William James: If we fancy some strong emotion and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its bodily symptoms we find we have nothing left behind, no “mind stuff” out of which the emotion can be constituted, and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is all that remains. … [I cannot imagine] what kind of an emotion of fear would be left if the feeling neither of quickened heart beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of goose flesh nor of visceral stirrings, were present. ... Can one fancy the state of rage and picture no ebullition in the chest, no flushing of the face, no dilation of the nostrils, no clenching of the teeth, no impulse to vigorous action, but in their stead limp muscles, calm breathing, and a placid face.[137]
Nevertheless, I would argue all this that must begin with activities that start in your brain before your body reacts to them, to eventually lead that “impulse to vigorous action.”
Student: But then, why should your body react to them at all?
The expressions of rage that James depicts (including that clenching of teeth and flushing of face) could have served in primordial times to help to repel or intimidate the person or creature that one is angry with; indeed, any external expression of one’s mental state can affect how someone else will think. This suggest an idea about what we mean when we use our most common emotion words; they refer to classes of mental conditions that produce external signs which make our behaviors more predictable to the persons with whom we are dealing. Thus for our ancestors, those bodily signs served as useful ways to communicate such so-called ‘primary’ emotions as anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, curiosity, and joy.
Student: Perhaps this could also be because our most common emotions evolved long ago when our brains were simpler. Then there were fewer levels between our goals and our sensory-motor systems.
The body and face could also serve as a simple sort of memory: those states of mind might soon fade away—except that those body-expressions could help to maintain them by sending signals back to the brain. In that respect, William James might be right: without such ‘mind-body’ feedback loops, those ‘cold and neutral’ mental states might not persist for long enough to grow into larger-scale cascades. For your external expressions of anger serve not only to frighten your enemies, but also ensure that you will stay frightened for long enough to carry out some actions that might save your life.
For example, your face might display an expression of horror—even when no one else is present—when you realize that you left the door unlocked, or forgot to turn the oven off, or that something that you believed was false. After all, you need your body to stay alive, so, given that it is always at hand, it makes sense for your brain to exploit it as a dependable external memory device.
When we are young, we find it hard to suppress those external expressions, but eventually we learn to control most of them, to at least some degree, so that our neighbors can’t always see how we feel.
Student: If those physical symptoms are not essential parts of emotions, then how can we make a distinction between our emotional states and our other ways to think?
It is hard to make that distinction clear, partly because we have so many names for our various emotional states, whereas most of our many other ways to think (such as those we described in §7–4) do not have popular names at all. Presumably this is because we don’t yet have good ways to think about them. However, here is an ancient but still useful view of what distinguishes the mental conditions that we tend to describe as emotionaclass="underline"
Aristotle: The emotions are all those feelings that so change men as to affect their judgments, and that are also attended by pain or pleasure.
In a modern version of this, some psychologists talk about ‘Valence,’ which refers to the extent to which one’s attitude toward some thing or situation is generally positive or negative.[138] Similarly, there is a popular view in which we think of emotion and thoughts as complementary, in much the same way that an object’s color and shape can change independently; we thus can think of each object (or idea) as having various ‘matter of fact’ or neutral aspects that, somehow, are also ‘colored’ by additional characteristics that seem to make it attractive, exciting, or desirable—versus disgusting, dull, or repulsive.
More generally, our language and thoughts are filled with distinctions like ‘positive vs. negative’ and ‘rational vs. emotional.” Such pairs are so useful in every day life that it’s hard to imagine replacing them (any more than we should discard the idea that the sun rises and sets each day and night, because this is technically incorrect). However, if our goal is to understand our minds, we’ll have to outgrow many dumbbell ideas.
In particular, exaggerating the body’s role in emotions can lead to serious misconceptions. Do the talents of pianists reside in their fingers? Do artists see with talented eyes? No: there is no evidence to suggest that any of those body-parts think; it’s the brain that sits in the driver’s seat. Ask Steven Hawking or Christopher Reeve.
§7-7. Poincare’s Unconscious Processes
“We cannot kindle when we will
The fire which in our heart resides,
The spirit bloweth and is still,
In mystery our soul abides:
But tasks in hours of insight will’d,
Can be through hours of gloom fulfill’d”
Sometimes you’ll work on a problem for hours or days, as when Joan worked on her progress report.
She has been thinking about it for several days, but has not yet conceived of a good enough plan. Discouraged, she sets those thoughts aside … but then an idea ‘occurs’ to her.
But did Joan really set those thoughts aside, or did they continue in other parts of her mind? Hear a great mathematician recount some similar experiences.
Henri Poincare: “Every day I seated myself at my worktable, stayed an hour or two, tried a great number of combinations and reached no results.”[139]
Most persons might get discouraged with this—but Poincare was inclined to persist:
“One evening, contrary to my custom, I drank black coffee and could not sleep. Ideas rose in crowds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination. By the next morning … I had only to write out the results, which took but a few hours.”
Then he describes another event in which his thinking seemed much less deliberate:
“The changes of travel made me forget my mathematical work. Having reached Coutances, we entered an omnibus to go some place or other. At the moment when I put my foot on the step the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it. … I went on with a conversation already commenced, but I felt a perfect certainty.”
138
See Ortony, A., Clore, G.L., Collins, A.,
139
These quotations are from Poincare 1908.