Immanuel Kant's mind and the brain's resting state

The early philosopher Immanuel Kant suggested that the mind’s intrinsic features are intimately linked to the extrinsic stimuli of the environment it processes. Currently, the field faces an analogous problem with regard to the brain. Kant’s ideas may provide novel insights into how the brain’s intrinsic features must be so that they can be linked to the neural processing of extrinsic stimuli to enable the latter’s association with consciousness and self.     

Localization of visceral pain and other sensations before and after anesthesia

The localization of sensations in sense organs that developed ontogenetically from the ectoderm layer, like vision, hearing, and skin, is much more precise than sensations inside the body, like pain in the chest or viscera, which are produced by receptors developed from the entoderm layer. Pain on the surface of the skin is much more sharply localized than is pain in the viscera. Personal experiences of pain sensations produced by an obstruction in the colon and the effects of anesthesia are described. It became evident that anesthesia can influence the activity of the vestibular organ for many days.     

Apparent image rotation in stereoscopic vision: The unbalance of the pupils

In binocular vision the apparent rotation of an object relative to the frontal plane seldom corresponds with the actual rotation. The reason for this is a difference in the brightness of the object in both eyes. It can be produced by a difference in the pupil size, adaptation, or sensitivity. One of the purposes of the pupils seems to be to compensate for this brightness unbalance and to make the apparent rotation come closer to the actual one. Unbalance was produced by placing a density filter before one eye, and the corresponding rotations were then measured. The rotations are affected by the irradiation in the eye, as a physical component, but also by the lateral inhibition in the visual nervous system. If the object and the background have a different color but there is no brightness difference on the edges of the object, there is no distorted rotation.     

When spiders appear suddenly: spider-phobic patients are distracted by task-irrelevant spiders

Fear is thought to facilitate the detection of threatening stimuli. Few studies have examined the effects of task-irrelevant phobic cues in search tasks that do not involve semantic categorization. In a combined reaction time and eye-tracking experiment we investigated whether peripheral visual cues capture initial attention and distract from the execution of goal-directed eye movements. Twenty-one spider-phobic patients and 21 control participants were instructed to search for a color singleton while ignoring task-irrelevant abrupt-onset distractors which contained either a small picture of a spider (phobic), a flower (non-phobic, but similar to spiders in shape), a mushroom (non-phobic, and not similar to spiders in shape), or no picture. As expected, patients' reaction times were longer on trials with spider distractors. However, eye movements revealed that this was not due to attentional capture by spider distractors; patients more often fixated on all distractors with pictures, but their reaction times were delayed by longer fixation durations on spider distractors. These data do not support automatic capture of attention by phobic cues but suggest that phobic patients fail to disengage attention from spiders.     

Doing as if: The histrionic self-presentation style

The histrionic self-presentation style is introduced as a concept that describes specific individual differences in self-presentation, namely, performing explicit As-If-behaviors in everyday interactions. The As-If-Scale (AIS), a trait measure of histrionic self-presentation, shows good internal consistency and test–retest reliability as well as convergent and discriminant validity in several samples. Construct validation involved determining relations between the AIS and the Big Five, histrionic role concepts, motives, competencies, humor and ambivalence. Furthermore, the AIS yielded incremental validity in predicting behaviors related to histrionic self-presentation over and above the self-monitoring construct. The possible impact of the histrionic style for research on self-presentation and other fields is discussed. It is argued that histrionic phenomena are pervasive within many facets of our western culture and therefore deserve further examination.     

Are our emotional feelings relational? A neurophilosophical investigation of the James–Lange theory

The James–Lange theory considers emotional feelings as perceptions of physiological body changes. This approach has recently resurfaced and modified in both neuroscientific and philosophical concepts of embodiment of emotional feelings. In addition to the body, the role of the environment in emotional feeling needs to be considered. I here claim that the environment has not merely an indirect and thus instrumental role on emotional feelings via the body and its sensorimotor and vegetative functions. Instead, the environment may have a direct and non-instrumental, i.e., constitutional role in emotional feelings; this implies that the environment itself in the gestalt of the person–environment relation is constitutive of emotional feeling rather than the bodily representation of the environment. Since the person–environment relation is crucial in this approach, I call it the relational concept of emotional feeling. After introducing the relational concept of emotional feeling, the present paper investigates the neurophilosophical question whether current neuroimaging data on human emotion processing and anatomical connectivity are empirically better compatible with the “relational” or the “embodied” concept of emotional feeling. These data lend support to the empirical assumption that neural activity in subcortical and cortical midline regions code the relationship between intero- and exteroceptive stimuli in a relational mode, i.e. their actual balance, rather than in a translational mode, i.e., by translating extero- into interoceptive stimulus changes. Such intero-exteroceptive relational mode of neural coding may have implications for the characterization of emotional feeling with regard to phenomenal consciousness and intentionality. I therefore conclude that the here advanced relational concept of emotional feeling may be considered neurophilosophically more plausible and better compatible with current neuroscientific data than the embodied concept as presupposed in the James–Lange theory and its modern neuroscientific and philosophical versions.