Emotions
I have been seriously procrastinating on my cs182 homework. It was due yesterday. I have been doing everything but do my homework. I learned about the unibomber, got a facebook account, talked to old friends, etc. When I finally got down to it, it turns out the homework was rather interesting. I decided to learn about ‘basic level categories of the domain of emotions’. So then I read about all these interesting theories about the origins of our emotions. Darwin believed that our facial expressions were evolutionary adaptions to express our current state to others. For example, disgust is used to convey that a food is gross or poisionous and we express that by sticking out our tongue. Then there was the James-Lange theory. It argues that emotions are our associations with our bodily state at the time. When we are in a dangerous situation our heart rate increases, we produce adrenline, etc. We then associate these physical feelings with the emotion of fear. Cannon and Bard thought that the bodily reactions and the emotion felt occur at the same time, and they are both triggered by ’stuff that happens’ in the brain. Here’s a paper that I found quite interesting regarding the subject.
Speaking of emotions…
After corresponding with Jacob for a while, I found myself in a much better mood than before. Happiness is contagious.
do you actually like cs182? who is teaching it this semester?
March 6th, 2006 at 12:47 pm
I like it for what it is, and not what it pretends to be. It’s a hodgepodge of random information that is somehow related to thought and language. We mainly learn about different experiements and their significance. Since it’s crosslisted in 3 departments, you come in expecting it’s going to do a bad job representing each department. It’s a joke as a cs class but the material is interesting. So far, what we learn doesn’t seem to have a purpose, though. I’m just learning more ‘business party conversation’. The prof is Narayanan.
March 8th, 2006 at 9:38 am