emotions are old, and I told you so

[mellowtigger]

I've been talking for nearly a decade about how some autistics live with an older form of emotional brain that has been awakened from slumber for another "test drive" of suitability in this test lab that is our global industrial civilization.

I count some emotions as just another kind of sensory experience. Sensations require an effort to establish a link between the perception and the actual cause in the external world. It's not easy to establish these links. Cringing is useful because the action takes you away from the source of harm without any need to understand the source. Anger and fear, however, require understanding the source, otherwise actions are taken "wildly" that often fling harm in all directions equally. Connecting internal sensation with the external world is very important.

Today is the first day I've seen some rather specific evidence in favor of this subjective experience as a complicated process. Scientific American published "Decoding the Body Watcher", an article that explains a few key points that echo my own assertions:

• "While the prefrontal cortex may indeed be specialized for attending to external information, older and more buried parts of the brain including the “insula” and “posterior cingulate cortex” appear to be specialized in observing our internal landscape."
• "Contrary to the conventional assumption that all attention relies upon the frontal lobe of the brain, the researchers found that this was true of only exteroceptive attention; interoceptive attention used evolutionarily older parts of the brain more associated with sensation and integration of physical experience."
• "By recruiting “limbic-bridge” areas like the insula and posterior cingulate, a person using interoceptive attention may bypass the pre-frontal neocortex, directly tapping into bodily awareness that is free from social judgment or conceptual self-evaluation."

So when autistics like me self-report that some physical (and some emotional) sensations overwhelm our sense of self with their intensity, now there may be a good and objective reason to accept our account.  There are a host of articles that link these same two brain regions with autistic minds.