So, you can define emotions very simply as the process of perceiving what is going on in the organs when you are in the throws of an emotion, and that is achieved by a collection of structures, some of which are in the brain stem, and some of which are in the cerebral cortex, namely the insular cortex, which I like to mention not because I think it's the most important, it's not.

You can be highly concentrated on a person, on a problem, and be so good at excluding all other material that that becomes not just the focus of your experience, but practically the sole content of your experience, everything else falling by the wayside.

We may smile and the dog may wag the tail, but in essence, we have a set program and those programs are similar across individuals in the species.

There is a sequence of events in our lives and so there's a temporal aspect to our experience that brings by itself, sense into the story. In other words, you were not walking before you were born and you were not doing X and Y before you did something else first. So there's a sequencing of events that imposes a certain structure to the story.

We may express them [emotions] physically slightly differently, and it's of course graded depending on the circumstance, but the essence of the process is going to be the same, unless one of us is not quite well put together and is missing something, otherwise it's going to be the same.

Rather than being a luxury, emotions are a very intelligent way of driving an organism toward certain outcomes.

We're seeing it the same way, we're hearing the same way, we have the same conception of the situation. And so, for all purposes, we are operating with a very similar perception.