Isle of Lyngvi

I have personal experience of the link between body state and my feelings. I’m the kind of absent-minded professor sort who can forget to eat on occasion. Sometimes when this happens I get in a particularly bitchy kind of cranky mood. Every thing irritates me and I start snapping at people. Not surprisingly it was people around me that noticed this pattern first.

If Damasio is right this feeling is my body trying to communicate. The obvious thought is that the body is trying to tell me to eat. I have come to the conclusion that by the time I’m feeling cranky my body has decided I’m too thick to get the signal and is now trying to get someone else to tell me. I also get a similar mood if I am short on sleep and should go to bed.

Castaneda has claimed that sorcery is applying one’s will on the joints of a situation. Joints are the hinge points that bodies turn around they are the connection tissue between parts. In aikido control of a joint gives you control of the body. Applying this principle to ourselves leads us to look at how the various processes link up into nested feed back loops. From these loops we locate those connections or turns over which conscious effort can exert an effect.

In the stimulus, reaction, feeling, thoughts and images sequence there are several places that we can apply pressure. We can, upon experiencing a feeling, concentrate on thoughts and images congruent with the feeling of our choosing to provide the stimulus for the next iteration of the loop. We can, upon noticing our physical emotive reaction, change them or adjust them more to our liking. With the physical reactions adjustments are easier than direct changes. It is hard to turn activation into calm but easier to adjust fear into excitement. The last place we can use our influences is on the association between stimulus and emotive reaction. After reflection we can associate stimulus that has triggered unpleasantness with more favorable reactions.

Some people might be bothered by my supposition that my body was using my feelings to communicate with other people but evolution has no qualms about groups. Humans, as other animals, evolved in terms of the pack or grouping that existed as their species evolved. Any feature, such as feelings, that evolved at the same time would have evolved in terms of the animal and its group.

Damasio, Antonio. (2003). Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc.

Damasio confirms my supposition that memories are emotionally tagged for decision making (144). He also discusses the use of this emotional decision making and how it functions in the case of blink cognition. Essentially the brain compares the current scenario to what has happened in the past and sends you the feelings of the outcome of various options. This makes one option feel better than another.

Damasio makes the claim that the sequence of feeling production goes stimulus, physical reaction (emotion) and last experience of emotion (feeling). He also states that feeling is a long process taking between one second and one minute to occur and extinguish.

The trick to emotional engineering is to recognize an emotional stimulus before it has time to cascade to a full blown feeling and interrupt and replace the physical actions of the emotional reaction. Further you could train yourself to always have the preferred reaction to the stimulus by associating them through a technique such as NLP’s anchoring. While feelings and emotions are useful and evolved because they served our ancestor’s well being and survival, what Spinoza called conatus, individual reactions can be disadvantageous particularly in our contemporary social context.

Take for example the scenario of the boss who habitually yells at his subordinates. Perhaps you have experienced this. You probably associated this stimulus with what is commonly called a negative emotion, the fight or flight reaction or activation syndrome. The problem is that in a work context you can neither fight nor flee your employer. This physical double-bind of reaction and suppression is a major component of stress and is very unhealthy over the long term.

If you were to notice the physical reaction of the oncoming emotions, generally a change in muscle tension, posture, facial expression and breathing pattern; you could interrupt them and replace them with the reactions of an emotion more appropriate for the situation before the feelings and ensuing thoughts overwhelm you. You could even precondition yourself to react in the manner of your choosing to your boss’s unpleasant habit.

Damasio, Antonio. (2003). Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc.

“Go to your bosom; knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.” Shakespeare.

Rather than being based on lack as such the drives are based on health. They are part of a homeostatic cybernetic loop. We maintain our vitality rather than pursue what we lack. Feelings are a status signaling device like the dials on a plane dashboard. Connecting the feelings back up with the drives and motivations they derive from would give you greater ability to interpret the signals.

Damasio defines a feeling as “the perception of a certain state of the body along with the perception of a certain mode of thinking and of thoughts with certain themes” (86).

If we talk about ‘The “feeling” of a certain musical note, we actually are referring to the affective feeling that accompanies our’ perceptions (92). Feelings are strongly related to somatosensory activity but are distinct from tactile sensation (106). Feelings arise from the maps of body-states not the states themselves (112). That is, feelings are metadata about our sensations rather than sensations themselves.

Feelings and consciousness are mutually arising phenomena. Without consciousness feelings as such do not exist but self depends on this sense of feeling (110). You don’t choose an emotion they happen before you are conscious of the stimulus (60).

Both External events and mental images can trigger an emotion, “if the stimulus is emotionally competent an emotion ensues, and only the intensity varies” (57).

When some of the pattern of an emotion is performed the rest of the pattern arises to complete it. The emotional response “process spreads laterally into parallel chains of events and amplifies itself” (65). Feelings are interactive perceptions and because of the feedback effect, the act of feeling changes the feelings experienced. This is where there is an opening for us to effect this process. In empathy and emotional simulation, a virtual map is overlain on the real map to create a new composite map (116).

Feelings are gestalt signals of complex and multifaceted bodily conditions that are organized in an abstract functional fashion. They are subject to feedback loops and are at least partially amenable to conscious selective activity.

Damasio, Antonio. (2003). Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc.