OK, this is another line of research (than biology).

There is an increasing amount of investigation these years into the nature of consciousness (including emotions), but THAT egg seems hard to break on a purely physiological or even higher functional level. Maybe consciousness is a Gödel kind of self referential proposition hard to crack inside the axoiom system of current biology...

There's also a growing understanding - at least among people working with serious introspection such as yoga or zen meditation - that consciousness is deepely integrated in the senses, body, - even matter/time in a broader sense.

Allan