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Abstract:
Consciousness and emotion are ancient topics as old as
culture, still in their scientific infancy, and both slowly
emerging into full respectability after decades of systematic
neglect by science. Despite a modest resurgence in interest in the
subject, emotion probably remains the most neglected and least
understood subject relative to its importance in human life in the
whole of neuroscience. This is likely overdetermined. One aspect
may be hangover from Lange-James perspectives in which in which the
richness of experienced emotion was reduced to a sensory feedback
from autonomic and motor efferents, a kind of phenomenologically
compelling but ultimately irrelevant "neural mirage" or after image
of the "real action" of emotion in autonomic and motor
efferentation. Additionally, the explosion of cognitive
neuroscience, in concert with the extensive discrediting of much of
psychoanalytic thinking, has left emotion in a largely secondary
role, despite dramatic lessening of the stranglehold that
behaviorism had over thinking in psychology. Cognition is very much
in ascendance these days, with some even assuming its foundations
are fundamentally independent from affect, a position for which
there is little evolutionary or neurological evidence. Finally, the
relative disregard for emotion (until recently) in neuroscience may
have major contributions from the intrinsic scientific and
methodological difficulty of the subject itself:
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