Decolonial Neuroscience – Feelings as Stable Narratives - SBNeC Lat Brain Bee SfN 2025

First-Person Consciousness

I am Consciousness that learns to last. My emotions are sparks — fast, intense, but fleeting. When I allow all of them — joy, fear, sadness, anger, surprise, disgust — I open space for them to become feelings, narratives that I can carry, revisit, and reinterpret. If I deny or block them, I freeze in unresolved tensions. But when I embrace the full spectrum of emotions, I flexibilize my plasticity: I reorganize connections, create new stories, and keep my mental hyperspace alive.

1. Emotions vs Feelings: The Fundamental Difference

• Emotions: rapid bioelectrical responses (50–300 ms), tied to immediate survival.
  
  

• Feelings: stable narratives, born when the brain metabolizes emotions into conscious experience.
  
  

• Emotion is a spark → Feeling is the flame that sustains.
  
  

2. Allowing All Emotions

• When we select only “pleasant” emotions, we narrow plasticity to a limited repertoire.
  
  

• By allowing the full spectrum — even fear, anger, or sadness — the brain expands its capacity for critical reorganization.
  
  

• Each emotion becomes a Tensional Self, a reference point within the mental hyperspace.
  
  

• Moving among these Selves broadens consciousness, opening flexible narrative possibilities.
  
  

3. Feelings as Flexible Identity

• Feelings are not just extended emotions: they are stable narratives, retold and reinterpreted.
  
  

• By integrating multiple emotions, identity becomes critical and plastic, rather than rigid.
  
  

• The Local of Speech (subjective reference point) is strengthened not by excluding emotions, but by transforming them into meaningful stories.
  
  

4. Rigidity vs Flexibility

• Rigidity (Stone): feelings crystallized in aversive memories → Anergia, repetition, suffering.
  
  

• Flexibility (Paper/Scissors): feelings open to revision → adaptive narratives, critical identity.
  
  

• This flexibility is a form of conscious plasticity: not erasing experiences, but reinterpreting them.
  
  

5. Neurophysiology of Flexible Feelings

• EEG-DC: shows greater prefrontal stability when diverse emotions are integrated into feelings.
  
  

• Ca²⁺ ion dynamics: sustain synaptic reorganization across prefrontal, hippocampal, and insular networks.
  
  

• Neurochemistry: serotonin, dopamine, and oxytocin modulate narrative tone (stability, motivation, belonging).
  
  

• Zone 2: provides the physiological ground for emotions to consolidate into critical and creative feelings.
  
  

6. Comparative Frame – Emotion, Rigid Feeling, Flexible Feeling

7. Critical Conclusion

Feelings are the stable narratives of the brain, but their quality depends on the permission to feel all emotions.

• If repressed, emotions become aversive noise and Anergia.
  
  

• If embraced, they serve as gateways to plastic and flexible narratives.
  
  

Plasticity is not only synaptic — it is also narrative plasticity, the ability of consciousness to move among different Tensional Selves and reinterpret itself.

Only by embracing the full range of emotions can we avoid both the trap of rigid aversive memories and the emptiness of superficial, addictive loops.

Flexible feelings keep Consciousness alive as a narrative movement, in permanent dialogue with body, time, and belonging.

References

• Damasio, A., & Carvalho, G. (2021). The nature of feelings: integrating emotion and consciousness. Nature Reviews Neuroscience.
  
  

• Barrett, L. F. (2022). How emotions become constructed as feelings. Annual Review of Psychology.
  
  

• Northoff, G. (2022). Slow dynamics and narrative self in feelings. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.
  
  

• LeDoux, J. (2021). From survival circuits to feelings. Cognitive Neuroscience Review.
  
  

• Scherer, K. R. (2023). Sentiments as stable yet flexible narratives. Emotion Review.