I think in much much simpler animals, valence is a literal specific signal in the brain, basically the collective spiking activity of a population of dopamine neurons. In mammals, that’s still sorta-close-to-true, but I would need to add a whole bunch of caveats and footnotes to that, for reasons hinted at in §1.5.6–1.5.7.
(I have a bunch of idiosyncratic opinions about what exactly the basal ganglia is doing and how, but I don’t want to get into it here, sorry!)
I reject both the “first” and the “second” thing you mention. I’m much closer to “valence is pretty straightforwardly encoded by spikes going down specific known axons”.
Separately, I might or might not agree with “the neural bases of emotions are widely distributed”, depending on how we define the word “emotions” (and also how we define “neural bases”, I suppose!), see here.
Thanks!
I think in much much simpler animals, valence is a literal specific signal in the brain, basically the collective spiking activity of a population of dopamine neurons. In mammals, that’s still sorta-close-to-true, but I would need to add a whole bunch of caveats and footnotes to that, for reasons hinted at in §1.5.6–1.5.7.
(I have a bunch of idiosyncratic opinions about what exactly the basal ganglia is doing and how, but I don’t want to get into it here, sorry!)
I reject both the “first” and the “second” thing you mention. I’m much closer to “valence is pretty straightforwardly encoded by spikes going down specific known axons”.
Separately, I might or might not agree with “the neural bases of emotions are widely distributed”, depending on how we define the word “emotions” (and also how we define “neural bases”, I suppose!), see here.