Projections: The New Science of Human Emotion

Neuronal activity in the habenula (provided by optogenetics) was discovered to favor passive coping (essentially not moving during a challenge); in contrast, activity in the raphé (source of most of the neurochemical called serotonin in the brain) favored active coping (vigorous engagement with the problem). By optogenetically stimulating or inhibi

Feeling bad seems gratuitous—and more than that, a vast and unnecessary source of suffering. Much of the clinical disability in psychiatry, after all, arises from the subjective negativity of states like anxiety and depression. One reason may be that life requires making choices between utterly distinct categories that cannot be compared directly.

Perhaps these conversion factors are something that the evolution of behavior works upon. Relative value (in the common currency of subjectivity) assigned by the brain to different states will inevitably determine consequential—indeed existential—decisions made by the organism or the human being. But these currency conversions also must be flexible

Any small animal can find a crevice or a burrow and stop moving to cope passively with adversity. Even the tiny nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans appears to calculate the relative value of actively foraging or remaining in place, with the full power of its 302 neurons. But larger brains contemplate many more possible actions and outcomes, rumina

The challenge of trying to perceive, and experience, unconventional realities from the patient’s perspective is the heart of psychiatry, working through the distortions of both observer and observed. But inevitably the true innermost voices of the departed and the silenced, the suffering and the lost, remain private.

Somehow three independent perspectives, psychiatry and imagination and technology, together can frame the conceptual space needed—perhaps because they have little in common.

If behavior is already tuned and controlled appropriately for survival—if risk is already avoided, as dictated by the projection to the lateral hypothalamus—what is the point of the preference, or subjective feeling, provided by the connection to the VTA?