We are told that emotions are generated in the brain.
Fear arises from the amygdala. Joy is produced by dopaminergic circuits. Sadness reflects altered neurochemistry. Emotion, on this view, is something manufactured internally and then expressed outwardly — a private event with public consequences.
This picture is so familiar that it rarely attracts scrutiny. Yet, like the myths of the mind’s eye and the mental archive, it depends on a quiet reification: emotion is treated as a thing, and things must have a place.
But emotion does not behave like an inner product. And the harder one looks, the less sense the location claim makes.
The production metaphor and its limits
To say that emotions are generated in the brain suggests a sequence: neural activity produces emotion, which then appears in experience and behaviour. But this sequence immediately encounters trouble.
Emotions vary dramatically with context. The same physiological arousal can be fear, excitement, anger, or anticipation depending on situation, interpretation, and social framing. Emotional experience shifts with language, norms, expectations, and relationships — sometimes instantaneously, without any plausible intervening “production” step.
If emotion were produced internally like a substance, such variability would be inexplicable noise. In practice, it is the rule.
What changes is not the output of an inner factory, but the situation in which experience is taking form.
Emotion as experienced value
From a relational perspective, emotion is not a thing but a mode of experienced value.
An emotion is how a situation matters — how it solicits, repels, invites, threatens, or fulfils. It is not added on to experience; it is integral to how experience is organised. To be afraid is not to have fear inside you; it is to find the world configured as dangerous. To be joyful is not to host joy internally; it is to encounter the world as promising.
This is why emotion cannot be peeled away from its circumstances without distortion. Remove the situation, and the emotion evaporates — not because it has been suppressed, but because it no longer has anything to be.
Neural dynamics as constraint, not cause
None of this denies the role of the brain. Neural activity matters profoundly. But it does not produce emotion in the way the production metaphor suggests.
Neural dynamics contribute constraints and sensitivities: how readily certain patterns of valuation can be actualised, how strongly bodily arousal couples to attention, how past experience shapes present responsiveness. These are enabling and limiting conditions, not emotional contents.
To confuse correlation with production is to repeat the same ontological mistake seen in memory and imagery: mistaking enduring conditions for stored or generated phenomena.
Regulation without a regulator
Emotion is often described as something to be “regulated”, implying a controlling system acting on a generated inner state. But here again, the relational view clarifies what is actually happening.
Emotional regulation is not the suppression or adjustment of a private object. It is the reorganisation of relations: reframing a situation, altering bodily posture, changing language, shifting attention, invoking social support, or redefining what is at stake.
What changes is not an internal quantity, but the field in which value is being experienced. Regulation is situational before it is neural.
Trauma, affect, and the persistence of value
Trauma presents a particularly revealing case. Traumatic emotion is often described as something stored in the brain, waiting to be triggered. But what persists is not an emotion-object; it is a pattern of valuation that continues to be actualised under certain conditions.
The world remains threatening. The body remains vigilant. Meaning is narrowed. Emotion reappears not because it has been retrieved, but because the system is repeatedly constrained into the same configuration.
Again, nothing needs to be located. What persists is history shaping possibility.
Emotion without interiority
Once emotion is understood as experienced value rather than inner product, the question “Where is emotion located?” loses its grip.
Emotion happens:
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in experience,
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in relation,
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in the lived configuration of body, world, and others.
The brain is indispensable to this process, but it is not where emotion resides. To locate emotion in the brain is like locating meaning in ink. Something important is being measured, but the phenomenon itself is elsewhere.
From feeling to becoming
Emotion is often treated as a disruption of rationality, a force to be managed or explained away. But seen relationally, emotion is one of the primary ways possibility becomes salient.
Emotion tells us what matters. It shapes what can be noticed, pursued, avoided, or endured. It is not an obstacle to cognition but one of its organising principles.
And this is why emotion resists being reduced to neural production. It is not a thing generated inside us, but a way the world shows up as significant.
The myth of inner production dissolves, and with it the fantasy that value can be localised.
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