Abstract

Primal emotional feelings are an optimal way to make scientific progress on the neural constitution of consciousness. Such research has revealed the existence of profound neuroanatomical and neurochemical homologies in the systems that control emotionality in mammalian and avian species. Wherever in their brains one applies localized Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS), whether electrical or chemical, and obtains coherent instinctual emotional behavior patterns, animals treat these within‐brain state shifts as 'rewards' and 'punishments' in various learning tasks. Humans consistently report desirable and undesirable affective changes to such DBS. These effects serve as gold standards for the detailed scientific study of affective qualia in animal and human brains.