title: Jaak Panksepp: The creator of affective neuroscience type: Applied Contributions language: English published: 29 Jul 2020 updated: 30 Jul 2020 category: Psychológia author: MUDr. Radkin Honzák source: https://www.prohuman.sk/psychologia/radkin-honzak-jaak-panksepp-tvurce-pojmu-emocni-neuroveda
Vzpomínku na Jaaka Pankseppa nevyvolalo žádné kulaté výročí, ale úžasný počin nakladatelství dybbuk, které uvádí na trh překlad jeho stěžejního díla The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotion.
Jaak Panksepp (1943 -2017) had the good fortune that his parents took him early from his native Estonia to the USA, where he could fully develop his talent. He did begin by studying electrical engineering, but it did not interest him, and his experiences in a psychiatric hospital, where he worked for several summers, led him into the world of emotions, to which he then devoted himself intensely for the rest of his life. His study of clinical psychology did not satisfy him and, with its verbally semantic approach, seemed to him to be largely detached from the real world of patients, so he changed his field and started studying behavioral sciences in the hope that he could approach emotions through neuroscience.
In this respect, emotions have had bad luck for millennia. Plato split the human being into body and soul; unlike Eastern philosophers, who considered it a temple, he called the body the grave of the soul and compared it to a two-horse chariot. It is steered by reason, who holds in check two horses: a good and a rebellious one, which are pleasant and unpleasant emotions. This view of reason’s rule was vividly expressed by the grandmother of writer Glazar when she said: “When a man’s member ends up where he thinks it belongs, reason is only a bit off.” Plato’s idea was carried into medicine by Galenos, who urged students to care for the soul as much as for the body, yet in the end, this did not succeed.
When medicine sought to become a science, and a science of humans, because at that time diseases had not yet been standardized, the Church did not want to relinquish its competencies in this area and was still powerful enough to keep them. Descartes then advised the emerging medical science to treat the human being as a rational machine and leave the soul to the Church and philosophers. And so emotions completely escaped the realm of natural-scientific analysis. Unfortunately, this neglect still persists in medicine today, even though it is completely clear that a sad organism (that is, a sad machine) is something entirely different from an enraged organism. Only psychosomatic physicians were interested in emotions, a group that was and remains a tiny minority. It should be said that psychologists also lacked clarity, and order was finally imposed by Paul Ekman, under whose leadership, at the end of the last century, there was consensus on six basic emotions—fear, anger, sadness, joy, surprise and disgust—out of which, like from three primary colors, the entire rich emotional spectrum is composed.
There were then two great neuroscientists. Antonio Damasio, who finally postulated that emotions are not some ephemeral butterflies but primarily bodily processes. The key sentence is his: Emotions take place in the theater of the body and are translated into feelings in the theater of the mind. The second was Jaak Panksepp, who did not forget that although the human is a specific species, he is still also an animal, and some mechanisms in our brain function just as those stored in the brains of our older relatives. Panksepp demonstrated the biological nature of emotions down to the level of gene expression.
In the first years of his scientific work, he devoted himself to studying biological rhythms and sleep problems. When the opioid receptor was discovered at the beginning of the 1970s, Panksepp voiced an original idea. While most researchers looked for what opioids do in the body, he asked what connection might exist between susceptibility to addiction to these substances and interpersonal relationships, from attachment bonds to partnerships. “The physiology of motherhood is the physiology of love,” he says in his TEDx talk.
The work on this issue also provides a clinical theory about excessive opioids, or increased sensitivity of their receptors, in children with autism spectrum disorders, supported not only by repeated animal experiments but also by treatment outcomes in some types of these child patients after administration of small doses of an opioid receptor blocker—naloxone. As for another childhood disorder, ADHD, he expresses skepticism about routine treatment of these children with Ritalin. He believes that these are simply less mature brains, which could be addressed, for example, by exercise or other non-pharmacological approaches.
The key significance of the emotional brain was confirmed when he removed the frontal cortex of rat pups. They certainly did not grow into anything resembling robots, as critics predicted. The rats did navigate a maze less well, but as far as continuing life was concerned, there was no problem. They matured, mated, had offspring, which they raised without difficulty.
As for basic emotions, Panksepp departs from the accepted consensus and proclaims seven basic emotions: curiosity or search with the corresponding feeling of enthusiasm, anger with anger, fear with anxiety, lust with arousal, care with the feeling of love, panic with dread and ruin, and playfulness with feelings of joy. What is perhaps the main contribution is the fact that these emotions are also developmentally present in more ancient brain types. Playfulness appears even in the oldest areas.
His best-known works are those that dismantled the myth that only humans know how to laugh. He observed that rat pups, in a rough-and-tumble game imitating a fight, clearly experienced joy, expressed through high-frequency sounds (chirping), so they were laughing. Beyond a certain age the rats no longer laughed—he also helped from the human side, by tickling. He made many rats laugh, and they sought out his hand with delight and allowed themselves to be cheerfully tickled. I only wonder whether one of them became their Aristotle, who, after his predecessor’s pattern, would have concluded that a person does not laugh when tickled alone.
Playfulness and joy are the most harmonizing states, as demonstrated by a number of recent studies in neuropsychoimmunology. The grandpa in Saturnin had it absolutely right when he said he would not have grown so old if he had stopped playing. Let’s take this to heart!
Author: MUDr. Radkin Honzák psychiatrist