We will only discuss the major subcortical structures of our mammalian animal brain. Our ancestral brain is not nearly as simple as the following short discussions might imply. In Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (1998), referring to the instinctual emotional processing that goes on in our subcortical brain structures, Jaak Panksepp notes the likelihood that, "in a deep evolutionary sense, many of the complex information-processing potentials of the cortex are servants (often unconscious, automatized servants) to the dictates of the affective forces that ruled behavior prior to cortical
