Do emotions originate in the brain or in the body?

Do emotions originate in the brain or in the body? What is the ultimate source of our emotions?

This is the famous James-Cannon debate.

Do emotions originate in the body and then get perceived in the brain, where we invent a story to explain them, as William James theorized?

Or do emotions originate in the brain and trickle down to the body, as Walter Cannon suggests?

In 1884, while an assistant professor of philosophy at Harvard, William James had published his essay what is an emotion basing his theory on his own introspective observations and a general knowledge of physiology. He said he had concluded that the source of emotions is purely visceral, originating in the body and not cognitive, originating in mind. He stated that there is probably no brain center for emotional expression.

We perceive events and have bodily feelings, and then after the perception, which joggles are memories and imagination, we label our physical sensations as one or another emotion.

James believed that there is in fact no such entity as emotion. There is simply perception and bodily response. The immediate sensory and motor reverberations that occur in response to the perception end up pounding heart, tight stomach, the tense muscles, the sweaty palms – are the emotions and the emotions are felt throughout the body as sensations.

“Each morsel of which contributes its pulsations of feeling, dum or sharp, pleasant or painful or dubious, to that sense of personality that every one of us unfailingly carries with him.”

Emotions consist of organic changes in the body, muscular and visceral, and are not a primary feeling directly aroused, but a secondary one, indirectly aroused by the body’s is workings.

This is essentially the “Body Up” theory.

Walter Cannon was an experimental physiologist and authored the book “Wisdom of the Body”. By the late 1920’s, he had explained emotions in relation to the sympathetic autonomic nervous system with the vagus nerve being the central component traveling from the brain to the spinal cord and sending branches to many organs including the pupils of the eye, the salivary gland, the heart, the bronchi of the lungs, stomach, the intestines, the bladder, the sex organs, and the adrenal glands.

Greater even the vagus nerve, was the hypothalamus of the brain which he proposed to be the “seat of the emotions”. Emotions trickle down to the body from the hypothalamus through either it’s neuronal connections to the brain stem or by way of the secretions of the pituitary gland.

This is essentially the “Brain Down” theory.

So which one is it?

“Body Up” or “Brain Down”.

Do emotions start in the body only to be perceived by the brain or does the brain house our emotions and send the corresponding signals out the body?

It’s not either/or!

It’s both!

It’s simultaneous! A two-way street!

This is the key to understanding a very modern conundrum: How can emotions transform the body, either creating disease or healing it, maintaining health or undermining it?

Elmer Green, a Mayo Clinic physician who pioneered the use of biofeedback in the treatment of disease, said, “Every change in the physiological state is accompanied by an appropriate change in the mental-emotional state, conscious or unconscious, and conversely, every change in the mental-emotional state, conscious or unconscious, is accompanied by an appropriate change in the physiological state.”