Jaak Panksepp > Quotes

“When scientific conversations cease, then dogma rather than knowledge begins to rule the day.”
― Jaak Panksepp, The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions

“Skepticism is certainly a beneficial tool, to the extent that it yields a dialectic of ideas that can progress toward empirical resolution of difficult issues, but at present it is too commonly an attitude, a well-cultivated academic pretense, that leads to the neglect of important problems.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“Descartes’ s faith in his assertion “I think, therefore I am” may be superseded by a more primitive affirmation that is part of the genetic makeup of all mammals: “I feel, therefore I am.”34 Evolutionary”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“We now know that the placebo effect is real medicine that operates mainly through the activation of brain opioid systems.”
― Jaak Panksepp, The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions

“It is all too easy to accept emotions as primitive "givens" and proceed toward a superficial understanding based on words, arbitrary definitions, and the quiddities of logic rather than biology.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Textbook of Biological Psychiatry

“When children play, they exercise their senses, their intellect, their emotions, their imagination—keenly and energetically.… To play is to explore, to discover and to experiment. Playing helps children develop ideas and gain experience. It gives them a wealth of knowledge and information about the world in which they live—and about themselves. So to play is also to learn. Play is fun for children. But it’s much more than that—it’s good for them, and it’s necessary. … Play gives children the opportunity to develop and use the many talents they were born with. Instruction sheet in Lego® toys (1985) CENTRAL”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“The inhibition of behavior provoked by cat odor is remarkably powerful and long-lasting. As summarized in Figure 1.1, following a single exposure to cat odor, animals continued to exhibit inhibition of play for up to five successive days. Our interpretation of this effect is that some unconditioned attribute of cat smell can innately arouse a fear system in the rat brain, and this emotional state becomes rapidly associated with the contextual cues of the chamber. On subsequent occasions, one does not need the unconditioned fear stimulus—the feline smell—to evoke anxiety. The contextual cues of the chamber suffice. This, in essence, is classical or Pavlovian conditioning. The flow of associations is outlined more formally in Figure 1.2, and as we will see, classical conditioning is still one of the most powerful and effective ways to study emotional learning in the laboratory.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“When a child is born with the body of one sex and the brain of another, social pressures will only make matters worse, because the child’s innate gender identity cannot be altered by persuasion. (...)
These neurobiological facts are concordant with social practices that many American Indian tribes traditionally followed: At times, nature ordains that a female sexual identity should flower within the brain of a biological male, and a masculine temperament should flourish within a biological female.
The wisdom of some of our ancestors readily accepted the psychosexual variety that Nature bestowed on vertebrates—a continuum of maleness and femaleness—that many in our culture have learned to scorn.”
― Jaak Panksepp, The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions

“In the past, when an apparently healthy patient appeared emotionally agitated and complained of physical symptoms, doctors tended to believe that the symptoms were psychosomatic, “all in the mind,” and therefore not physical or “real.” This is no longer an accepted view of psychosomatic illness. As soon as we recognize that affects emerge from emotional systems that are fueled by brain chemicals that can also exert an eventual effect on the functioning of the brain and the body, then the division between emotional and physical disorders narrows to the point of extinction.”
― Jaak Panksepp, The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions

