What is Emotional Nervous System, Emotional factors and Theory

What is Emotional Nervous System, Emotional factors and Theory

Both physical pain and emotional distress are felt through the nervous system. When you feel dissatisfaction with your lifestyle, your job, or are involved in a toxic relationship, or are experiencing any type of emotional stress, your nervous system gets affected. When physical pain is experienced in addition to emotional pain, it adds up to an already overloaded nervous system and the pain feels stronger than if emotional issues were absent.

There may be occasions when a person, consciously or subconsciously, uses physical pain to distract the mind from emotional pain. Pain threshold is lowered by emotional pain and focus is on the physical pain to avoid dealing with emotional issues.

The Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior

What is Emotion?
We can explain most of our sensations and abilities in terms of clear needs for survival.

Vision is needed for us to see our environment in order to find food and avoid dangers.
Taste makes it possible for us to know if we are ingesting a substance that is healthy or toxic.
The sense of smell is a long-range extension of the sense of taste.

The sense of touch gives us the ability to manipulate objects, sense material that might be caustic to the body, or sense temperatures that could damage the surface of the body or temperatures that would create a challenge in maintaining equilibrium, or stress the entire organism.

Our hearing (along with our voice) makes complex communication possible and also gives us another ability to seek sustenance and avoid dangers.

Proprioception calculations in the brain advance the ability of the body to move intelligently in the environment.

This could be a very long list.

There is an emotional component to every sensual experience as well. Emotion seems to be in everything, but the advantage emotion gives us in survival may not be obvious.

A very loud noise surprises you from behind and you flinch. Muscles throughout your body contract and the body bends forward suddenly. Objects in your grasp are dropped. Thoughts in your mind are dropped. The eyes close tightly and the muscles in the face contract into an expression of extreme stress. Almost every part of the nervous system is affected by such a sudden and extreme change in the environment. The reaction is one of violence. This is an emotional reaction.

A second or two later you are able to process and understand if the noise is coming from a dangerous event that needs to be avoided or from a benevolent friend who is surprising you from behind. In seconds the emotional response to the situation could be extreme fear or violence, or it could be joy. And if the emotion changes to joy at being surprised by a long-lost friend, the emotion of joy can come to you before you fully remember who it is that is surprising you.

You are able to react emotionally to the situation faster than you are able to process an understanding of what is happening in the environment and understand the situation. The emotional reaction involves all of your systems at once. (This quick emotional reaction is the nature of the quick instinctual reactions of animals.)

The fast response of the emotional flinching reaction is protective because it could protect you from a fast-moving danger before you could understand what was happening.

Emotion is basic to the experience of every cell in the nervous system. Nerve cells use emotion as the basis for the calculations that are being performed. I will later show how this emotional experience is coordinated on the cellular level to make intelligence possible.

Most of what we call emotion is really a straw poll of what is going on in the many systems of the body at the same time. An emotion could be a register of activity in various realms of experience that have no relation to each other except through an emotional understanding. Brain cells that have many connections to a wide-array of different areas of perception and processing are measuring emotion in the system. (Emotion is not centered in any part of the nervous system as is suggested by current medical understanding, but it is measured in such centers, or it can be said to converge or intersect in such centers of the brain.)

The fact that emotion is in evidence in everything, and that the experience of everything at once can only be pinned down as an experience of emotion, is all evidence that perhaps the basic experience of a singular cell is an emotional unit of experience as well. Whatever is happening in the individual cell when in different states must be representational of other influences to the organism and must be in some form itself that cuts across all areas of experience. The experience of a single cell responding to light, or touch, or sound is the same. That experience is something apart from light or touch or sound but in reacting to the influence becomes part of it as well.

The wide variety of different emotions that we describe are really the same range of emotions from good to bad (pleasure to pain, happy to sad...) measured in relation to different topics or sensory experiences. And the different sensations are also emotional measures: sweet and sour, light and dark, etc..

The evidence that pain and pleasure of a cell respond to influences of light and dark or one range of wavelengths of light over another, for instance, is very subtle evidence in daily experience, but sometimes such evidence of this theory can be dramatic in the case of disorders such as seasonal affective disorder.

Every cell in the brain has the same range of emotion. It is the same range of emotion that is necessary for the survival of any life form: pleasure and pain.

To be a successful organism of any kind, it is necessary to use pleasure to seek health and success and to use pain to avoid danger and damage or death. It is very difficult for us to comprehend the possibility of this, but the seeking of pleasure and the avoidance of pain are necessary for single cell organisms and also necessary for single cells of our nervous system (as any large organism is really a cooperating colony of single-cell organisms)

EMOTIONAL FACTORS IN ORGANIC DISEASE OF THE CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM

The Neurologic and Psychiatric Services of the Philadelphia General Hospital, Philadelphia, Pa.

A series of cases of diverse organic diseases of the central nervous system such as chronic encephalitis with Parkinsonism, multiple sclerosis, pseudo-sclerosis, dystonia musculorum deformans, and brain tumor is presented. In these cases, the initial symptoms became manifest either during or immediately subsequent to some severe emotional disturbance or psychic trauma and the objective neurologic signs were at first minimal. As a result, the symptoms were attributed to emotional causes and only later after the objective neurologic signs had progressed was the correct diagnosis established.

The possible role of the emotional disturbances as an etiological factor in the production of the structural changes is discussed. It is suggested that the emotional trauma precipitates both physiologic and psychologic alterations which lead to the appearance of objective neurologic signs.

Your emotions are invisible energies in motion that move through you with lightening-fast speed, flooding you with signals of either pleasure or pain. Like brush strokes on a blank canvas, your emotions color your world with contrast and meaning.


For many of us, emotions seem to have an interior life and will of their own. Previously, it was thought emotions were purely mental activities generated by the brain, over which we had little or no control. We now know that emotions have as much to do with the body as with the brain. Today, the idea of the body and brain being completely separate is fast being replaced by the holistic model of mind, body and spirit being intimately connected.

The Relationship Between Emotions and Your Nervous System

Let's look at some of the inner workings of your nervous system's structure and how it communicates with your heart, brain and body. The nervous system is your body's primary communications network. Your nerves, like wires, carry electrical signals or messages within and between all the parts of your body.

You have conscious or voluntary control over the sensory and motor systems of your central nervous system. The sensory branch of your central nervous system receives and transmits information from the outside world through your five senses (sound, sight, smell, taste and touch) to your brain. So, you can perceive the physical world around you while the motor branch of your central nervous system carries internal signals from your brain to your body, making it possible for you to walk, talk and perform actions in the world around you.

The autonomic branch of your nervous system is non-conscious or involuntary, meaning you have no apparent control over its function. Your autonomic nervous system operates at a subconscious level to control all the functions of your internal organs and glands which secrete hormones.