BRAIN SCIENCE PODCAST

with Ginger Campbell, MD

Episode #91 Originally aired 11/30/12 Interview with Jaak Panksepp, PhD, Author of The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions [music] INTRODUCTION Welcome to the Brain Science Podcast, the show for everyone who has a brain. I'm your host Dr. Ginger Campbell, and this is Episode 91. Today I'm happy to welcome back pioneering neuroscientist, Jaak Panksepp. But before I tell you about today's episode, I want to remind you that you can get complete show notes and free episode transcripts for every episode of the Brain Science Podcast at brainsciencepodcast.com. That's also where you'll find links for things like the Brain Science Podcast apps for mobile devices, and my new eBook, Are you Sure? The Unconscious Origins of Certainty. Also, you can send me email at docartemis@gmail.com. Today's guest, Dr. Jaak Panksepp has devoted his career to studying the subcortical origins of emotions. We first spoke back in Episode 65, when we focused on his ground-breaking textbook, Affective Neuroscience. Today we will be talking about his new book, The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions.

Copyright Virginia Campbell, MD 2012

This conversation is really a continuation of the discussion I began in Episode 90; but don't worry, if you are new to the Brain Science Podcast, you can jump right in with this episode. After the interview I will be back to summarize the key ideas, and also to tell you how you can learn more. INTERVIEW Dr. Campbell: Jaak, I'm really glad to have you back on the Brain Science Podcast. It's been almost three years since we last talked. Dr. Panksepp: My goodness! Dr. Campbell: I guess you've had some health challenges in the intervening time haven't you? Dr. Panksepp: I have had a stem cell transplant, and I'm doing fine. It was a heck of a challenge. Hopefully things are OK. I have another PET scan coming in a couple of weeks. Dr. Campbell: Well, I'm glad to know that you were able to get this new book, The Archaeology of Mind, finally out into the world, because I know you had a big desire to do that. Could you tell us maybe just a little bit about your new book? Dr. Panksepp: Yes. Archaeologyand I'll just use 'Archaeology' as shorthand it's been on my mind for quite a few years. After completing Affective Neuroscience, which was published in 1998, lots of colleagues and friends wanted me to write a more popular version. And I put it off, put it off, but finally I went to it. And so, it's a bit of an updating. It's basically the arguments that were first presented in Affective Neuroscience, and they're made more accessible to people
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that are not scientists. The 1998 book was a textbook. This can be used as a textbook but it's more in the popular vein, even though there's still a lot of data and complex arguments. Dr. Campbell: Yes, I was very impressed with the amount of new data that is available in the book. There were an awful lot of recent papers cited. Dr. Panksepp: There's an enormous amount of work going on; and keeping up with the fieldespecially now that human neuroscience is tackling emotions with all the brain imaging tools that we haveit's changing the ballgame. But not necessarily the story that I have been generating. Dr. Campbell: So, I guess for the sake of new listeners (I'm happy to report I might have picked up a listener or two in the last three years) maybe we should start out by talking about some basic definitions. What is affective neuroscience? Dr. Panksepp: Well, affective neuroscience is the study of the basic emotions; the ones that Mother Nature gave us as part of our evolutionary tools for living. And they are built into the brain at a very low level. These are functions that all mammals sharenot identically, but certainly with evolutionary similaritiesthat allows the animal data for the first time to truly illuminate the foundations of our own minds. Which I think are affective; namely, they're automatic tools for living that tell us what's good for survival and what may harm survival. The upper brain could not exist and could not function properly without the lower brain. And that's why I called the book Archaeology of Mind, because these are low areas of the brain that we cannot readily study in human beings.

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Dr. Campbell: Now, the term 'affective,' besides the emotional affects it also includes sensory affects and homeostatic affectseven though that's not your focus. Dr. Panksepp: Absolutely. Dr. Campbell: So an example, I guess, of a sensory one would be feeling cold? Dr. Panksepp: Yes, that would be one; but taste, sweetness and bitterness are maybe more obvious examples. Because we have this intimate relationship with our tongue, whereas cold seems to be a more general and really a less wellunderstood sensory feeling. You can feel cold even though your body is hot. For instance, in a fever, when you have chills and your body temperature is going up, people actually feel cold. So, the experience itself is inside the brain as much as on the sensory surfaces. Dr. Campbell: And then homeostatic, I guess an example of that would be hunger? Dr. Panksepp: Hunger and thirst would be good ones. I think you can also put the temperature into that category. So, even though hunger does not have an external sensory field, it's a body and brain interaction so it's inside the organism, really temperature is much more like that also. So, one really has to break down the sensory feelings that kind of interface with the world. Taste is a great example; smell, hearing, vision; we can have different feelings for sounds. Music conveys emotions very readily. And those are really not in the emotional category (even though music can activate our emotions; so, they all interact).

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And then this large class of bodily feelings, hunger and thirst, we all understand; and we barely understand where they are organized in the brain. I actually worked on hunger as one of the first projects in my career back in the 60's and early 70's. And we did highlight what we thought the evidence indicatedthat hunger was in the ventromedial hypothalamus more than anywhere else in the brain. And the modern research is very consistent with that early conclusion. At a certain point in the history of science we have to have working hypotheses based on very little knowledge. And then people have to use that which is lasting understanding; different people can see the same thing to generate additional testable hypotheses. So, we're already beginning the path toward a true understanding of hunger and thirst. But many people still will not allow those words when we describe animal behavior, because it's very hard to see into the animal mind. It's the emotions where we can see into the animal mind. Dr. Campbell: That's sort of ironic though, since there's no debate over the fact that all mammals share the lower circuits for things like hunger, yet the idea that we share the circuits for our emotions generates some controversy. That's the reason why I brought those other up; to show that we're really talking about a continuum. Dr. Panksepp: You bet. A lot of people believe emotions are a higher brain function. Many human theorists essentially have stated that over and over again: that the thought has to come before the feeling. Dr. Campbell: Yes, but I think, as Damasio showed in his recent book, the fact that an anencephalic baby can have an emotional life is a pretty convincing argument that that's not true.

