Emotion in the perspective of an integrated nervous system 1 Published on the World Wide Web on 27 January 1998. 1

It would not be possible to discuss the integrative aspects of brain function without considering the operations that arise in large-scale neural systems; and it would be unreasonable not to single-out emotion among the critical integrative operations arising in that level. Yet, throughout the twentieth century, the integrated brain and mind have often been discussed with hardly any acknowledgment that emotion does exist, let alone that it is an important function and that understanding its neural underpinnings is of great advantage. There are numerous reasons behind the benign neglect of emotion and I cannot mention them all and much less discuss them. In general, however, it seems fair to say that emotion must have seemed both too elusive and too subjective to attract the interest of neuroscientists or cognitive scientists concerned with researching that which appeared most concrete and objective. It seems clear now that there is nothing more elusive about emotion than about, say, perception or memory —in fact less so, in my opinion— and it is equally clear that emotion is also no less objective. In the event, however, it did seem more elusive and less objective than other cognitive and behavioral phenomena. Perhaps this was so be-