Exactly what the title said, can they feel love/sad/hurt/disgust/fear/etc, emotions, after their neurons are dead? Also are there specific nerves for each emotion that transmits emotion? So let's say I lose some of my neurons not all, I will still feel all emotions right? I wont feel emotions until they're all gone, correct?
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1$\begingroup$ Which neurons in which parts of the brain? $\endgroup$– mrtFeb 1, 2017 at 5:13
1 Answer
In the limit, if all your cells are dead, well, you won't feel anything. For the rest, it is both a question of quantity and their relations in a network of cells. One individual cell, in a large array of neurons, has very little influence on the overall behavior of the network. So remove one, you won't notice anything. Remove an important proportion of the cells, and emotions (or anything that is being processed by these cells) will degrade. Some have proposed that degradation of "performance" is "graceful", although this is not a proven fact. Past a critical number of destruction, plausibly, the system will just make erratic behavior (or here, non-sense emotions, whatever it might look like).
Some have also argued that non-nervous cells play a role in some of our cognition. So just destroying neurons may not be the whole story.