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I think that you might find this interesting:

Laugh Gesture Relationship with Neuroscience When We Learn

I posted some something related to this that focused on the negative reinforcement aspect. The Amygdala also reinforces positive learning. One of the basic drives is the exploration of our environment and we clever humans have extended this to “teaching.” Positive social reinforcement is definitely something the amygdala picks up on resulting in enhanced learning. One other factor in learning is relevance - as you explore your environment (be exposed to education) your learning rate is greatly…

I don’t think of emotions at a separate sensory stream like vision or hearing. I think of it more as a “smell” that you learn along with whatever experience you are having that flavors that experience.The more profound the experience the more intense the flavoring and the greater the learning rate of that encounter - for good or bad.

There are good reasons to expect that part of the purpose of the hippocampus is as a buffer for experience to be colored by the outcome of that experience as it is consolidated and transferred to the cortex.

Your learning as you explore your environment builds a vast landscape of emotionally flavored micro-experiences. This is the essence of exploration and play - building this catalog of emotionally tagged experience. This is why we seek novelties - to add to our useful store of knowledge of the world. It’s instinctual and every bit as powerful as other drives such as grooming or seeking shelter.

I am certain that this exploration extends to the social sphere. We are social animals and must learn our place in the leader/follower relationships. I suspect that there is a lot to know about how dating and dancing work in this context. Children can be unspeakably cruel to each other as they sort these things out. All of these experiences are colored with emotion by our innate lizard brain as we learn them.

The “finished” results of your exploration are what you draw upon when you encounter the lion; you use the crystallized sum of all your prior explorations. Assuming you do survive your stressful encounter whatever you did to survive is stamped hard in your memory - it worked! Such is the fuel of PTSD. If you did not survive whatever you did was not working and does not need to be remembered.

In relation to your example of certain words or ideas freighted with emotion - the tribal experience works to shade these tokens by context. I suspect that at some point this emotional weight overwhelms the meaning of the word to the point where some book definition is meaningless.