“Ultimately, an understanding of all our mental activities must begin with our willingness to use words that approximate the nature of the underlying brain processes. Our thinking is enriched if we use the right words—those that reflect essential realities—and it is impoverished if we select the wrong ones. However, words are not equivalent to physical reality; they are only symbols that aid our understanding and communication (see Appendix B). This book is premised on the belief that the common emotional words we learned as children—being angry, scared, sad, and happy—can serve the purpose better than many psychologists are inclined to believe. These emotions are often evident in the behaviors animals spontaneously exhibit throughout their life span.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“many investigators who study behavior have argued that emotions, especially animal emotions, are illusory concepts outside the realm of scientific inquiry. As I will seek to demonstrate, that viewpoint is incorrect. Although much of behavioral control is elaborated by unconscious brain processes, both animals and humans do have similar affective feelings that are important contributors to their future behavioral tendencies. Unfortunately, the nature of human and animal emotions cannot be understood without brain research. Fortunately, a psychoneurological analysis of animal emotions (via a careful study of how animal brains control certain behaviors) makes it possible to conceptualize the basic underlying nature of human emotions with some precision, thereby providing new insights into the functional organization of all mammalian brains. A strategy to achieve such a cross-species synthesis will be outlined here. It is based largely on the existence of many psychoneural homologies—the fact that the intrinsic nature of basic emotional systems has been remarkably well conserved during the course of mammalian evolution.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“The most primal affective-cognitive interaction in humans, and presumably other animals as well, is encapsulated in the phrases “I want” and “I don’t want.” These assertions are reflected in basic tendencies to approach and avoid various real-life phenomena. However, there are several distinct ways to like and dislike events, and a proper classification scheme will yield a more complex taxonomy of emotions than the simple behavioral dimension of approach and avoidance. For instance, it seems unlikely that the dislike of bitter foods and the dislike of physical pain emerge from one and the same avoidance system. It is equally unlikely that the desire for food and the urge to play emerge from the same brain systems.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“As we saw in the previous chapter, we cannot reasonably study the playfulness of young rats in the presence of predator odors. Likewise, we cannot study the courting, reproductive, dominance, and migratory urges of birds unless the lighting is right (e.g., the lengthening daylight hours of spring, which allow their reproductive systems to mature each year). If we do not pay attention to a host of variables that reflect the adaptive evolutionary dimensions of the animals we study, we will not obtain credible answers concerning their natural emotional tendencies.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“Read-out theories imply that affects can only occur either in animals that are intelligent enough to interpret emotional physiology or in animals that have language. This would mean that only human beings and perhaps some other primates are affective creatures. Presumably less intelligent mammals copulate without lust, attack without rage, cower without fear, and nurture without affection. They cannot feel the sting—the psychic pain—of social loss. This may be an extreme depiction of the prevailing view, but it is not far off the mark among those who are actually doing animal brain research”
― Jaak Panksepp, The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions

“As we now know, there are no credible, routine ways to unambiguously separate the influences of nature and nurture in the control of behavior that will apply across different environments. To understand the aspects of behavior that derive their organizational essence mainly from nature, we must first identify how instinctual behaviors emerge from the intrinsic potentials of the nervous system. For instance, animals do not learn to search their environment for items needed for survival, although they surely need to learn exactly when and how precisely to search. In other words, the “seeking potential” is built into the brain, but each animal must learn to direct its behaviors toward the opportunities that are available in the environment. In addition, animals do not need to learn to experience and express fear, anger, pain, pleasure, and joy, nor to play in simple rough-and-tumble ways, even though all of these processes come to modify and be modified by learning. Evidence suggests that evolution has imprinted many spontaneous psychobehavioral potentials within the inherited neurodynamics of the mammalian brain; these systems help generate internally experienced emotional feelings.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“It is now well established that one can reliably evoke several distinct emotional patterns in all mammals during electrical stimulation of homologous subcortical regions. Typically, animals either like or dislike the stimulation, as can be inferred from such behavioral criteria as conditioned approach and avoidance. If the electrodes are not placed in the right locations, no emotional behaviors are observed. For instance, most of the neocortex is free of such effects. Even though cortical processes such as thoughts and perceptions (i.e., appraisals) can obviously instigate various emotions, to the best of our knowledge, the affective essence of emotionality is subcortically and precognitively organized.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“in order to understand the neural nature of emotional feelings in humans, we must first seek to decode how brain circuits control the basic, genetically encoded emotional behavioral tendencies we share with other mammals. Then we must try to determine how subjective experience emerges from or is linked to those brain systems. Progress on these issues has been meager. In general, both psychology and modern neuroscience have failed to give sufficient credence to the fact that organisms are born with a variety of innate affective tendencies that emerge from the ancient organizational structure of the mammalian brain.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“Without a concurrent neural analysis, emotional concepts cannot be used noncircularly in scientific discourse. We cannot say that animals attack because they are angry and then turn around and say that we know animals are angry because they exhibit attack. We cannot say that humans flee from danger because they are afraid and then say we know that humans are afraid if they exhibit flight. Such circular word juggling does not allow us to make new and powerful predictions about behavior. However, thanks to the neuroscience revolution, we can begin to specify the potential brain mechanisms that are essential substrates for such basic emotions.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“The inhibition of behavior provoked by cat odor is remarkably powerful and long-lasting. As summarized in Figure 1.1, following a single exposure to cat odor, animals continued to exhibit inhibition of play for up to five successive days. Our interpretation of this effect is that some unconditioned attribute of cat smell can innately arouse a fear system in the rat brain, and this emotional state becomes rapidly associated with the contextual cues of the chamber.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“Even though our unique higher cortical abilities, especially when filtered through contemporary thoughts, may encourage us to pretend that we lack instincts—that we have no basic emotions—such opinions are not consistent with the available facts. Those illusions are created by our strangely human need to aspire to be more than we are—to feel closer to the angels than to other animals. But when our basic emotions are fully expressed, we have no doubt that powerful animal forces survive beneath our cultural veneer. It is this ancient animal heritage that makes us the intense, feeling creatures that we are.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“We already have medications such as Substance P receptor antagonists, and the drug aprepitant (a medication currently used to treat nausea), which should, if one can generalize from the animal data, reduce angry irritability (see Chapter 4”
― Jaak Panksepp, The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions

