TR 1070 Lecture Notes - Lecture 23: Sense, Mental Model, Affective Neuroscience
5 Jun 2018
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Notes from Siegel Lecture:
Lecture explores how entering a state of trust and connection enables new
forms of awareness to emerge
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We are hardwired here--in these systems
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Play explores, practices, and represents all the other primal emotions
Dolls-caring
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Sex
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Rage-mad dog
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Fear-roller coaster
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The Science of Play
Affective neuroscience studies emotional life across evoluntionary stages
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While the experience of emotion is influenced by various regions of the brain
and the body, this activity tends to activate the cortex; emotional experience
correlates to activity in the subcortical region
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The 7 Primal Emotion Systems
Seeking--enthusiasm
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Rage--angry
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Fear--anxious
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Lust--passionate & aroused
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Care--tender & loving
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Panic--lonely & sad
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Play--joyous
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The Purpose of Play
Play is difficult to operationally define in specific terms, as it varies across
species and cultures. A playful state can be conceptualized broadly as
behavioral combinations that have no particular intended outcome intended.
Other forms of play involve exploration with a directed purpose.
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Explore!
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Play with the mind = explore and create
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Fantasy
Re-presentation new combinations
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Question is how to keep play alive in adulthood
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It is important to note that the opposite of play is not work as many may guess,
but can be seen instead as depression--the shutting down of vitality and the
inability to create new combinations
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Play is an innate, primary emotional drive associated with activity of the cortex;
it is a fundamental part of life for us as mammals
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Trauma can inhibit the ability to play, as the states of receptivity necessary for
play are replaced by states of reactivity in response to threat or percieved
threat
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Reactivity vs receptivity (open, play)•
Reactivity in response to Threat
Flight•
Fight•
Freeze•
Faint•
The Cognitive Neuroscience of Play
Interaction with environment and perception of external sensations-sometimes
called exteroception- or sensing and perceiving energy arising from within the
body-interoception- each involve the activation of sensory receptors,
stimulating neural firing processes throughout the body and in the sensory
areas of the brain; through this flow of energy and information in the nervous
system, we create a neural representation of our experience, which then
somehow in ways no one has been able to explain, either causes or at a
minimum is associated with subjective, mental representation of experience
Exteroception: energy arising from the external environment and sensed
by us
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Interoception: energy arising from one's internal experience
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The neuronal foundations of mental representations result in a schema (or
mental model) of experience, which influences future perception of future
experiences. While schemas allow us to make sense of experiences quickly and
efficiently, they also affect the way we experience the world through
nonconscious assumptions and expectations
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Top down process: Learned prior to current experience; influences interpretation of
sensory experience
Bottom-up process: drawing from the senses to make sense of experience; a
beginner's mind- experiencing as if it were the first encounter
Play can be seen to liberate us from top-down processing, allowing us to
experience the present moment with receptivity, creativity, and awareness
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Mindfulness: "The awareness that emerges through paying attention on
purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally to the unfolding of
experience moment by moment."
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Siegel's hypotheses
Play liberates bottom up- for the first time
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Play & Presence
Since play is engagement in new combinations, it may build on bottom-up
processes. Life, in contrast, can lead to the recurrence of automatic, top-down
processing, dulling awareness so that the uniqueness of each moment
disappears. In this way, play is a powerful form of "freeing the mind"
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Presence = Pre- (before) + -sense (to sense) •
4/19 Lecture
Thursday, April 19, 2018
2:01 PM