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Dr. Panksepp: Absolutely. And Antonio Damasio has recently published some of the finest work indicating in adult human beings who've had a disease like encephalitis, that has damaged the higher parts of the brain that are thought to be absolutely essential for emotional feelingslike the famous 'patient B' patient B, his higher limbic system, including cortical regions like insula, anterior cingulate, parts of the frontal lobe, are completely damaged and the person still has a rich mental life, including most of the emotions that we all feel. Dr. Campbell: That's pretty convincing. So, before we start talking about some of the primary-process feelings that are the focus of your work, I thought maybe we should talk a little bit about your approach to research. In Archaeology you talk about using a triangulation approach. Could you tell us what that is, and why you think it's important? Dr. Panksepp: Yes. I think in order to make progress on the most interesting topics in brain researchnamely, what does it mean to experience the world, what does it mean to experience yourself; namely, consciousness itselfyou have to take the mind seriously; namely, our internal experience of ourselves in the world. This will never be understood without studying the brain. I think we all agree on that. And we also triangulate between the third critical support, which is behavior. Now, behavior has been studied in animals for a long time. And it took a long time before people started focusing on the brain control of behavior, but the mind has been left out of that equation. What affective neuroscience tries to do is bring certain simple aspects of the mind, such as emotional feelings, back into the animal research. And the reason for that is that it's very practical knowledge that can clarify psychiatric issues. Psychiatric disordersdepression, mania, obsessive compulsive disorder,

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sometimes schizophreniahave emotional imbalances that really trouble people's lives. And if we do not understand these emotional feelings that become imbalanced, we cannot develop new medicines and new understanding. And we cannot really study those mental processes in human beings; but if we share them with other animals, then by studying other animals carefully and sensitively we actually develop knowledge about our own emotional mind. And that's what my project has been. Dr. Campbell: So, would it be fair to summarize that we need the animal work in order to be able to study the primary-process level; and we need people to study the tertiary, or higher cognitive levels; and then, in the middle is the thing we haven't really talked about yet, which is learning, which kind of bridges between the two. Dr. Panksepp: Absolutely. That's why I use the metaphor of archaeologythat as you go deeper and deeper into the brain and mind you come to a level that was built in genetically. I call that the 'primary-process level.' And it turns out raw emotional feelings (and I capitalize these systems, because I'm talking about specific neural circuits), those primitive emotions we share with the other animals, and we have a similar type of feeling, because we can predict human feelings from the animal research already. So, that primary level was kind of ignored throughout the history of psychology. They were simply called 'unconditioned stimulus' and 'unconditioned response' processes; so, we had a convenient label. What the behaviorist animal investigators focused on was learning and memory which of course is terribly important. But that learning and memory comes from a second layer that's higher up in the brain. As a group we call those brain
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systems basal ganglia. Everyone has heard about the amygdala, but there are many other ones like bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, nucleus accumbens, septal area. And these interface with the cortex, which is a higher level processing. Within the neocortex we can have ideas. And, of course, human culture is built upon the neocortex. And that part of the brainthe middle part; the learning and memory partgives you all of the information you need for thinking. So, we had to understand how the memory occurs. And it turns out that the memory occurs based upon the values that are built in very low in the brain. So, emotional feelings, sensory feelings, body homeostatic feelings, they have to be interfaced with the world. So, the middle layer secondary-process does the interface, and that provides all the information that you will ever have for thinking. So, people that do not take this kind of evolutionary hierarchical view will often get lost in their terminologies. You have to have separate words for each of the levels. And it turns out that usually people thought the unconscious, the unexperienced part of brain life was at the very bottom. But it's not; it's at that learning and memory level. Learning and memory just occur automatically unconsciously. Below it you have these primitive emotional and other affective systems that provide the intrinsic values, and those neural circuits appear to control learning. So, this is missing in the current puzzle that those people are studying. Lots of people are still working at the secondary-process levelclassical conditioning; operant conditioning; finding out how different brain areas participatebut they haven't brought the bottom into their discussion in any sophisticated way. And, of course, human work is on the neocortical level.

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So, if you look at this archaeology, when a little baby is born it's born with primary processes; those are very big in a baby's life. And immediately the baby begins to use its basal gangliathe secondary-process levelto learn about the world. And then, once the kids go to school, culture begins to put all kinds of cultural learning into the brain in the upper brain. So, early development is bottom-up; and once you're maturethe way we are, and the listeners of your wonderful radio programwe have lots of top-down control. Once you understand this early developmental sequence of primary to tertiary, and then later on you can have your tertiary control your primary processesnamely, emotional regulationyou see how many of the arguments in science and psychology have been pretty empty. Such as saying feelings always follow cognitions. Well, of course; when you're completely mature, that's what typically happens. Someone said something that's cognitiveand it affects your emotions in various ways. But a baby that doesn't have language, it's responding immediately to the world with its primaryprocess levels. And those little babies feel things. And animals feel things. That's what the evidence indicates. The big surprise is the primary-process level already has mental processes, experienced processes. So, that is something that our intellectual landscape will have to integrate. And it will be a slow process. [music] Dr. Campbell: Way back in Affective Neuroscience you argued that there was evidence for seven primary emotional processes. Is that the right way for me to say it? Dr. Panksepp: Yes.

