After suffering damage to his VPC, Elliot’s emotional life was severely diminished – but it wasn’t entirely destroyed. As we’ve seen, he could still experience occasional outbursts of anger. But they were like bolts of lightning flashing across an otherwise neutral sky.
That’s because Elliot could still experience primary emotions. These are the most basic forms of emotion, hardwired into us from birth. They include simple, short-lived states of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust. Elliot could still feel these just like anyone else. If you hid behind a door and suddenly jumped out in front of him, he’d still get frightened.
To better understand what’s going on here, let’s look at an example. Imagine you’re walking along a hiking trail when, all of a sudden, you see a snake. Your brain registers the creature’s slithering motion and relays this information to your limbic system for processing. Remember, this is one of our three suspects in the mystery of practical reasoning. Now we can catch it in the act!
Your limbic system basically responds to the slithering by saying, “Whoa, that’s scary! Fire up the fear response!” It then triggers a series of neurological and biological processes that quickly shift your body into an emotional body state of fear. Your heart starts pounding, and your breath gets shallow.
This brings us to one of our other suspects: the somatosensory cortex. Thanks to this part of the brain, you don’t just stop and think about the scariness of the snake in the abstract. You don’t stand there and say to yourself, “Hm, this appears to be a potentially dangerous situation. I wonder what I should do?” Instead, you feel the sensations of your emotional body state of fear. As a result, you feel scared. And that motivates you to act quickly – perhaps jumping away from the snake.
This is a primary emotion in action. Notice how the VPC hasn’t come into the equation at all. That’s why someone like Elliot can still feel primary emotions, despite the damage to his VPC. In contrast, people with damage to certain parts of the limbic system cannot feel primary emotions.
