PSYC 1010 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: Somatic Marker Hypothesis, Homeostasis, Monism

• School: York University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 1010
• Professor: Ron Sheese

Document Summary

Feelings are a private event; only you can describe it but there"s no way for anyone else to verify your state: genetics have some functional value; they serve a purpose towards the survival of the species. Joy and sorrow as "mental sensors of the organism"s interior" (p. 139) It"s like the brain puts out sensors that go out to the environment: we have these sensors in the body and joy and sorrow in particular are sensitive to the organism"s interior. "feelings bear witness to the state of life deep within" (p. 140: the main attribute of feelings is a representation of body state. Feelings and social behaviour: summary of clinical cases, people have problems in the body that causes them to not have proper feelings. In all the examples, damasio emphasizes damage to regions necessary for the deployment of emotions/feelings: for many of these cases, people in the past have tried to explain them with cognition.