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Dr. Campbell: And I think that your list is still at seven. Would you take us through that list and tell us just a little bit about each of those? Dr. Panksepp: Very good. I have a sequence I use, going from the most ancient and most important to the most recent emotional systems, that seems to be correct in terms of what we know about brain organization. The most universal emotion we have is the desire to engage with the world, enthusiastically; to look for resources. And we call this the SEEKING system. This was discovered in 1954at least that's when it was publishedby Olds and Milner at McGill University. And they called it the 'reward' systembecause animals would press levers to activate this system, and reward was a big-ticket concept. And we have kept that word. But when you actually look at the animal's behaviorindependent of learning; just asking what does the system doevery animal, when you artificially activate the system, like with deep brain stimulation, they begin an exploratory activity. They move forward, they sniff, they search; it looks like they're looking for things. That appears to be a good feeling, that doesn't satiate. You know animals would press the lever for 24 hours, and then drop out of exhaustion. And that is very paradoxical, because when we eat and we have pleasure, we get full and we stop. This system doesn't stop until you're exhaustedhave to fall asleep. Creative minds are always using this system, because they've connected up a lot of great ideas in their upstairs brain to this mental energy that we could call 'interest.' Maybe it's even the driving force of creativity. This system participates in every other emotion. Of course, when you search for things that need to support your survival, other organisms might see you as a source of resourcesfood; predators. And now
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you'd better have a system that protects you. And we have a fear system that allows us to automatically pull away from a situationto hide; to run away. And we capitalize this also; it's called a FEAR system. And this is very important for fear learning that people do; but they don't seem to acknowledge the system yet. Of course, when you're looking for resources, the third system means other animals are looking for resources too, and you're going to at some point compete for resourceseven fight for resources. And a terrific way, if someone takes your stuff away, is to get angry. Well, the brain has a RAGE systemand we capitalize that. And we know where it is. And it doesn't feel good; animals turn it off. And that's our measure of a feeling: animals turning things on in the brain or off. Then, if we're mammals, we have to pass on our genes into the next generation, and you have to have a LUST system. Of course, reptiles have it, and many other classes of animals have it. The LUST system is slightly different in males and females. It does share many aspects, but we know that often males and females don't quite understand each other. And I think this is already built into the LUST system. But lust requires seeking. You have to look for a mate; you have to look for a companion. So, all the good things in life require the SEEKING system. But if you have a successful LUST system, that means that you've had children. And in mammals, almost universally, the mother is more competent in taking care of children. And many fathers simply hit and run; they depart from the scene. Whereas mothers, of course, are committed to the baby. That maternal devotion has a special system that we call CARE. This could be a primal source of empathy. Empathy is feeling another person's pain, another person's distress. And mothers are especially keen at identifying when their babies need attention.

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So, once you've got that CARE system, you also have a baby that has to communicate to the mother its desperate need for the motherespecially if it gets lost. And a little child that is lost always cries. And this cry, that we call the 'separation call,' is exhibited by practically all other mammalsnot every one, but practically all mammals (in the real world; some laboratory animals like rats and mice don't have a vigorous system). But we call this the PANIC system, because this is an anxiety feeling that is different than the one that emerges from fear. So, a lot of people just have this word 'anxiety' for everything that feels bad; but the feeling of panic is a psychological pain that we think is the foundation of depression. So, here's how an understanding of a system can immediately connect up with psychiatric issues a new medicinal development which we have been pursuing. So, this PANIC system in conjunction with a CARE system leads to social bonding, social attachment. And people ask me, where's the social attachment system? And I say, well, there is no separate social attachment system, it depends upon the emotions of separation distress and care, and how they lead to learning, because attachment is a secondary process. Then there is one more great system that we pretty much started the research on just like with the PANIC systemand that's the PLAY system. If you're a mammal, you cannot have all your skills built into the brainall the social skills you needand you should have a brain system that's devoted to essentially teaching you the nature of your own kind. And play is a wonderful way to do it. The desire to engage with other members of your species in such a powerful way, and a joyous way, that you will learn what you can do to others and others can do to you. So, I think PLAY is the playing ground for social skills.

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And after that I cannot find, I cannot see the evidence for any other emotional system. If I'm forced to kind of speculate, then I might say dominancethere might be a social dominance system. We're seeing it right now in the presidential elections very dramatically; each candidate trying to show their dominance. We see this in life. It's always present where you're competing for recourseslike Wall Street. But is there a dominance system in the brain? I cannot point to the evidence. I think dominance is a secondary process of learning. Animals that are playing learn to be dominant, too. One animal ends up being on topsort of the leader of the pack, so to speakwhereas others are more submissive. This is learned. That's a dominance pattern. So, I think dominance is a secondary process. Other people say, well what about disgust; why don't you capitalize 'disgust?' Well, I think disgust is a primary process, but it's a nausea of the body. Again it's a conceptual error; the concept of emotion belongs to those complex systems that are inside the brain itself, designed to organize the feelings that are completely generated within the brain but that connect with the world eventually. Dr. Campbell: Yes. And as far as disgust goes, I interviewed Rachel Herz, who has written a nice book about that. And one of the things that she pointed out is that, although disgust is a universal emotion, as Paul Ekman would describe, it is learned. Dr. Panksepp: I would say it's a universal feeling. It's not an emotion, it's a feeling. Dr. Campbell: And it's also learned, which makes it not a primary process. Dr. Panksepp: It is certainly learned in the social domain. When you have distain for someone, you say, You disgust me. That is clearly learned. But there's also the disgust you feel when you ate something that's not good for your body
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and you get nauseous. That disgust is primary-process, but that's a homeostatic, it's not an emotional feeling. Dr. Campbell: OK. So, before we talk about a few of these in a little bit more detail, would you talk briefly about how the evidence is gathered when you're trying to figure out or establish the existence of a primary process? Dr. Panksepp: Yes, that's something that's absolutely critical. You can see these emotions I described in the real world readily. But of course, that doesn't tell you where they come from in the brain, and one could argue maybe they're learned. What allows you to say that certain emotions are built into the brain is using primarily deep brain stimulation. Namely, you put electrodes where you can put electrical charge into little areas of the brain, and hope to find areas that produce an emotional display that everyone would agree, Oh, this animal is searching for something; or, this animal looks angry; or, this animal is fearful. You can produce these emotional displays by stimulating the brain. But only in certain parts. And they have to be very low in the brainyou can never get these from neocortex; our thinking cap. That anchors you to what is real inside the brain; because the electrical stimulation does not have any information, it just has energy. And when you put that kind of energybasically electrical garbageinto the brain in certain places, and the animal shows a very coherent behavioral response, that means that behavioral response is built into the brain. There's no other credible alternative.

