As neural activity diminishes, feeling intensity decreases, but some residual activity persists in those circuits after a feeling is no longer perceptible. When the neural excitation exceeds a shadowy threshold of awareness, what emerges is a feeling - the conscious experience of emotional activation. (The figures of speech “pluck at one’s heartstrings” and “strikes a chord in me” have found a home in our language for just this reason.) Rising activity in the emotion circuits produces not sound, but (among other things) a facial expression. Emotions operate in an analogous way: an event touches a responsive key, an internal feeling-tone is sounded, and it soon dwindles into silence. As amplitude of vibration declines, the sound falls off and dies away. When a pianist strikes a key, a hammer collides with the matching string inside his instrument and sets it to vibrating at its characteristic frequency. (Available as a print.)ĭrawing an analogy to music - which might be so elemental to our sense of aliveness precisely because it shares a fundamental neuropsychological mechanism with emotion - Lewis, Amini, and Lannon examine the composition of feeling out of neural notation, illuminating the interdependence of and difference between emotion and mood:Įmotions possess the evanescence of a musical note. Art by Arthur Rackham from a rare 1926 edition of The Tempest. Why emotion so easily clouds the lens of experience is what psychiatrist trio Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon explore throughout A General Theory of Love ( public library) - the altogether revelatory book that remains, in my life of reading, the single most illuminating inquiry into the neurological nature and psychological nurture of why we feel what we feel and how this shapes how we become what we are. Anyone with moderate self-awareness can relate to the experience of having an irritable or indignant or melancholy mood descend upon them seemingly out of the blue, when it has in fact coalesced out of an invisible and pervasive atmosphere of unprocessed feeling: Who among us has not, in a human moment, aimed a flash of fury at the wrong person for the wrong thing because something entirely else is filling the sky of the mind with its charged nimbus of wrongness. We aim the analytical mind - that magnificent novelty-instrument millennia in the evolutionary making - at the opacity, but occluding the lens of self-understanding is something much more primeval: Emotion smudges the eyepiece of life, often without our awareness, changing what we see and making us react not to what is but to what we are perceiving. It is apt to create a substance where at first there was a mere shadow… It is best not to strive to interpret it in earthly language, but wait for the soul to make itself understood.”Ī century after him, the French philosopher Simone Weil - another visionary of uncommon insight into the depths of the soul - contemplated the paradox of friendship, observing that “it is a fault to wish to be understood before we have made ourselves clear to ourselves.”įor one consciousness to understand another - to understand what it is like to be another - might be the supreme challenge of communication and coexistence, because we each move through life half-opaque to ourselves. “It is dangerous to look too minutely into such phenomena. “Lights and shadows are continually flitting across my inward sky, and I know neither whence they come nor whither they go nor do I inquire too closely into them,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in his notebook one spring day in 1840.
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