Wednesday, 28 February 2024
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Now I'm reading a book called "How Emotions are made: The Secret Life of the Brain" by Lisa Feldman Barrett. From my understanding, it is a book about a theory, a new way of thinking about emotions. In the first chapter, they talk about the classic view of emotions. That is that each distinct emotion like happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust surprise have unique facial expressions like smiling for happiness and other bodily responses like heart rate, body temperature and sweating. But also that one can map an emotion to a specific brain region being responsible for executing that emotion, like the amygdala being responsible for fear. But experiments and meta analyses of experiments puts this view into question. It seems as the intuitive way of seeing emotions but may or is not the full or correct view of emotions. The important takeaway is that there is a lot of variation in how humans express emotions and that how we interpret facial expressions and bodily changes is heavily dependant on the context they are experienced or viewed in. This seems to resonate with my own experiences.

The classic examples of the 'fingerprint' of an emotion like the specific facial expression we picture someone being angry has is more or less an abstraction. A stereotype, that in the real world you will not find useful to use to recognise anger as there is much variation, at least that is what I'm gathering from it.

On a side note, I find it fascinating how many and intricate the muscles in our face are the allows for so many, if not near infinite configurations. I sit here making all kinds of faces, you can move muscles from the very bottom of your face to the very top Same goes for right to left side of your face.

Back to the book, they also find that you cant map specific emotions to specific brain region. Apparently in some ways, you can still instil fear onto a person without a functioning amygdala and that the amygdala is active in other emotions like happiness and activities you wouldnt associate fear with like learning. It was found that the amygdala is activated by novelty, something new to us which I guess makes sense with the idea that new and unknown things can incite fear. An experiment showed that when a new thing that incite fear is introduced the amygdala is active but after seeing it more it can still invoke fear but the amygdala is no longer significantly active as the novelty wears off.

They talk about neurons being 'multipurpose' as that neurons in different parts of the brain can be responsible for triggering an emotion. I feel that makes sense, like you have a large network of neurons and there are multiple wiring that are similar but have slight variations that in turn don't produce absolute identical results but a variety of results from minor to larger variations dependant on a lot of factors. And that you can make statistical averages of the neurons firing but that is always an abstraction, a simplified version of reality and does not tell the reality of that 'variation is the norm'. This is what I got from it and I look forward to reading more from the book.

I wonder how other words relate to the emotions like happiness, anger and so on. Like joy, estatic, thrilled, content, excited. I guess they can describe intensity of an emotion, context or reason for emotion. I'd definitely want to look into all the different words there are to describe emotions. Somehow that feels like a vital thing in order to make your experience more rich. I like the saying of emotions being the colors of life, as I talked about before that it seems emotions are very close to consciousness. I'm not sure if I'm using the word consciousness correctly but what I mean is our subjective experience of being, like the window to life. And what I was trying to say is that that experience will be richer if you can differentiate between emotions or how you feel. Particulary this I feel I lack quite a bit in. Usually I simply respond with fine not caring to look deeper into it or viewing emotions just as positive or negative. That's like viewing life in black and white only I guess you could say. Also other languages probably separate emotions differently like they can have different distinctions of colors.

Today I've been thinking about wether I should make this writing public. I would view it as a privilege to get someones perspective and insight on what I'm writing. In the few past years it has really come to my attention how deluded and long gone from reality I or one can become. And I guess a good way to reduce that risk is being open to hear other people, you know, a reality check, especially as I know I live in a little bubble of my own. What type of feedback is one looking for? For me the desire to be less conflicted and confused is becoming ever more what I care the most about even if it will be uncomfortable. I feel as if I'm dead if I only care about comfort. That sounds dramatic and I want to make it clear that with seeking comfort I mean like just seeking the feeling with nothing attached to it, like pressing a feel good button in an empty void. However I don't think you have to choose between being confused or uncomfortable but this is a longer writing involving things I haven't thought too much about yet.

Anyway, a thing I wanted to say with this was that the most hurtful and ego crushing stuff people have told me is also some of what has made me realise my foundation is weak, like how you view the world and how to go about it, which then leads me to search for a stronger foundation. This is what I mean with conflict and confusion. If you never think things through you'll just become more and more confused. And you have to be very critical and not fear uncomfort to resolve ideas in your head that conflict or cause any doubt. On this matter, right now I see loving kindness as a strong building material. Right now it is too abstract for my liking. I wish to get more clearer with it and I know there are many things I haven't fully considered, like what is idealistic and what is pragmatic. Like, will I mow down the enemies on the battlefield with loving kindness? The real world gets very messy, something easy to forget in idealistic thoughts.