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Then you can ask the next question about feelings. You can ask, Does this emotional display feel like anything, or is it neutral? People that say animals don't have emotions should predict they are neutral, the animal doesn't care; you're just pulling the animal around like a puppet on strings. But in fact, wherever in the brain you activate these emotional displays they're always rewarding or punishing. So, that is the gold standard for a feeling. And an understanding of that feeling, we obviously don't see exactly what the animal is feeling; we say the behavior that we see corresponds to the feeling that we experience. And when humans have been stimulated in these same areas, you typically get a feeling that is in the category of our capitalized labels. So, in the RAGE system a person will just blow their top, get pissed off, say the most horrible things suddenly, clench their jaw, wrinkle their hands into a fist. And then it turns off and it stops. And the person apologizes, and says, I don't know what overcame me. Well, they were overcome by an emotional feeling. They report things like, I was all of a sudden very angry, but I don't know why. You can produce fearful feelings and the other feelings in the same way. And these are coming from brain areas we share with the other animals. So, the evidence is rather overwhelming. Dr. Campbell: Could you say a little bit more about how we know that the animals careI mean, that the feelings are not neutral? Dr. Panksepp: Well, we use reward and punishment. In other words, our feelings feel good and bad. In the technical language of behavioral analysis, the world has rewards (food, water, etc.) and punishments (someone biting you, hitting you, etc.). These rewards and punishments are 'unconditioned stimuli.' They were just given a
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word; they were never really studied carefully. Because you had to study them by looking inside the brain, and folks were not ready to go there. So, do we have any rewards in the world that we don't say feel good? Do we have any punishments in the world that we don't say feel bad? I don't know of any such examples. And we should not put our human species on a pedestal by saying, well, we have language and therefore we can experienceas some people say. I say, no; experience at this level is not language, it's simply feeling good or bad. And if all our rewards feel good and bad, then if brain systems, themselves, are rewarding and punishing, we have to give the animals feelingsespecially if we can make predictions directly to our own species that can talk. So, the bottom line is science never has proof; science has evidence for one argument or another. And we still live in an era where it seems like certain arguments are more important than the facts. But I think what affective neuroscience shows is animals do have emotional feelings, we know a lot about them, and they predict a lot about our own feelings. So, I think it's generating a cohesive story. Dr. Campbell: The thing I was trying to get at was what do the animals do that tells you that a particular thing you're doing is either rewarding or a punishment like say, if you're stimulating the brain, how can you tell which is which? Dr. Panksepp: Well, it's very easy: We ask the animal you can turn on this stimulation into your brain yourself. If the animal does that, it's rewarding. Dr. Campbell: Right. Dr. Panksepp: So, we have several different kinds of rewards in the brain of animals. We also can ask the animal, If I turn it on but you're allowed to turn it
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off, will you turn it off? And, yes, the animals escape the stimulationthat internal state that you produced artificially. So, self-stimulation and the desire to go back to places where you got that stimulation are indications of reward for all animals, including humans, and where you want to turn something off and you don't want to go back to a place where you had that experiencenamely, conditioned place aversion vs. conditioned place preferencethose are the best gold standards for feelings that we have. Dr. Campbell: OK. That's what I was trying to get at, because I think that's pretty hard to argue with. So, each of the processes that you have identified has its origin in a subcortical circuit that, as far as we know, is shared between all mammals and humansat least the main parts of the circuits. Dr. Panksepp: Yes. They are never identical, because evolution is always diversity. You just look at all the mammals; even though they share the same basic body plan, each one is sufficiently different in that we have no problem distinguishing them. So, these systems are not identical in all mammals, but they're evolutionarily related, so the general principles are likely to be very, very similar. [music] The Brain Science Podcast is sponsored by Audible.com, the world's leading provider of downloadable audiobooks. Many of the books featured on the Brain Science Podcast are available from Audible, and I know many of you are already loyal Audible members. But if you haven't tried it, you can get a free audiobook download by going to audiblepodcast.com/brainscience.

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Audible has been sponsoring the Brain Science Podcast since 2007, but I also want to take a moment to thank those of you who support my work with your donations. Listener donations allow me to keep the Brain Science Podcast and the episode transcripts completely free. [music] Dr. Campbell: The last time that we talked (I looked back at the transcript; I'm not going to pretend I have a perfect memory from three years ago), we talked a lot about the SEEKING system. And I think you've said a lot about that today, too, so I don't think we need to talk about that one any more right now. But what about the FEAR system? Because that's one that we didn't talk about very much before. And it's also one that there's a lot of, I think, myths and misconceptions about. Dr. Panksepp: Yes. It's a big, big system, because you need such a system to protect yourself and support your survival; especially in the old ancestral environments where there were a lot of big predators. Again with deep brain stimulation, you put it into a specific continuum that runs from the midbrainespecially the very core of the brain, which is the most ancient part; namely the periaqueductal grayand you get, at low current levels, the animal sort of getting concerned that something bad is happening, it looks like. Then the animal often freezes, becomes very still. And then if you increase the current more, they run away, and they show a flight response. So, they show a whole pattern that we see in normal animals that are scared. A rabbit sees a possible predator, they kind of freeze and hide when the predator is far away; if the predator all of a sudden gets so close, they run. And we don't know anything about that transition point. My own hypothesisand it's just a

