Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

4
Toward Basic Principles
for Emotional Processing
What the Fearful Brain Tells the Robot
jean-marc fellous
and joseph e. ledoux
The field of neuroscience has, after a long period of looking the other
way, embraced “emotion” as an important research area. Important
progress has come from animal studies of fear, and especially fear conditioning
in rats. This work has contributed to a re-evaluation of the
concept of the “limbic system,” and has identified the amygdala as a
crucial component of the system involved in the acquisition, storage, and
expression of fear memory. Researchers now understand how fearful
stimuli enter, travel through, and exit the amygdala. Mechanistically,
the amygdala acts as a species-specific danger detector that can be
quickly activated by threatening stimuli, and that can be modulated
by higher cognitive systems. In turn, the amygdala influences the cognitive
system by way of projections to “arousal” centers that control the
way actions and perceptions are performed.
Further research has shown that such findings from experimental
animals also apply to the human brain and has directed attention to
another important component of the emotional brain: the prefrontal cortex.
Together, the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex can account for
higher forms of fear that involve consciousness.