodle page for the module.
Just highlighting that we think is yeah.
The different modes.
You can do it.
It's fantastic.
Exactly.
Because a lot of hidden material behind the lectures.
Okay, so there's a keep in touch and we've been
able to look.
At these.
Questions here and we put announcements there and we've got
questions.
People have put in great questions and we'll try to
respond to those through the announcements page.
This is for general questions.
If something comes to you and you want to ask
a general question about the course, feel free to throw
a question into that for each the each of the
weeks from, let's say further onwards is a a at
the end of this fits with this class times is
reading and there.
Are.
Questions about lectures to feel free against remind everyone if
you have a question that pops up after reading maybe
in the middle of reading week or reading material and
you think, Oh, looking back at lectures for next week
for don't post the question in to that.
I will respond to that.
We'll see these.
But really today is the highlight right at the end
is a now exceptional have you would say and we'd
like to get your feedback through the key to have
this continuous module dialogue you still loves acronyms C and
D approach to the.
Module and.
There is now a link to a mental page where
you can go, I want to go.
Now.
Yeah.
It needs to work.
So it's currently sitting in there.
It's still running, but it needs to be updated.
So after this lecture we'll get that functioning.
If you can go in and answer the questions.
Have you understood things?
How do you say what are the things for this
course?
Is that within this large room there are people from
psychology, so you might have different perspectives to people inside
psychology.
It may be useful to get your reflections on this
module compared to other modules you're setting, but it will
be all of the questions.
And that means that you can go in and access
from that link.
In a couple of weeks we'll have another mentor as
you going forwards, more CMC approach, more, more feedback from
you and at the end, surprise, surprise, another mentee page
for feedback.
If you're in any module and I'm sure you're used
to filling out these mentees, but we'd love to hear
from you.
We've had great we've had some useful suggestions on the
page and we'll keep collecting that.
Thank you for all your attendance and enjoying the module.
We'll see you next week.
So there is a lot of great work to do,
but a lot.
Great.
It's a really good question.
It's pretty pretty.
Hard to talk about what's.
Going to.
Happen next week.
Right.
That's because.
It doesn't make.
Sense to.
Keep people from actually able to pick up the phone
call for a living.
Record the next.
It's hard to record the next question.
I found it on the floor of someone to drop
it so we can hand it.
To the psychology man office or.
The main.
Office.
That's the most likely outcome.
Of that discussion.
Yeah, I could just make an announcement.
I mean.
Although if anybody's lost a phone, we found a mobile
phone.
Here, We'll put it in the reception's.
If anybody is walking out and somebody is running back.
That phone will be in the reception for the building.
I mean.
Maybe not so lucky for people who.
Would.
Like.
To see.
Different things.
I do.
Think.
That it's tricky because it's the only way for people
to think that.
That's pretty cool.
I think.
That's absolutely.
Great.
School teaching is not acceptable.
I think things like that.
Very nice to talk to you for a few hours
because sometimes it's a part of the whole.
I want to get some stuff because I don't care
about 15 minutes per 100,000 people.
Because.
People trying to get me to actually try to keep
something that's interesting because I'm focusing.
On you to.
Come to.
You.
Normally you have to start.
To.
Some of.
These private firms to pick these people.
You can.
Make more people want.
To let go.
Why not?
Well, that's.
How.
It lots of things.
You can.
Do about that perspective.
Because unfortunately, it's impossible to get people to look at.
What's going on here.
Yeah, we get really we.
Get feedback to people about the course of events, just
everything updates and you can put that in as a
feedback you'd like.
Stephen That's what I'd like to say.
A lot of.
Students don't want to understand that either, but apparently the
feedback from.
Feedback.
That might.
Be difficult.
For the general nominee is that people get a quick
look at time frames when this happens, but that's a.
Time that it's.
One that might be that may be the case, but
that it's actually you can see back into the things
that we can use that to say, Hey, you look
like you want me to do videos, basically, but.
You don't have.
To do it.
Some of it might take these guys.
Yeah, except this is six years of research.
That's some of.
The material, but not what you want to do to
make.
This work.
Yeah, it's not.
Material.
Why didn't I get a first.
Bite of this?
And I didn't say that.
That's the problem.
It's kind of really happened since, Mr. President.
So I said, Well, I originally said that any on
the day would have been.
The school.
But she's not accepting.
What's been happening in Iraq.
And the way you.
Might.
Have noticed.
The really useful question.
It's good to get feedback about how you doing things
differently, doing something right.
Yeah.
Yeah, I know.
I'm just I'm just hoping that by pinpointing very quickly
that these kind of theories, we do.
Have a lot of people out there who might be
eager.
To meet with individuals, something to discuss how to give
some solutions.
Access We really hate that.
It's the men's lives work, stuff like that.
Yeah, I just.
That because we're not going to make it.
But, you know, I think that there is not much
concern about this because the problem.