December 6, 2010 11:04 Pm
in order to untangle this cognition/emotion/motivation knot, it helpful to use an ethologist behavioral framework to establish the universal infrastructure that human experience adds to. I suppose also some would say an evolutionary framework.
[edit: December 6, 2011] Darwin's work probably should be noted here:
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For example reproductive, feeding, nurturing, and safety requirements would seem to be the basis for emotion and motivation. First basic survival behavior patterns and then social behavior patterns. Seeking resources and doing it in a social setting of family, friends, associates, and enemies leading to basic, caring, trusting, competing, and dominance relations.
Whatever the mix is, it is sufficient to energize and guide individuals and groups through routine behavior.
So we catalog and organize the various emotional and motivational patterns into a framework
then we do the same for the nervous and endocrine systems laying out the modular structure and the communication channels. But of course the whole thing actually has many hierarchical layers that form the macro modular structure.
Then we show the relationship between our ordinary language social narrative and a bio-systems view of the neuro endocrine system.
For example it has been suggested that due to the layout of reward neurons being more dense in information processing areas, we seek out novel but richly interpretable experiences because they provide opioid release. The "Click" of comprehension triggers a biochemical cascade that rewards the brain with a shot of natural opium-like substances.
In other words, mental work gets done with the help of various neurotransmitters providing the so called motivation. Dopamine, for example, has been characterized as the gimme more neuro chemical in that it induces a regenerative loop of action.
There are opposing processes, negative feedback, such as activation inhibition boundaries. A novel input stimulates one spot strongly and it in turn inhibits its neighbors. (Once established the spot no longer rewards.)
december 9, 2010 7:16 Pm
most of my notes on motivation rehash the recent ideas about embodied cognition which emphasizes that the living organism displays an integrated input process output cycle. Thinking depends on sensory input just as sensory systems depend on thinking to guide it. In that sense cognitive psychology includes emotion as well as rationality.
Intermixed in those ideas is the conceptual framework of dynamic non-linear systems or in other words time varying complexly ordered systems or simply “bio-physical processes” that make up the world. This framework uses parameters, attractors, probability.
And along with dynamic systems comes the cybernetic framework that emphasizes control systems, feedback, etc.
Along with formal concepts of systems, perhaps the most important foundational framework comes from evolution of organisms in general. For example, it appears that like the rest of the body, the brain structure and its neurochemical processes is the result of a long period of continual structural differentiation, billions of generational refinements. Little nubs evolve gradually, successively, and inevitably into arms and paws, then into arms, hands fingers, and now into complex writing instruments. And that idea is true from the smallest bio-chemical component to the macro sized organism.
Perhaps that is why fractal patterns captured the imagination. They dramatically showed what evolving self-similar regeneration looks like. And computer generated fractal images all comes from a simple little mathematical equation.
But again following that principle of successive refinement, software systems themselves have evolved from chunky blocks, to vast libraries of frameworks containing functional elements containing millions of lines of code. So displaying a fractal image takes a small equation and a few dozen lines of high level code to display. In turn, those lines of code call upon sub-units who call upon sub units recursively down many levels where the rubber actually hits the road.
So the brain is hierarchically organized tangle having been refined for eons.
Theres a certain logic for organisms to thrive in an environment. Just as the rest of the body, the brain has found solutions that enable cooperation with the environment - finding food, cooperating with a group, and daily living.
That systems logic produces similar abstract action patterns across species and environments, nesting patterns for example.
Even larger patterns are evolve similarly - tribes, herds, flocks, etc.
So humans are a refinement of what has evolved before. Understanding requires a conceptual framework that includes both the ancestral biological basis as well as the cognitive and affective refinements involving information rich social interaction.