Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

98 brains
Many questions remain to be answered about how the brain mediates working
memory and how consciousness relates to the working memory system.
However, it is not necessary for emotion researchers to solve these problems,
nor is it necessary to wait for the solutions before studying how emotion works.
Emotion researchers need to figure out how emotional information is represented
in working memory. The rest of the problem, figuring out how the
contents of working memory become consciously experienced and how these
subjective phenomena emerge from the brain, belongs on the shoulders of all
mind scientists.
Amygdala and Consciousness
Emotional arousal influences cognitive processing. Attention, perception,
memory, decision making, and the conscious concomitants of each are swayed
by emotional states. The reason for this is simple. Emotional arousal organizes
and coordinates brain activity (LeDoux, 1996). The emotional coordination
of brain activity converts conscious experiences into emotional
experiences.
If our immediate conscious content occupies working memory, then a
feeling (the conscious experience of an emotion) is the representation in
working memory of the various elements of an immediate emotional state.
In this view, the feeling of being afraid would be a state of consciousness in
which working memory integrates the following disparate kinds of information:
(1) an immediately present stimulus (e.g., a snake on the path in front
of you); (2) long-term memories about that stimulus (facts you know about
snakes and experiences you have had with them); and (3) emotional arousal
by the amygdala. The first two are components of any kind of conscious
perceptual experience as the only way to identify an immediately present
stimulus is by comparing its physical features (the way it looks or sounds)
with memories or present knowledge about the same or similar stimuli.
However, the third kind of information occurs only during an emotional
experience. Amygdala activation, in other words, turns a plain perceptual
experience into a fearful one.
The key question, then, is how the amygdala achieves this alteration of
consciousness, this transformation of cognition into emotion, or better yet,
this takeover of consciousness by emotion. The answer may be that emotion
comes to monopolize consciousness, at least in the domain of fear, when
the amygdala comes to dominate working memory.
The amygdala can influence working memory in a variety of ways, some
of which will be described. The first is by altering sensory processing in cortical
areas. Working memory finds out about the outside world from sen-