Linking the process of rational decision making to emotions, an award-winning scientist who has done extensive research with brain-damaged patients notes the dependence of thought processes on feelings and the body's survival-oriented regulators. 50,000 first printing.

Studies in the neurobiological underpinnings of social information processing bypsychologists, neurobiologists, psychiatrists, radiologists, and neurologists, using methods thatrange from brain imaging techniques to comparative analyses.

This chapter explores the neuroanatomy of emotional memory, arguing that the brain mechanisms that encode, consolidate, and retrieve memories may operate differentially in emotional and non-emotional contexts. Specifically, the chapter emphasizes the role of the amygdala in the enhancement of memory for emotional events, largely through the amygdala's influence over brain areas during the period of memory consolidation and also during the retrieval of emotional memories. Data are drawn from human studies and from studies of other species, from lesion evidence, (...) and from neuroimaging. The specific effects reported, however, are not uniform, and there is evidence of emotion's mixed effects on memory. Thus, for example, bilateral amygdala damage seems to eliminate both emotion's tendency to promote memory for an event's gist and also its tendency to undermine memory for an events periphery. At the same time, the effects do seem general in other ways, and the chapter argues that the amygdala effects depend on arousal itself rather than the emotion's valence. (shrink)

Prominent models of human long-term memory distinguish between memory systems on the basis of whether learning and retrieval occur consciously or unconsciously. Episodic memory formation requires the rapid encoding of associations between different aspects of an event which, according to these models, depends on the hippocampus and on consciousness. However, recent evidence indicates that the hippocampus mediates rapid associative learning with and without consciousness in humans and animals, for long-term and short-term retention. Consciousness seems to be a poor criterion for (...) differentiating between declarative (or explicit) and nondeclarative (or implicit) types of memory. A new model is therefore required in which memory systems are distinguished based on the processing operations involved rather than by consciousness. (shrink)

The goal of the present study was to examine the hypothesis that the ability to construct vivid mental images of the future involves sampling the contents of memory. In two experiments, participants envisioned future scenarios occurring in contextual settings that were represented in memory in varying degrees of perceptual detail. In both experiments, detailed contextual settings were associated with more detailed images of the future and a stronger subjective experience. Our findings suggest that the contents of memory are routinely sampled (...) during the construction of personal future scenarios. (shrink)