My argument would be that if you want to understand the mind, you have to go to the very foundation of the mind, sort of like Einstein and the generations of thinkers before him who sought to deal with the actual nature of matter—how it is organized in the world. Once they could systematically order their observations into the Periodic Table of Elements, they could actually predict that there would be other forms of matter.

I think there is no totally agreed upon definition of affect, except at the common vernacular level. Basically feelings mean you have experiences of yourself and the world. A philosopher would call it qualia. Everyone in philosophy of consciousness agrees that that is the hard problem of consciousness, namely, how do we experience? Those are fundamentally brain processes. We have sensory feelings. Namely, we see the world in colors that do not exist out there in the world. Every psychologist or scientist and philosopher knows that the brain constructs colors. So, how the brain constructs experiences, that is the fundamental issue of how we understand ourselves as creatures of the world that share basic living processes with the other animals. We cannot do the necessary research in humans very easily because you have to go to a fine detailed level, in the brain, so you really have to do the relevant neuroscience on animal models. That requires asking the right questions, ones that can be answered. Many of them can’t be answered right now. So, you know, I would say I was the first one that really vigorously went after emotional feelings in the brain because they are so very important for psychiatric understanding. Many psychiatric disorders reflect imbalances of feelings. Depression--you feel “bad” in various ways, and there can be several different ways to feel that way. For instance, in mania, you’re on top of the world, as if you simply have too much happiness or joy. Schizophrenia is more of a cognitive disorder, where your thinking processes are jumbled up. We’ve found from brain imaging that the connectome of how the brain is connected up is quite different in these disorders. We’re finally at an era where I think people are gradually coming to the recognition that we can finally tackle the human mind by understanding the mind of other animals.

The fact that the brain creates experience is often a hard one to accept. You know, we think that the brain is giving an accurate reflection of the way the world actually is. It is certainly giving us an image of the world that is very useful for our survival, but even though stimuli in world trigger what we experience, we cannot even answer the philosophical question of is my experience of red the same as your experience of red? What we can show is that a certain wave length of light, when it hits the eyes, we use a cognitive symbol, “red,” that applies to this, but we cannot say it’s identical (or even very similar) in different people. That is only a reasonable philosophical assumption, as opposed to a scientific conclusion.

In a sense that forces us into the solipsistic, philosophical position that there is no absolute knowledge in science. Knowledge is relative and hence some of my critics may say, “Panksepp, you’re trying to study emotional feelings in animals. We don’t even have enough data to believe that the animals have feelings.” My response to them would be, it’s not a matter of proof. Science does not deal in proving things; it provides evidence for a certain argument. So, if you think about Einstein’s Theory of Relativity; he was a mathematician that tried to imagine riding on a beam of light and how the universe and world would change as he approached the speed of light, and he generated mathematics around that vision that changed the world. It led, eventually, to atomic weapons. Without his insights, we would have been spared that agony. I think it’s very much the same for neuroscience. We have to have symbols; we have to use words for how the mental universe is organized. We do not yet have a standard set of words that people agree upon. My argument would be that if you want to understand the mind, you have to go to the very foundation of the mind, sort of like Einstein and the generations of thinkers before him who sought to deal with the actual nature of matter—how it is organized in the world. Once they could systematically order their observations into the Periodic Table of Elements, they could actually predict that there would be other forms of matter. But, you had to have the foundations right, namely those that nature created in the solar furnace. We have to, in psychology, come to terms with what aspects of mind were created long before Homo sapiens walked the face of the earth.