The Cortex and the Amygdala

The Cortex and the Amygdala:
that old story of twins separated at birth.
 
 An angel came in Rene' Descartes' dream
one night and told him that
the secret of the universe
lay in measure and number.

Cartesian dualism was born!

In the human brain,
this dualism is the split of
the Cortex and the Amygdala.

 
The Cortex is rational. The Amygdala is emotional.
But things are not as watertight as they seem.The Cortex measures.
But it measures what we feel-
It assigns value to emotion.The Amygdala feels.
But it feels a thought deeply-
It reacts with its own reasons.
 
Professor Joseph Ledoux remarks,
''We have to put emotion back
into the brain and integrate it
with cognitive systems.
We shouldn't study emotion
or cognition in isolation,
but should study both as aspects
of the mind in its brain.'
 

And about the Amygdala, he adds
''It's the part of the brain
involved independent of how
the stimulus gets into the brain
and how the response comes out.''

(A rattle snake has an amygdala similar to ours.
It goes on alert when it senses danger.
For many indigenous cultures, like the Mayans,
the rattle snake was sacred.)

It is easier for the Amygdala to control
the cortex than the other way round.
But studies in bottom-up and
top-down neuroplasticity
indicate remarkable signs of
long-term synaptic potentiation.

It basically means that the
Cortex and the Amygdala
can definitely talk with each other better.

For Antonio Damasio,
Professor of Neuroscience, emotions are
cognitive representations of body states.
His 'somatic marker mechanism'
is the way in which cognitive representations
of the external world
interact with cognitive representations
of the internal world. 'Perceptions interact with emotions',
to create body state representations
into working memory,
where we can be aware of them.
 

The very fact that the brain
runs a program means
there is a desirable state
it seeks to achieve.
And if such a state was not
intrinsic to the mind
it would not know
what program to run.
That subjective, non-physical state is Qualia:
the singular, personal and incommunicable.
 
Dr. Richard Restak acknowledges
the 'consciousness preceding identity'
(his words) between sleep and waking states
as pure cognition.
This is the Turiya of Vedanta
and the 'Transistional 'I' of Ramana Maharishi. 

 
Read Montague, specialist in
computational cognitive science, writes
''The neuron is fired before
the thought even occurs.
This suggests an evolutionary purpose
of a uncomputable, extra-physical property.

''There goes Descartes' number and measure!
 
The Taoist classic
'The Book of Balance and Harmony'
states that when emotions
have not yet arisen, it is Balance;
and when arisen, if they are
in equilibrium, it is Harmony.
People suffering from Schizophrenia
don't show any emotion.
And that is not the Balance,
the Taoists are talking about.
The Taoists know the Tao
from which all emotions rise and set.
So they are in Balance.
And since they know from where
all emotions rise and set,
they also know to keep emotions in equilibrium. 

So they are in Harmony.

 
That Tao is the ''uncomputable,
extra-physical,
consciousness preceding identity''.
And a Taoist would probably say,
like stillness within movement
and movement within stillness,
the amygdala within the cortex
and the cortex within the amygdala
is what a healthy mind is all about.