The limbic system is often called the centre of feelings. Affective/emotional experiences are originated in the limbic system. It is considered to be the central unconscious evaluator of the information entering the brain and is in charge to provide the top motivational contexts and to deal with enabling mechanisms like attention control, associations, and memory management subject to the motivational contexts. It more or less dictates the first cognitive reaction, and after loop-like activations sweeping through numbers of brain structures, it also has the final judgement. This can lead to strongly emotional behaviour, for instance panic behaviour in the extreme case. The ventral loop (also called limbic loop) represents a number of pathways between certain regions of the cortex and certain subcortical structures. Most of the neuronal formations involved belong to the limbic system. This is the reason why the ventral loop represents our top executive level which decides what we do and what we will not do in order to comply with the motivational contexts. By means of the ventral loop the unconsciously working limbic centres shape our conscious experiences as to feelings (positive and negative), goals and the intensity of our desire to bring them to reality. The loop projects from the limbic cortex, i.e. the orbitofrontal and the cingulate cortex, to the ventral striatum, from there to the ventral pallidum, and finally, being relayed by thalamic nucleus mediodorsalis, back to the limbic cortex.
Both the ventral striatum and the pallidum are in close connection with the substantia nigra. The centres of emotional implicit memory, i.e. the amygdala and the ventral tegmental area (mesolimbic system), both representative of the human negative and positive value system respectively, directly affect the loop through the striatum. Also the hippocampus projects to the striatum taking care that the experiences about context get involved, while the basal forebrain takes care of the attention control necessary in that process. Whereas the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex accommodates what can be considered as the human problem solving capability, including the working memory, it is the orbitofrontal cortex as part of the pre-frontal cortex which provides in full consciousness the functional means that rational human cognitive behaviour can be generated. Rational behaviour abides by given behavioural standards or boundaries which are generally accepted. The orbitofrontal cortex is also the place where voluntary goals (short-, mid-, and long-term) are being developed, for instance according to motivational contexts with expectance of reward (mesolimbic system), and corresponding actions are being prepared. Also later consequences of emotional short-term demands of the limbic system are assessed and adjusted by taking account of certain constraints, for instance social ones. Thereby, exaggerated emotional reactions (for instance from the amygdala) might be mitigated or held down. It seems that the orbitofrontal cortex accommodates what we name human prudence.
At this point it also becomes obvious that human cognition not only stands for feedforward input-output information processing as known from invesitigations of the school of behaviourism in psychology but also for the individual's self-initialised behaviour of goal setting, and entailed actions. In that sense, the orbitofrontal cortex is the consciously experiencing rational counterpart of the unconsciously working limbic system, unconsciously taking the emotional limbic demands for granted, but in consciousness trying to make them compliant with the real world conditions and requirements, if these are known and if there is sufficient time which can be spent for necessary reasoning activity.
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