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working hypothesisis at that point the SEEKING system comes on board, and now the animal flees because it's seeking safety and it's in an active mode. So, the learning of this system occurs in the amygdala. And that's why the amygdala has become so important in memory research, and even a certain kind of emotion research which is at the secondary level. There are lots of people doing wonderful work on that. We know more about the details of emotional learning in that system, because hundreds of people have been working on the amygdala and how it learns. It's been very well worked out. Glutamate is absolutely necessarythis universal excitatory amino acid that transmits information all over the brain. Glutamate is the biggest excitatory transmitter all over. If that disappeared in your brain, all your thoughts would immediately vanish. You would be anesthetized, by the way. People do surgery with these kinds of agents. The molecule that Michael Jackson died from was a blocker of this system. But it can also block negative feelings; and put you to sleep. And then at some point it kills you, at some dose. Often people feel a little better when the activity of this system goes down, because many negative feelings are activated by glutamate, including fearful ones. So, it turns out that the learning is based upon the glutamate. And the only thing that's been missing in the equation so far is the primary-process of FEAR itself. And that's because of history; that people just didn't know how to go to that level. There was a whole generation of scholars focused on learning and memory as the most important problem, without really conceptualizing the nature of the unconditioned stimuli. People use shock usually; that's the unconditioned stimulus. Well, guess what? Unconditioned stimuli have many results. One of them is pain; and one of them

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is fleeinggoing into a fear mode. Which one is more important? Are both equally important? Is the pain and the fear equally important for conditioning? We don't know yet. But the feeling of fear has been thrown out, because people think the feeling is too flaky, too outside the scientific conversation, without realizing that the feeling is actually part of a certain neural circuit. So, my argument is the neural circuit that generates the fear behavior and the feeling is a very big player in connecting up learningso, connecting fear to what's happening in the world. And in Archaeology of Mind, I think Chapter 6, I actually highlight a very explicit hypothesis on how this could be tested. Let me just mention one other wonderful experiment I read recently from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. People know that this so-called 'love molecule,' oxytocin, has a lot of input into the amygdala, where the fear conditioning occurs. And they wanted to know how is the oxytocin in that little brain area modifying fearful feelingsby condition aversion; by all the possible behavioral indicators. And they actually were able to stimulate just the oxytocin in the central nucleus of the amygdalawhich is the real hotbed; the most fearful sub-part of the amygdalaand they found when they just simply activated this so-called 'love molecule,' oxytocin, animals became more relaxed and less fearful. How beautiful is that! And mothers have a lot of oxytocin. And what mothers really need is a lot of courage. And when you reduce fear, you have more courage. Dr. Campbell: Yes. I want to talk a little bit more about oxytocin in a minute. But back on fear for a minute; because I think that the dogma is that fear is all learned, how do we know that it is actually innate, or primary? Dr. Panksepp: Because you can take animals that have been born in the laboratory, reared in the laboratoryyou can bring them up in such a way that
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they've had no fearful experiences in their lifetimeand you can put electrodes into these brain areas that generate fear and you get a full fear response. So, where did the animal learn that? Evolution built it into the brain. I mean it's pretty straightforward. All our research is done on these laboratory animals that we breed; we rear in the comfort of free food, water, warmth. They don't have to look for the resources. (Even though they would like to. Given the choice, they will always want to look for their resources. Even when they have free food they will work, often, for food, because they enjoy it.) But we can have animals that never experience fear, as far as we know. And we can get a very clear fearful response in every one of those animals by stimulating the low primary-process operating systems, as we call them. Dr. Campbell: OK. I thought it was really fascinatingI think you had mentioned it in Affective Neuroscience, and you mentioned it in Archaeology the fact that rats are afraid of certain smells, even if they have never even met a predator. Will you talk about that for a second? Dr. Campbell: That's truly remarkable. A lot of people have been working on that. We all know now that rats are prepared by evolution to avoid places where predators hang out. We were the first to ask the question is the fear of cat smell carried by the main olfactory bulb (which we smell our coffee and food with), or is it the so-called accessory olfactory systemit's called the vomeronasal organ; you can picture a snake with its forked tongue sending its tongue out, actually sampling the air, and then pulling the forked tongue in and putting that sample right into what's called Jacobson's organ that carries the message into the brain by the vomeronasal organ.

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So, we have two olfactory systems. And we checked out, back in the 80's, does the smell of a cat come from the olfactory bulb or from this accessory system? And we thought it would be the olfactory bulb; we thought the animal is smelling a predator far away. But it turned out to be the close up systemthe vomeronasal nerve. When you cut that, the animal no longer is fearful of cat smell. That was a surprise. That probably indicates the system was designed to avoid laying down your home where predators have laid down their home nearby. It's best to have a clean field; no predators. Dr. Campbell: Does that organ's input come through at the midbrain level? Dr. Panksepp: It comes directly into the amygdalasmack into the amygdala. And Robert Sapolsky at Stanford University (I'm sure you've probably interviewed him; you should), he right now is working on this arcane problem: how does this fear of cats actually get into the amygdala, and how does it get blunted in certain animals? It turns out that there is a pathogen, a parasite Dr. Campbell: Is that toxoplasmosis? Dr. Panksepp: Toxoplasma gondii. Yes, thank you. Toxoplasma gondii. Which is very prevalent in the world; many people are infected with it. France seems to have the highest level of infection. We get it from our cats. That's why mothers should not be cleaning cat poop out of a litter box. It turns out that Toxoplasma gondii, in order to reproduce, the only place it reproduces is the stomach of a cat. So, how does Toxoplasma get into the stomach of a cat? Obviously by things cats eat. Cats like to prey on little rodents. Little rodents get exposed to Toxoplasma gondii. The cat eats it. And when the cat eats it, it eats rodents that aren't too scared of it. It turns out that Toxoplasma makes rats less fearful of cat smell.
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Toxoplasma actually gets into the brain, as Sapolsky has shown, and blocks the cat smell from activating fear. Wow! That means these rats are more liable to end up in the stomach of a cat. So, that makes a wonderful evolutionary story: how a little bug outwitted the rat emotional system to get into the cat's stomach. Dr. Campbell: One other thing about the amygdala, Jaak. The popular press seems to promote the idea that the amygdala is the actualwell, the source of fear. But that's not right. Dr. Panksepp: No, it's not. Oh, I don't know; it's been marketed by some areas of neuroscience for such a long time that people seem to kind of have a knee jerk, Oh, amygdala is the heart of emotionality. It's not. We know that human beings that are missing the amygdala on both sides have lots of emotions. These people are concentrated in a northern part of South Africa. It's a genetic disorderit's called Urbach-Wiethe diseasethat for some reason the amygdala begins to degenerate when you're young. The degeneration gets larger and larger and larger as you get older. And there are enough people with this problem around still, people that have carefully analyzed their emotional responses find they still have fear, they still have worries, they still have all their other emotions. Their main problem is they're often too trusting. They might not be suspicious of other peoplewhich is a nice trait if you're going to be a nice person; and often they have a very wonderful warm personality. But they are not missing their emotions. They have rich emotions. They are a little deficient in fear learning, so they don't learn who to be suspicious of. But this does not mean that they cannot experience fear. So, the secondary-process is not needed for the primary-process. So, the field, for some reason, has missed the power of the primary-process. And it turned out

