Memory and emotion

When I cut myself with a knife in the kitchen, pain and higher-level emotions are part of my response to this event. Then, the memory of the process of actions that led to this event becomes associated with this emotional response. For a mind that's afraid of this bundle of emotions, fear will be associated with future repetitions of the process. The mind that seeks this emotion, on the other hand, might push the individual to perform the process again.

In that sense, emotions act as an amplifier to memories associated with them. In addition, they inform the motivation for future re-enactments of a process.

What are emotions? Wikipedia's article is good. They are a mental and physiological state.

The state can be induced by reality or by thought, if those are assumed to be distinct. Thanks to memory this state can be recalled at later times. This is such a powerful storage mechanism that the emotion can act on every cell in the body, in addition to re-wiring the mental state. How can it be stored?

We assume that the initial emotion was caused by an physico/mental event. For example, cutting oneself with a knife. This physical occurrence involves the subject who, later, has lived through a certain event and thus had a bodily and mental reaction to the event. Long after the occurrence of the event, the cells are still informed with its time-structure but in a latent way. Their trigger to re-enact this time-structure (i.e., generate the same responses that were generated the first time around) is a sensation or a thought. Thus, the emotion is encoded in the body (including the brain) as latent vibrations. This particular configuration of cells vibrating causes the chemical activity to be altered such as to recreate the original state, given the appropriate trigger.

How is information stored with that state? The movie Slumdog Millionaire is a perfect example of this: the kid remembered all the answers because the emotions associated with each piece of information had been extraordinarily high. So the mind, like the body, vibrates with its own past thoughts and the strength of the vibration of specific thought depends on the intensity of the original interaction with reality which accompanied the occurrence of the thought.

The mind seems to be an abstracting machine in dealing with reality. Whereas the skin cell feels the actual pain (or pleasure), the mind cell only receives information about this sensation. Because the mind cell itself is cozily encased in a protected environment removed from external reality and connected to the body cells via essentially electric wires.