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Posted by: cyanidefreak 06/19/2009, 12:24:34  (About author)
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I'm waiting for them to send me the secret code so I can read the whole article but in the mean time, from the abstract, "Unlike other animals, humans have the unique ability to control and modulate instinctive emotional reactions through intellectual processes such as reasoning, rationalizing, and labeling our experiences."
When a mother cat slaps a kitten away when the kitten has obviously annoyed her we can easily read what is going on. But what happened before that? For twenty minutes the kitten gnawed on the mother cat's ear, scratched her in the eye, bit her lip, suckled her while kneading her with razor sharp claws, bit her tail, pulled her whiskers, walked on her like a rug, jumped on her like a trampoline, ... and all that times four or five or six kittens or more. Then mom gets up and walks away in disgust and a protesting kitten gets smacked. It seems to me that the cat was controlling and modulating her instinctive emotional reactions somewhere in there. It would be most interesting to do the same kind of MRI on a wide variety of vertebrates. That way, we could see if the same amygdalae responses occur or do not occur across species. |
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