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that I chose to focus on that; not because I didn't think other people were focusing on it, but as the years passed I realized that people were having trouble understanding the evidence I was providing. Because it wasn't in the textbooks; other people were not studying the systems at these lower levels; and everybody was trained not to talk about the animal mind. And I did not take that training seriously. I thought it was a little incoherent with evolutionary theory. And we do have very objective ways to measure whether systems feel good or bad. And these good and bad feelings are very ancient things. And you can look at Damasio's work as a wonderful example of wherein his first book, Descartes' Error in 1994feelings were a top-brain activity; emotional feelings came from the neocortex. Just like the James-Lange theory: You see the bear; it doesn't scare you, but you say, I'd better run away. And you run away, and all of a sudden your heart's going up, blood pressure is going up, and you reinterpret it cognitively as a feeling in the neocortex. It's still the major theory in psychologywould you believea-hundred-and-some years later. The primary-process was neglected. It had to be neglected until you had tools. And these tools didn't become readily available until about the 1960s, when I was a student. I was just fortunate enough to shift from clinical psychology into trying to understand what the emotions were that troubled people. And I said, you know, the animals will tell us about our emotional feelings more clearly than any human research anyone can do. And I don't think that was a wrong choice. But very few people took that choice. And the people that did were the ones that said you cannot talk about emotional feelings. That was dogma, so people closed the book on that. And now the book is gradually opening.

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Dr. Campbell: So, the breakthrough, as far as being able to study it, was figuring out that you could electrically stimulate various circuits of the animal's brain and see what happens? Dr. Panksepp: Yes, that was the key to it. Again: garbage in, coherence out. You can't stimulate your computer that way; it just ruins your computer, and nothing coherent ever comes out again. The brain is designed with certain tools; and you can activate the emotional tools, everyone will agree, that animal looks angry, that animal looks fearful. We can all agree on that. But then you simply ask the next question (which is simple conceptually; the research, of course, is difficult): Do you like this new state that I have produced? If the animal has no consciousness of it, no experience of it (and I'm talking only about phenomenal consciousness, qualia, the emotional experience itself; as FDR said, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself"), essentially that is so rich in human predictions. And we have taken our understanding of the separation systemthe PANIC system, we call ithow it works with the SEEKING system, and said that this balance of psychological activity is one of the sources of depression. Depression is when you've had too much psychological pain, too much loss, and all of a sudden life has become overwhelming with just psychological pain. This depletes the resources within your SEEKING system, and you no longer have a desire to be in the world. And then suicide becomes an option, and becomes a high likely activity. By just understanding these systems as the focus of where depression may come from, we have done enough neurochemistry with very skilled biochemical colleagues that have identified possible ways to intervene in the balance of these systems. One of our molecules, that came from a genetic analysis of happiness, playfulness, activity in the SEEKING and PLAY system; one of our candidates, a
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totally new molecule that wasn't on the radar of psychiatry, we know that it can produce happier feelings in animals. And we've got ways to measure that; we call this rat laughterthat we've become famous foris our measure of it. And we've found molecules that increase this rat laughterwhich, in the vernacular, is human joy. And these molecules work in animal models of depression. We took one of them (GLYX-13) through Phase 1 human testing nowafter the toxicology was done. And it sure looks like GLYX-13 has antidepressant effects in humans. Dr. Campbell: I guess you're really excited, since at the beginning of your career your aspiration was to help human patients, right? Dr. Panksepp: Absolutely. I started in clinical psychology because I did work in the back wards of a psychiatric hospital as an undergraduate. And I decided to get into this field, but realized that there was no scientific understanding of human emotional feelings, which were the most important ones for psychiatry. I simply had to do a certain kind of research. So, all my research has always been done with the notion that animals must be conscious beingshave emotional feelingsand simply figuring out how one collects the kind of data that yields a coherent argument. For a long time I've told my colleagues, Even though you don't believe animals have feelings and consciousness, I think the evidence at this level already indicates that they do. Namely, we have the weight of evidencenot the weight of argumentation, which you have been trained to do, but the weight of evidence that's come from predictions of a very different, but sensible, view of animal mental life. So, in my latter years I'm just getting a bit louder and louder on that point. Because science is really the only intellectual discipline we have to understand
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the nature of reality. And we cannot have preconceptions of what reality is. And one of the preconceptions that came into my field was that we can never understand the consciousness of other animals, because that is too subtle, and we don't have access to their minds. Of course they don't talk, of course they might not have complex thoughts the way we do; but it looks like at the very foundation of our mind we have emotional and other bodily systems that automatically tell us things are good or badthat support survival, the good feelings; the bad feelings tell us we're on the path of destruction. We can be more the skeptics now. We can change from our traditional skepticism to following the rules of evidence; namely, what has support, and what is just a story. Dr. Campbell: Jaak, I have to tell you that after your first interview it happened to be that I was training a rescue German Shepherd. And so, I happened to give your first interview to several of the teachers at my dog obedience school. They got it right away; because anybody that works with animals And I guess that's the case for you. I mean you've spent your whole career with these lab animals. You've Dr. Panksepp: even tickled them. Dr. Campbell: Yes, I don't really get how the scientists that also have spent their careers with lab animals want to say that they're not conscious. But we're going to get back together, I hope soon, and talk about that in much more detail. But is there anything else that you would like to share before we close? Dr. Panksepp: Well, let me just briefly kind of remark on chemistries.
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I mentioned oxytocin controlling fear. Oxytocin is now the most exciting molecule that's seeped into human experimentation. Because we can sniff it up the nose, and some of it gets into the brain. And a lot of people are calling it the 'love molecule.' We know it's very important for motherhoodmaternal behavior in rats. So, right now we're confronted by: What is the concept here; what is the right psychological concept? Is it love really? Is it trust? All kinds of complex words are being laid on this system. But I think that's not recognizing the levels of analysis. Oxytocin is a primary-process system; it facilitates maternal behavior. Maternal behavior, sure, has to have a bond with an infant gradually; but the one thing a mother needs more than anything else is confidence. And that's what you see in human mothers. A first-time mother worries about having the first child: What will I do? Am I up to the task? And then a transformation occurs a couple of days before delivery. And that confidence is expressed in nest-building; all of a sudden you're active, and you're fixing the house up for the baby with enthusiasm. And I think the process occurs, a new kind of seeking urge that is full of confidence. So, I think that descriptor will summarize everything that's been found in humansincluding increased trust; and now, surprisingly, decreased trust. If you've got borderline personality disorder, oxytocin makes you less trusting of other people. Dr. Campbell: So, we don't have to worry that a car salesman is going to fill the showroom with oxytocin and convince us to buy a car. Dr. Panksepp: I don't think so. But it could have a small effect. Hopefully they won't be permitted to do such things. But the dilution will be so high, it's not

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going to be. Maybe it would give you a small glow, but that's about it. But that might be enough to sell something. Dr. Campbell: Well, I was just thinking if it's confidence instead of trust, then maybe you would be confident of your own judgment that a salesman is trying to pull one over on you. Dr. Panksepp: You've got it. That's exactly the way I think we can explain the diminished trust if you have borderline personality disorder. Borderline personality is just a needy individual that feels insecurehas felt so insecure, and hoping to have other people provide that security. What if this person all of a suddenwho has been so needyall of a sudden feels more secure in a trust game, and all of a sudden they have the courage to say, No, I'm not going to take thatexactly what you said. Dr. Campbell: Anything else? Dr. Panksepp: I would just say that the sooner we realize that we are animals the brightest animals on the face of the earth, for surebut I think often this brightness also closes our eyes to the things that we share with the other animals. And if we don't open our eyes on that, our science will not be as good as it can be, and the way we treat animals will not be as fine as it could be. These are awfully important issues. And I hope a lot of young people start coming into the field to answer the 99% of the questions that haven't been answered yet. Dr. Campbell: Absolutely, absolutely! And Jaak, we'll get back together hopefully in a few weeks, and talk more about these animal issues on my other podcast, Books and Ideas. Dr. Panksepp: Wonderful! I look forward to it, Ginger.
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Dr. Campbell: Me, too. [music] I want to thank Dr. Panksepp for taking the time to talk with me. And I want to take a few minutes to review the key ideas, and to tell you how you can learn more. The most important idea from today's discussion is the idea that emotions begin in the subcortical regions of the brain. Dr. Panksepp has identified seven primary emotional processes, which he calls SEEKING, FEAR, RAGE, LUST, CARE, PANIC, and PLAY. We discussed the evidence for these in more detail back in Episode 65. But the key idea is that if you stimulate the identified subcortical circuit you can elicit specific behaviors, and in the case of humans, specific emotional experiences. In contrast, one cannot elicit these primary processes by stimulating the cortex of the brain. And, as we discussed in Episode 90, even babies without a cortex show evidence of emotions. Now, back in Episode 65 Panksepp and I talked a lot about the SEEKING system and how it makes more sense to think in terms of seeking rather than a reward system. But today we looked a little more at FEAR, because I wanted to emphasize the evidence that fear does not begin in the amygdalacontrary to what you may have heard. Instead, it begins much lower. The amygdala is important, however, for emotional learning. This brings me to something else that Dr. Panksepp emphasized back in Episode 65 but that we only touched on today, and that is the importance of recognizing the different levels of analysis. The primary-process level, which is what we talked about today, is best-studied in animals. The secondary-process level, which is the learning level, is where the amygdala comes in. The tertiary-process
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level is the level of higher cognitive processes, which is what we can study in people. And it's very common to get these levels confused and not to appreciate their separation. One point Panksepp makes in Archaeology that I found very interesting is that, while primary processes and tertiary processes may be consciousalthough they aren't alwaysthe secondary level, the level of learning, is unconscious. This has some very interesting philosophical implications that I hope to explore more in the future. Another thing that we touched on only briefly today was the role of chemicals in the brain; and Dr. Panksepp mentioned oxytocin. In Archaeology of Mind he talks quite a bit about recent discoveries regarding oxytocin. But I also want to mention that when he was establishing the circuits for the seven primary emotional processes, Panksepp showed that each circuit could be stimulated by certain neurotransmitters and blocked by others. Each of these circuits has been elucidated in multiple species of mammals by means of both electrical and chemical stimulation. The behavior of the animals shows that they experience these processes as either rewards or punishments, they are never neutral. I want to emphasize how we know this is true. The key experimental technique is called 'self-stimulation,' which means that the animal has an electrode placed in a specific place in the brain and it has the ability to turn the current on or off. This is how scientists know that animals find stimulation of the seeking circuit very rewarding. They will literally stimulate this circuit until they drop. In contrast, they will turn off or avoid stimulating the RAGE circuit. So, it's easy to imagine how these primary processes can drive learning, even in animals with small brains.

