Emotion influences learning, memory

Emotion shapes nearly every aspect of human activity — from learning to memory to decision-making — and even influences evolution, University of Southern California neuroscience professor Antonio Damasio said in a lecture in McCosh 50 Thursday night.

"Emotion, whichever way you look at it ... is involved in homeostasis," he said, and "the business of running our life."

Damasio's talk focused on the processes involved in triggering and experiencing emotions and feelings.

Though Sigmund Freud and William James investigated the science of emotion more than 100 years ago, such research had largely been abandoned by the turn of the 20th century, he said.

In the past 10 years, however, significant progress has been made in identifying what Damasio termed the "body loop" theory of emotion production.

Damasio explained that "emotional programs" are built from simpler drives and motivations.

"To have an emotion is a very big deal, and it actually involves a lot of changes [throughout] the body proper, as well as the brain itself," he said.

People used to think, Damasio pointed out, that one or two systems in the brain would "do all the emotions for you and feel the emotions."

"Now we know this is not true. We now know there are all sorts of routes from the body [into] the brain ... the detail to which we know this is very sophisticated."

Studying the processes that trigger emotions is critical because "emotions turn out to be essential in processes of decision," including financial and political decisions, he said.

"Reason alone tends not to be the whole story," Damasio said of the process of decision-making. "There is one part that comes from emotions, for better and for worse."

He suggested that one reason people sometimes do not connect emotions with neurobiology is that the "processes of self-consciousness hide the fact that this is not a monolith ... we tend to assume that everything we choose to do is because we really wanted to do it."

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Individuals with brain damage often have difficulty making choices that depend on normal emotions. Damasio explained a number of case studies where various parts of the brain were damaged and particular emotions were lost.

When the amygdala — an area of the brain involved in processing emotion — is damaged, for instance, people cannot experience fear, even though they know what fear is. Such individuals can be excessively trusting of others, which can lead to a further set of problems.

During a question-and-answer session, Damasio said that it is especially important to study the emotional results of brain damage in young soldiers coming back from the war in Iraq, many of whom are being kept alive by improvements in medicine.

"Stay tuned," he concluded, "for more news from the world of emotion and feeling."