Feelings as a critical higher function

An understanding of the neurobiology of emotion and feelings is a key to the formation of principles and policies capable of reducing human distress and enhancing human nourishing ~ Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, 2000

When favourable factors combine in unique ways, we experience harmony or perfection (Ackerman, 2004). We experience because we have the ability to feel (Damasio, 2000). As Deepak Chopra poetically describes it: Thinking doesn't lord it over feeling; feeling doesn't stubbornly resist the higher brain; doing occurs when both thought and feeling say, "This is right" (Chopra, 2004). Adding further weight to the proposed topic, neuroscience is increasingly showing us, by means of functional neuroimaging technologies, how emotional messages are encoded whenever a memory is processed for storage in the brain (Ochsner et al., 2002). In other words, feelings -whether positive or negative- experienced during the learning process are encoded along with a memory in the brain for long-term storage. Studies also show that the majority of connections between the billions of neurons in the brain are made after birth (Greenfield, 2000). Nature creates the brain and nurture makes it flourish. Noreen Barron.