Bodily changes in pain, hunger, fear, and rage : an account of recent researches into the function of emotional excitement / by Walter B. Cannon.

  • Cannon, Walter B. (Walter Bradford), 1871-1945.
Date:
1929
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Bodily changes in pain, hunger, fear, and rage : an account of recent researches into the function of emotional excitement / by Walter B. Cannon. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    ing acute alcoholism. In all these conditions the drug acts first as a depressant on the highly sensitive cells of the cortex, and thus lessens or temporarily destroys their control of lower centers; only when the drug becomes more concentrated does it depress also the lower centers; but before that stage is reached the lower centers, released from the cortical dominance as in the surgically decorticated animals, show forth their functions in free play. Consistent with the experimental and pharmacolog¬ ical evidence is the evidence derived from pathological cases. In certain forms of hemiplegia, as noted earlier, the patients may be incapable of moving the face on the paralyzed side; if suddenly they are affected by a sorrowful or joyous emotion, however, the muscles, unresponsive to voluntary control, spring into action and give both sides of the face the expression of sad¬ ness or gayety.6 These cases occur when the motor tract is interrupted subcortically and the thalamus is left intact (see Fig. 40). The opposite of this condition is seen in unilateral injury of the thalamus. A patient described by Kirilzev 7 moved symmetrically both sides of his face at will, but when he laughed in fun or made a grimace in pain the right side remained mo¬ tionless; at autopsy a tumor was found in the center of the left optic thalamus. Similar cases have been described by Wilson.8 This localization of the central neural apparatus for the expressions of pleasure and pain has interesting relations to emotive phenomena commonly seen in so-called “pseudo-bulbar palsy/’