Brain Points

Together With Feeling

What are emotions?

Webster defines emotions as “a conscious mental reaction (as anger or fear) subjectively experienced as strong feeling usually directed toward a specific object and typically accompanied by physiological and behavioral changes in the body”(Merriam-Webster online, emotion) . Bor uses the example of a pig squealing in distress as a response to a pain to question what consciousness entails.  Could this reaction to a specific stimulus be interpreted as fear and as a result can it be concluded that the pig is consciously aware of its own fear?  Skeptics as described in the book would refer to this behavior as “purely a behavioral response that the animal was programmed to make…[that] there is not necessarily any conscious life [in the reaction]”(Bor, 198). ”  

What defining trait then gives us rights over conscious emotion and as  a result separates us from pigs?  

Many would argue that this defining characteristic is a direct result of our highly specialized brains. These areas in the frontal lobes in particular have been believed to house our conscious awareness of emotion and as a result any animal that lacks these developed cerebral areas are assumed to be incapable of experiencing consciousness. It seems then that we are forever destined to ride this roller coaster of emotion alone thanks to our uniquely developed brains. Wait am I forgetting something, oh right we have a very special relative who shares about 99% of our DNA and as a coincidence also has a similarly structured brain. Could great apes be our emotional partners in this tango for two!

So Chimps are capable of conscious emotions?

It would seem so, in fact in a scholarly journal written by Weiss and colleagues it was revealed that not only can chimps and orangutans show emotion, they also go through phases similar to what humans experience during midlife crisis! In their research they studied 508 great apes of various ages in captivity and thorough modified human evaluation guides for midlife crisis were able to evaluate and determine that these great apes experience “this U-shaped pattern or “midlife crisis”… impl[ing] that human wellbeing’s curved shape is not uniquely human and that, although it may be partly explained by aspects of human life and society, its origins may lie partly in the biology we share with great apes”(Weiss et al. 2012). The apes were evaluated by their trainers on a scale that measures their Well-being using a four-item questionnaire rating the degree to which the apes were in a bad or good mood, how much pleasure they got from social situations, and how successful they were in achieving their goals. From their data they were able to create a graph depicting the strong U shape associated with midlife crisis around chimps ages 27-28 which corresponds to humans about 45-50 years old.  (I do not own the right to the graph so I cannot post it here but the paper is in the works cited)

Okay so they go through midlife crisis how is this a conscious emotion?

It is a gateway into the mind of great apes, it is clear that we share a good deal of our DNA and this example helps us wrap our heads around the possibility of sharing emotions with our closest living relatives. Bor tells of mother and child who were separated shortly after Olympia was deemed unable to feed her child. Six weeks later mother and child were reunited, the mother was ecstatic to be given back her daughter and with open arms eagerly awaited he child to embrace her. Tragically the child by this point was unable to recognize her mother and clung to her foster parents as the mother was left in dismay. Soon however she realized that her child did not recognize her, in her best attempt to make the child comfortable in her presence she arranged the room so as to invite the child to come over and greet her. However her attempts failed and she was left to ponder why her child no longer wished to be in her presence. Undeterred the mother tried numerous times to “calm the baby and once again make her embrace [the] arms [of] an inviting [parent]” (Bor, 197) She even went as far as to pretend to leave the room in an attempt to get a response from her child, to which the child responded by rushing to the door distressed by her mother leaving again eventually feeling comfortable enough to embrace her mother. This is the story of Olympia and her daughter Hebe, two chimpanzees who live in Monkey world, Dorset England. Olympia although distressed by her infant’s rejection made every attempt to make her child feel comfortable and safe. She not only expressed goal oriented behavior but was also able to personify and interpret her baby’s actions as fear and insecurity. I would argue this to be a highly conscious action and nothing less than a mother’s genuine love and desire for their infant. These similarities towards human behavior may be a result of similar DNA and brain structure or it could be housed in an area that has yet to be discovered, one thing is for sure in my mind however, and that is that chimpanzees show behaviors remarkably similar to those that humans express when they consciously reflect on others emotions.    

 

Can these similarities be the product of solely mirror neurons? It has to be more than that in my opinion.  

Works Cited

Bor, Daniel. "Being Bird-Brained Is Not an Insult." The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning. New York: Basic, 2012. 195-216. Print.

"Emotion." Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 14 Nov. 2013. <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/emotion>.

Weiss, A., J. E. King, T. Matsuzawa, and A. Oswald. "Evidence for a Midlife Crisis in Great Apes Consistent with the U-shape in Human Well-being." Evidence for a Midlife Crisis in Great Apes Consistent with the U-shape in Human Well-being. PNAS, 22 July 2012. Web. 10 Nov. 2013. <http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/11/14/1212592109.full.pdf html>.