“To their initial chagrin and eventual delight, more and more investigators began to note that animals trained according to behaviorist principles would often “regress” to exhibiting their own natural behavioral tendencies when experimental demands became too severe. For instance, raccoons that had been trained to put coins in piggy banks to obtain food (for advertisement purposes) would often fail to smoothly execute their outward demonstrations of learned “thriftiness,” instead reverting to rubbing the coins together and manipulating them in their hands as if they were food itself. Apparently, the instinctual, evolutionary baggage of each animal intruded into the well-ordered behaviorist view that only reinforcement contingencies could dictate what organisms do in the world.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“Our emotional feelings reflect our ability to subjectively experience certain states of the nervous system. Although conscious feeling states are universally accepted as major distinguishing characteristics of human emotions, in animal research the issue of whether other organisms feel emotions is little more than a conceptual embarrassment. Such states remain difficult—some claim impossible—to study empirically.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“I would suggest that subjectively experienced feelings arise, ultimately, from the interactions of various emotional systems with the fundamental brain substrates of “the self,” but, as already mentioned, an in-depth discussion of that troublesome issue will be postponed until Chapter 16.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“I will develop the position that a hybrid discipline focusing on the neurobiological nature of brain operating systems (especially those that mediate motivational and emotional tendencies) is needed as a foundation for a mature and scientifically prosperous discipline of psychology. A guiding assumption of this approach is that a common language, incorporating behavioral, cognitive, and neuroscientific perspectives, must be found for discussing the fundamental psychoneurological processes that all mammals share.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“Related topics, like the nature of the self, the will, and thinking processes, also remain neglected by neuroscientists. Only recently has human psychology returned its attention to these questions under the banner of cognitive neuroscience.16 Many animal behaviorists have also started to study the nature of animal cognitions.17 The renewed effort to understand cognitive representations, imagery, and thought is notoriously difficult, but it is decidedly easier than the study of emotions. Cognitive representations can often be treated as logical propositions that can be precisely linked to explicit referents in the external world, which allows investigators to initiate credible empirical studies.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“Behaviorism has dealt credibly with the modification and channeling of behavior patterns as a function of learning, but it has not dealt effectively with the nature of the innate sources of behavioral variation that are susceptible to modification via the reinforcement contingencies of the environment. The various cognitive sciences are beginning to address the complexities of the human mind, but until recently they chose to ignore the evolutionary antecedents, such as the neural systems for the passions, upon which our vast cortical potentials are built and to which those potentials may still be subservient.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“The notion that emotions are simply the result of our higher cognitive appreciation of certain forms of bodily commotion has been largely negated by the observation of essentially normal emotional responsivity in people who have suffered massive spinal cord injuries.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“Each emotional system is hierarchically arranged throughout much of the brain, interacting with more evolved cognitive structures in the higher reaches, and specific physiological and motor outputs at lower levels.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

“Despite its claim to a new view among the psychological sciences, affective neuroscience is deeply rooted within physiological psychology, behavioral biology, and the modernized label for all of these disciplines: behavioral neuroscience. The present coverage will rely heavily on data collected by individuals in these fields, but it will put a new twist on the evidence. It reinterprets many of the brain-behavior findings to try to account for the central neuropsychic states of organisms.”
― Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions