Anyone can become angry – that is easy.  But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way – this is not easy – ARISTOTOLE.

Often one finds the words faith, hope and love with adjective prefixes as ‘unconditional’ faith or ‘infallible’ hope or ‘blind’ love and so forth.  Use of these adjectives suggests that they are unexplainable by reason.  Why unconditional? Why infallible? Why blind? Often actions/reactions made purely based on faith, hope and love could be of disastrous consequences.

Parent making a desperate effort in the moment of crisis to ensure their child’s survival… we all live and work today with the hope that we will live tomorrow… or a faith in god, we put our entire burden. 

After all what are these words faith, hope and love signify?  They are human emotions.  Why are they central to human kind?  Why do we need these emotions?  What is the purpose and significance of them?  Why emotions or passions overwhelm reason?  In this context, the term Homo sapiens - the thinking species - becomes misnomer.  There are both scientific answers as well as philosophical explanations to these questions.   

In this essay, l shall dwell into science to find the answers for these questions.

Various branch of science that deals with human brain/mind… Psychology, Neurology, partly anthropology and likes…

Parent’s desperate efforts to save their children without concern for their life, automatic reactions of this sort have become etched in our nervous system, because for a long and crucial period in human prehistory they made the difference between survival and death.  Even more important, they mattered for the main task of evolution: being able to bear progeny who would carry on these very genetic predispositions.

These given of human nature arise from the basic architecture of mental life.  In terms of biological design for the basic neural circuitry of emotion, what we are born with is what worked best for the last 50,000 human generations, not the last 500 generations.  The slow deliberate forces of evolution that have shaped our emotions have done their work over the course of a million years; the last 10,000 years – despite having witnessed the rapid rise of human civilization and the explosion of the human population – have left littler imprint on our biological templates for emotional life.

All emotions are, in essence, impulses to act, the instant plans for handling life that evolution has instilled in us.  The very root of emotion is “to move”, plus the “e-“ to connote “move away”, suggesting that a tendency to act is implicit in every emotion.  Every emotion (anger, fear, love, hope, faith) has distinctive pre-configured reactions.  Emotions are also shaped by our culture.  Hence, responses to some of these emotions may vary between different cultures.

Our mental life is fundamentally constructed of two minds.  One, the rational mind, is the mode of comprehension we are typically conscious of: more prominent in awareness, thoughtful, able to ponder and reflect.  But alongside there is another system of knowing: impulsive and powerful, some times illogical – the emotional mind.  Aka thinking brain and feeling brain (the heart!!).

How do these minds interact? Why some emotional impulses hi-jack rational mind? What there do always two minds both want to do two different things? To answer these questions we need to understand how the brain grew.  Over the millions of years of evolution our brain grew bottom up, with its higher centers developing as elaborations of lower, more ancient parts.

the brain stem - The most primitive part of the brain is the brain stem surrounding the top of spinal cord.  This root brain regulates like breathing and the metabolism of the body’s other organs, as well as controlling stereotyped reactions and movements.  This primitive brain cannot said to be think or learn; rather it is a set of preprogrammed regulators that keep the body running as it should and reacting in a way that ensures survival.  [This brain reigned supreme in the Age of Reptiles: Picture a snake hissing to signal the threat of an attack]

the limbic brain – from the most primitive root, the brain stem, began to evolve, eventually growing large enough to encircle the top of the brainstem.  In early stages it was composed of little more than a thin layer of neurons gathered for analyzing smell.  One layer of cells took in what was smelled and sorted it out into the relevent categories: edible or toxic, sexually available, enemy or meal.  A second layer of cells sent reflexive messages throughout the nervous system telling the body what to do: bite, spit, approach, flee chase.

With the arrival of higher order animals as mammals came new, key layers of the emotional brain.  These, surrounding the brainstem, look roughly like a bagel with a bite taken out at the bottom where the brainstem nestles into them.  Because this part of the brain rings and borders the brainstem, it was called the “limbic” system.  This neural territory added emotions proper to the brain’s repertoire.  When we are in the grip of craving or fury, head-over-heels in love or recoiling in dread, it is the limbic system that has us in its grip.

the neocortex -  As the limbic system evolved, it refined two powerful tools: learning and memory.  These evolutionary advanced allowed an animal to be much smarter in its choices for survival, and to find-tune its responses to adapt to changing demands rather than having invariable and automatic reactions.  If food led to sickness, it could be avoided next time.  Over 100 million year brain in mammals took a great spurt.  Piled on top of the two-layered limbic cortex – the regions that plan, comprehend what sensed, co-ordinate movement – several new layers of brain cells were added to form the neocortex – the thinking brain.  It is the part of the brain responsible for higher order activities as abstractions, reason, logic, and feeling about ideas, feeling about feeling, art, symbols, language and so forth.  Due to such a complex higher brain, human kind has various responses to same emotions.  [Lack of higher brain – neocortex – in reptiles, which only have limbic system, is the reason for cannibalism.  That is the reason reptile hatchlings run to cover from being cannibalized from their own mother.]

Conclusion - The fact that thinking brain grew from the more primitive emotional brain (the limbic) reveals much about the relationship of thought to feeling; there was an emotional brain long before there was a rational one.  Because of this architecture emotional brain plays crucial role in human life.  As the root from which newer neocortex brain grew, the emotional areas are intertwined via myriad connecting circuits to all parts of the neocortex.  This gives the emotional center immense power to influence the functioning of the rest of brain – including the centers for thoughts, reason, abstractions and logics.

Anatomically emotional system can act independently of the thinking brain.  Some emotional reactions and emotional memories can be formed without any conscious, cognitive participation at all.  Such is emotion of Faith, Hope and Love.  In an emotional emergency, primitive limbic brain is the first to receive signals [visual, sound, smell] from external world before they are sent for processing in higher neocortex brain. 

Even before neocortex could process and figure out the thought full response to the confronted emergency, limbic brain kicks into action hiring the rest of the brain including the thinking neocortex for action.  Limbic brain being the ancient brain has an ancient response to the confronted situation and reacts according to stored response.  If anger is triggered, blood rushes into hands to help hold a weapon and puts whole but at the edge ready for confrontation or if it is fear, blood rushes to legs for fleeing.  This is called as emotional hi-jacking.  Neocortex or thinking brain has no chance of calculating thoughtful reactions to the confronted situation.  Once the anger is gone; one feels remorse, regret and this is caused by the thinking brain which is responsible for higher mental faculties as consciousness and moral.  It is the moral which tells what is right and what is wrong.

This is why it becomes imperative to learn to manage emotional brain, to learn to have thoughtful response to the reactions of faith, hope and love.  Managing and controlling emotions gives enough time for higher brain to compile thoughtful responses and to decide write or wrong before acting.

A violent reaction to loss of love by a university student results in killing of 37 fellow students.  Unconditional love, blind faith, anger and avenge by fundamentalists resulted in loss of thousands of life in word trade center disaster.  These could have been avoided only if we let the age of reason to take over and allow the emotions to work with reason for greater future.

Life is comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel – HORAGE WALPOLE.

References:

Emotional Intelligence – Daniel Goleman

The Descent of Man – Charles Darwin

Self Introspection