William James (again) and Carl Lange theorized (some time ago…) that bodily changes may be the responsible of our feeling of emotions. Today there is more and more evidence that interoception and conscious emotional feelings are strictly related. N. WELTENS,D. ZHAO & L. VAN OUDENHOVEV on Neurogastroenterology and Motility address the issue with a very interesting review article. Hundreds of million of neurons, trillions of microbial organisms, something is happening below stairs…

In their recent article “The Good, the Bad, and the Just: Justice Sensitivity Predicts Neural Response during Moral Evaluation of Actions Performed by Others” on Journal of Neuroscience K. J. Yoder and J. Decety address the way our brains cope with Justice. It seems Justice is a human reason realm, and not a human emotion one. More than a century ago William James indicated the ethic choice as one of the most relevant example of human brain selection abilities. As we know today, thanks to the same James, but more recently to Antonio Damasio and other scientists investigating on human emotions, emotions equip humans with an extraordinarily advanced mechanism of choice. We expected coping with ethics, matter of artists and philosophers, would make an intensive use of such a marbelous mechanism. Thus… what’s wrong?

The theory of quantum brain, the consciousness emergence from microtubules vibration, a 20 years debated theory may gain new corroboration by recent investigations. Look at the claims on ScienceDaily or directly on the Hameorff Penrose article.

People are able to judge the whole, to see and experience the whole, by paying attention to the question: Is it increasing my own wholeness? Is it increasing the feeling I experience when in contact with the thing? Is it becoming like a mirror of the self?

(From “The timeless way of building”, Christopher Alexander, Architect)

In this talk from 2003, design critic Don Norman turns his incisive eye toward beauty, fun, pleasure and emotion, as he looks at design that makes people happy. He names the three emotional cues that a well-designed product must hit to succeed.

Watch the talk on TED

Everyone gets older but how we experience the ageing process varies per person. In a recent study into packaging communication first indications were found that being directly confronted with our age via a label might make consumers choose not to buy a specific product. See more on the “Restaurant of the future” web site.

Tutti sappiamo e condividiamo che quando ammiriamo un’opera d’arte che consideriamo bella proviamo una sensazione, quasi viscerale, che ci fa sospirare in ammirazione. Partendo da questa esperienza condivisa, il nostro gruppo di lavoro studia il momento in cui, davanti a un’opera, proviamo una sorta d’incanto […]