Basic emotions provide the semantic basis of animal and human language. We understand animals and they understand us because of the basic emotional continuity of all animal life. Anxiety and desire, or if we put it in terms of basic emotions: the neural system of fear and the neural system of search (dopamine system), have a semantic content that express the Speech of the Vital Will (as the other basic emotions do).
Basic emotions specify a direction for action and a modus operandi, and for this reason they imply a type of non-declarative, non-verbalizable, knowledge-but knowledge nonetheless- at the organism’s disposal. That knowledge is part of the Speech of our Volitive Soul (not all of it, for there are connecttions of the Volitive Soul to what we call physis at large). By non-declarative cognitive procedure I understand that which is linked to non-declarative or implicit memories. Non-declarative memories are information to which we do not have a conscious direct access. These memories can be of four kinds: procedural memories, memories of the perceptual system of representation, memories of classical conditioning, and the memories of non-associative learning. Procedural memory is the information about the motor and cognitive mappings, and it is processed in the basal ganglia and the cerebellum. The memory of the perceptual system of representation is the information which anticipates to the processes of perception (by means of previous mappings) and it is processed in the perceptual and associative cortex. The memory of classical conditioning is the information about the conditioned responses between two mappings, and it is processed in the motor cortex. Lastly, the memory of non-associative learning is the information about the processes of habituation and sensitization, and it is processed in the reflex pathways. See the model presented by Gazzaniga, Michael S., Ivry, Richard B., Mangun George R.; Cognitive Neuroscience. The Biology of the Mind. Ed. Cit. p.p.312-361.
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