Animal behavior and the science of human emotions
Joykishan Sharma *
Animal behavior is the prime source of understanding our own emotions. How people see and treat animals emotions will led to researched based studies of understanding the human emotion. Human emotion is multi dimensional. Our aim is understanding the human emotions by understanding the animal behavior.
Similar mechanism and responses of how both human and animal behaves accordingly shown by analyzing neuroanatomy, neurochemistry and brain engineering pave the path to the development of mind medicine. What would our life be like without emotions ? There would be empty , empty of values. We hate and we love . Can anyone tell why do we hate and we love? Science does not answer the why question. Science answer how questions.
But the why questions could be answer as follows we had feelings because they tell us what supports our survivable and what distracts our survivable. I have been in this area for years and I do work in Psychiatric Hospital discussing human tragedy and emotional tragedy. No one knew what emotions were actually and from where it comes from, how we get those feelings.
So I decided to shift to neuroscience ; first clinical psychology and then to neuroscience and that's the only pathway to understanding how we feel. That seems to be impenetrable mystery but is actually penetrable with neuroscience. If we do not take the emotions of animal seriously, we cannot penetrate the cognitive mind of animal. If one dog says to another dog that you smell good . I want to eat you. We cannot penetrate those feelings of animals but scientifically we can penetrate those feelings only with neuroscience.
If we understand the emotions of other animals we will begin to understand our own emotions and that pave the path to the new mind medicine. We can actually turn on and turn off the emotions and that is our measure of feelings. So we are very similar at the bottom of our mind. We are the cognitive creatures. They are the emotional creatures. But they obviously must have thoughts about their lives in the world.
We have powerful emotions - like we get anger, scared because of very similar system in our brain. Anger in animal brain reflects anger feeling and behavior. They cut it off and switch off the feelings and that is we need to understand these circuit. We do have knowledge about seven basic emotional system and called them primary emotions or primal emotions.
PRIMAL EMOTIONS AFFECTIVE FEELINGS
1. Seeking Enthusiastic or enthusiasm
2. Rage pissed off (sorry)
3. fear anxious
4. lust horny (sorry)
5. care tender and loving
6. panic lonely and sadness
7. play joyous
PANIC , too much psychological panic and this is the gateway to the depression and if it is the way beyond bound, people begin to think about killing themselves. So we have developed by focusing on the molecular biology of happiness , joy and is currently in human testing. That is the way we can feel tender, loving etc. If we understand those emotional system, someone will be rewarding and someone are punishing but they will never be neutral and that is the evidence that we have emotional feelings. We can predict that we stimulate the feelings.
Let us focus on the panic system. When you separate young one from the mother, they began to cry because mother is the ultimate source of security. Then we start measuring the cry and trying to figure out the neuroanatomy of the child and its neurochemistry that led to the new treatment to depression and suicide. Panic arousal may be a main source of psychic paint that promotes depression.
Simple touch or just a free hug alleviates pain. The main chemical that turns out to control all these is nothing but the brain opioids. Our love and attachment are partially addicted phenomena. Providing internal opioids shows maximal security, social bonding chemistry. Opioids mediate motherly love - attachment bond between mother and child. Social bonding may be an addictive process.
Brain opioids, oxytocin and prolactin all powerfully reduced the separation distress. The physiology of mother is the physiology of love . After mapping the deep brain stimulation of that cry in ginue pig separation distress circuit and human sadness system, their neural physiology, neural psychology, neural anatomical chemistry and brain engineering system are very similar.
Testosterone is something that counteracts crying. That is why there is large difference in male and female emotions. When we took the imaging of the feelings and found a very similar trajectory. Human depressions and sadness were very low opioids in the same higher brain areas. Remarkable we are brothers and sisters under the skin with all others animals which provides us with special responsibility for how we treat them in the world.
We have generated three concepts for the treatment of depressions
1) use of safe opioids to reduce psychological pain that leads tp depressions and suicidal ideation in progress - buprenorphine
2) use of deep brain stimulation of the SEEKING system to elevate capacity of enthusiasm.
3) the genetic analysis of PLAY elevate social joy in the brain to identify new neurochemistry\'s to promote positive social feelings. We have drugs placebo and buprenorphine.
Placebo is somewhat less effective in depressions as compare to the buprenorphine. Another interesting thing is that measuring the sound of rat tickles with the transducer and generate larger vocal activity and enjoy us to play with our fingers. This is one of the way to alleviate depression. GLYX13 , molecule that induce PLAY neural system and can cause genetics of play and positive affect.
Laughter give us the better antidepressants. I do hope that taking the emotional feelings of animals seriously may yeild more rapid understanding of human emotions and thereby promote progress in psychiatric medicinal development. Once we understand them, we will finally understood ourselves.
* Joykishan Sharma wrote this article for e-pao.net
The writer is a Research Scholar in Neuromedicine and can be reached at jkshnshrm(AT)gmail(DOT)com
This article was posted on July 31, 2016.
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