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So, in this new book, The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions, Jaak Panksepp set out to make his life's work more accessible to a general audience. To be honest, reading this book requires a significant commitment. But I think he does a wonderful job of updating his classic textbook, Affective Neuroscience. Anyone who is interested in this field will definitely want this book as a reference. The other strength of Archaeology of Mind is the evolutionary approach it takes. The primary emotional processes that Panksepp has spent his career studying have their origins in the ancient parts of the brain that are shared by all mammals. This only makes sense if you understand that while the cortex may be what makes us human, we can't live without these older parts of our brain. For most of his career Panksepp has seen his work mostly ignored, because his discoveries contradict long-standing assumptions. We didn't really get into this today, but I want to take a moment to address this briefly, because the assumptions really come from two different directions. Those who are interested in human emotions have long assumed that emotions begin in the cortex, while those who work with animals have assumed that their subjects don't have feelings. In Archaeology of Mind, Panksespp discusses the historical origins of these assumptions; but I think his work convincingly demonstrates that these assumptions are wrong. This is not just a question of science, it has implications for both humans and animals. Psychiatric illnesses are the source of much human misery. For example, being depressed feels bad. Acknowledging that emotions begin below the level of verbal thought explains why just talking about a problem doesn't necessarily make you feel betterthough it might help. On a more positive note, as Panksepp mentions often in his book, understanding these brain circuits could
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offer new hope for patients, because treatments can now be directed to the root of the problem. Of course, the idea that animals have feelings is also an important topic. Which is why I'm going to have Dr. Panksepp back on an upcoming episode of Books and Ideas, so we can talk about this in more detail. If you haven't already listened to Episode 89 and 90, I encourage you to go back and listen to these because they will help to put Panksepp's evolutionary approach into a broader context. Besides his interview in Episode 65, I also recommend Episode 47 if you're interested in learning more about brain evolution, and Episode 32 if you want a refresher on brain anatomy. I will have links to all of these episodes in the show notes at brainsciencepodcast.com. Now I want to close with a few announcements. One, it's been brought to my attention that the earliest episodes of the Brain Science Podcast are now disappearing from iTunes because of the 100-episode limit that iTunes has. This is going to mostly affect those of you who are new listeners and want to go back and listen to the earliest episodes. The solution to finding the early episodes is that you can go to the website at brainsciencepodcast.com, or you can also get them if you use the Brain Science Podcast app, which is available for iPhone, iPad, and Android devices. In the case of Android devices, I think you have to go into the Amazon app store to find it. Now, as far as the various podcasting applications, I don't know which ones follow the iTunes model of 100-episode limit, so you may have a particular podcasting app that gets all the episodes. Anyone that wants to let me know about this so I can keep a list, that would be helpful. But, of course, if you get the app I do make a little bit of money, which does help me a little.

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Also, with regards to the app, it has been recently updated, so I do need new reviews to be posted for iTunes and Android so that there will be some reviews. Right now it shows no reviews, because they only show the reviews of the most recent version. Another advantage of the app is that you can get the transcripts for the episodes directly on your devices. If you're a psychologist, I want to remind you that you can now get continuing education credit for listening to certain episodes of the Brain Science Podcast, including most of the episodes recorded this year. So, just go to the website to find the link to Mensana Publications and check that out, because I think it's an easy, cheap way to get some continuing education for something that, if you're listening to this, you're already listening to. I also want to remind you if you haven't already gotten my eBook, Are You Sure? The Unconscious Origins of Certainty, it's still available for Amazon Kindle. If you don't have a Kindle or a Kindle app, just send me your receipt and I'll send you the PDF version for free. Finally, you can also support my work by listener donations. And the way you do that is just to go to brainsciencepodcast.com and look for the Donations tab under the logo. But even if you can't buy the app or donate, you can help support the Brain Science Podcast by telling others about it, sharing it on Facebook or Twitter, or wherever you happen to hang out on the Internet. The next episode of the Brain Science Podcast will be our annual review episode, and I'm really looking forward to that this year because we've had some very good interviews and I'm looking forward to trying to sort of tie them all together. Meanwhile, don't forget to check out my other podcast, Books and Ideas. You can automatically get the show notes for episodes of the Brain Science Podcast by signing up for the Brain Science Podcast newsletter at

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brainsciencepodcast.com. This is a great way to make sure you don't miss an episode. And I will mention that I am sending out newsletters when I post an episode of Books and Ideas. If you don't want to listen to Books and Ideas you can ignore this, but this is just my way of reminding you that I have a second podcast. Finally, I just really want to remind you to visit brainsciencepodcast.com, because that's where there are links for everything including the Brain Science Podcast fan page, the Discussion Forum on Goodreads, as well as the free episode transcripts. And don't forget you can send me email at docartemis@gmail.com, or you can follow me on Twitter where I'm also Doc Artemis. Thanks again for listening. I look forward to talking with you again very soon. [music] The Brain Science Podcast is copyright 2012 Virginia Campbell, MD. You may copy this podcast to share it with others, but for any other uses or derivatives, please contact me at docartemis@gmail.com. [music] The music used in today's episode is from "The Open Door" by Beatnik Turtle. You can check out their website at beatnikturtle.com. [music]

Transcribed by Lori Wolfson All errors or omissions responsibility of the transcriber

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