Exploring our feelings
aww gushy gushy
Most human interactions are based on emotion - knowingly or not.
We embrace emotions, restrain them, feel them, pretend we don’t feel them, push through them.
We trust our “gut” when we really don’t cognitively know what a gut feeling is. In the best and worst of times, we’re actively choosing emotion and feeling over thought and cogitation. FYI, our “gut” isn’t really our gut. If we have any “gut” feelings they start in our retina or on our skin and move through the brain perception centers, making their way down through the actual gut via efferent nerves. We’ve talked about this before. Most of us know (in theory) that parts of our brain that process emotion are ancient brain structures, but we don’t know much beyond that.
We call our primary emotion processing hardware the limbic system which is thought to have evolved right alongside our most basic neurological functions adjacent to the “the reptilian brain”, parts of the brainstem and basal ganglia.
I know what you’re thinking, but it’s probably unlikely that Reptillian Lizard People would evolve far enough to be controlling our government. They’d probably be less reptilian and closer to robots.
I mean, maybe they live on a wetwet planet and get that keratin-thicc scaley skin, but their bwains would have to be pretty cortex-heavy to be smart enough to outdo humans on logic.
I just went way too far down this rabbit hole and decided to spare you.
…but I will bet the same people who believe lizard people might be running our government don’t do evolution.
To be fair, early in our history, those reptilian responses came in clutch. Before humans started taking up domicile in caves and building structures, they’d be on high alert. Also, they didn’t live in large groups, so the cognitive politics of the neighborhood watch committee didn’t find their way into the cortex yet.
When hunter-gatherers started organized farming, bwains (i.e., actually, skulls and we assume the gushy inside) changed. Not surprisingly, mandibular (jaw) changes came with eating softer wheat, grains, and dairy as opposed to nuts, seeds, and idk … flesh.
I think of humans with a newly evolved trait the way I think of a child with a new toy. We don’t like to credit emotions for anything now that we are getting comfortable with logic. As far as evolution is concerned, reasoned choices (i.e., the wrinkly bwain) are largely credited with having led us through the industrial and technological revolutions. Ted Kaczynski may have thought we’re at the pinnacle, but cautious optimists think we can still reason our way into a better future. It’s tempting to look at the world through dystopian lenses, but look where Ted’s lens got him - meanwhile Pinker’s doing TikTok vids in his NYC apartment. Ted may have been discounting humanity’s softer side. We love solving problems, sure but also, we love to love - and hate in general. We enjoy both logic and emotion - and they’re not mutually exclusive.
It’s only natural to want to pretend we don’t have a soft feeling underbelly. We hide our emotions to protect ourselves and gain an advantage. Ted was likely nursing some emotional vulnerability, even though he didn’t want to admit to his illness. Emotions can leave us vulnerable, but if we can get to a point as a society where we can be even a little more vulnerable, we might find a use for them.
To that point, I’m going to do say something I don’t say often (being vulnerable):
The Wokies are on to something when it comes to emotion in our culture…
The National Museum of African American History & Culture posted this infographic last year that had a lot of people dumbfounded:
This infographic could be right if we just edit it a little bit.
Ah, there we go. Now we can talk about what they got right.
As a society, the dominant culture is moving away from religion (thnx for the heads up, Nietzsche) and towards science for its “absolute” truths.
If we’re digging our heels into objectivity and reason, where does this leave human emotion? Should we abandon our lizard bwains?
Ironically, the shift towards post-modern ideologies including critical race theory (fodder for the above infographic), are much more critical of logic, in favor of emotional expression and demonstration.
Which will win in human evolution: Thinking or Feeling?
I say both. We pit these two neurochemical processes against each other unnecessarily like we do with Philosophy and Science.
This is where that dreaded nuance comes into play. We probably don’t need the raw, unfettered emotion of the stone age, but we also don’t want to eliminate our feelings (not that we could anyway).
Even the worst dystopian stories leave some shred of human emotion… and usually, the savagery of the old world is the key to redemption.
Nostalgia, emotion, and sensations aren’t the enemy - we’re just probably not optimizing them for the outcomes we seek… what our are goals as a species again? To survive, oh right.
There’s a place for emotion, even negative emotion. In fact, I’d argue that negative emotion is more useful than positive. To use emotion properly, the key is understanding it as a tool, not just a sensation.
Emotions can be categorized as “high valence” or “low valence”. Valence refers in general to the negative/positive sensations we feel. If we spilt those emotions between high and low levels of arousal or excitability, we come up with 4 basic quadrants.
In the past, when I was studying emotions from a neuromolecular perspective, I had speculated that low arousal emotions are a little less evolutionarily developed than high arousal feels. The centers of the brain that we understand emotions from are mostly relating to high arousal. This may be because we find high arousal states to be more compelling or that their easier to study. For basic survival, one can imagine the necessity of high arousal emotions. “Fight or Flight” instincts kick in when we’re in a low arousal state and move us to action. Most of us primates are still one adrenaline kick away from disaster, tbh.
To spend more time in lower arousal states, we need downtime. If you’re into Enlightenment values (tolerance, individuality, secularism, and universal rights) you’d probably agree that we have more leisure time than ever before in human history, and find this to be a good thing. We’re also living longer, and while there’s a whole mess of bullshit that brings, overall it gives us more time. Even if most of that extra time is spent stressing about illness, finances, or the general state of the world, a part of that time will be downtime. This is why it’s likely that we will see more development and understanding of low valence emotions.
We’re meditating more, having less children, and spending more time cognitively free to think about our emotions - think Netflix and Chill without the Netflix. Although this brings up an interesting thought about how occupied our minds are with fluff. Are we really reflecting and introspecting or are we just sailing away on the unending stream of media that is more accessible than ever? Is that “downtime”? Are we state of satiation when we are zombified in front of our screens?
Stay tuned for the next newsletter on what the fuck we can do to try to harness the power of emotions.