Mind Watching: Field Notes from Wilderness Solitude – Day 22

50 days of observations, insights, and contemplations...

by Tyler Volk

Tyler Volk’s “Mind Watching” Series Table of Contents

Day 22 -- Emotions Questioned

Back home. A hot sunny day and then the sky clouded up. During this gift of shade, I cut through a neighbor’s property to a swim spot and was impressed to see the river so strong, up by six inches, brown and murky. Its new face must be recent, presumably fed by a deluge the day before in the mountain headlands, perhaps from the storm clouds in the distant south I had seen in late afternoon during the final leg of my drive home.

Someone might well be wondering now in this series of essays, “You can continue thinking about thinking. But where are the emotions? This all seems so non-emotional.”

Though I did cite emotions as one of the braided streams of consciousness, I admit that I’ve been non-emotional in much of this, without primary examples from my reactions to pleasures and tribulations from other people, the usual sources for triggering emotions. Some of this lack is my own suppression. I have not featured various sensations of doubt, fear, and freedom during these days of personal retreat. This book, however, is not about my personal life and thoughts I might have about others as a topic. Besides, a major portion of my reasons for choosing this seclusion is to minimize human contact and thereby dampen the social emotions that come from primal campfires of love, friendship, stories, gossip, mutual respect, evaluation. This seclusion, in further support, gives me a rare chance to focus upon thinking and to put my passions toward that end.

All thought, I have noticed, is associated with emotional tones. For instance, I often feel frustrated and even anguished when my mind takes the form of a matrix of pine needles during thinking about thinking (see Day 2). And so here I might ask—Why worry about that moment of identity with a bed of pine needles? Why not just allow simple joy to inwardly bloom from the sight of flowers?

Cognitive scientists often parse emotions into two main types: primary and social. The first group, the primary emotions, we inherit in our package of human genetics and brain hard-wiring. Members of this group are present and visible very early during an infant’s development. Researchers have not yet agreed on a list of them—I have seen lists that range from four to perhaps nine primary emotions. It’s an ongoing, fertile time of experimentation for the field of emotions. But most lists include fear, anger, and disgust. Surprise and sadness, too, are usually cited, as is joy. (Joy and surprise might be either folded together or separated in some lists, for example.) Distress, as well, sometimes makes the list.

Paul Ekman, a leading pioneer in the study of emotions, has claimed that the primary emotions are surely biological and present in all people worldwide. Cultures differ widely in how they encourage or discourage the expressions of these. Nonetheless, claimed Ekman, angry faces look basically the same all over the world. It’s similar with fear. A fearful Intuit face can be correctly recognized as fearful by a Bangkok urbanite.

The emotions in the second category develop later. These social emotions involve reactions to one’s sense of status in relation to others. Examples of social emotions are shame, guilt, pride, and envy. To feel them requires judgments that are more sophisticated than those needed for primal reactions such as fear and anger, because in the social emotions one is aware of oneself as an entity in other people’s minds. To feel your specific standing in the social structure, you have to recognize that other people have an opinion of you; they can praise, they can denounce, they can reject, they can criticize.

Human life contains a symphonic mixing of primary and social emotions, and, as any sophisticated novel shows, as well as exhibit-A of your own life, the mixing gets as complex as coordinated biodiversity in a swamp. In general, the emotions are thought to perform basic cognitive functions. The social emotions, for instance, regulate the exchanges of favors, friendships, and obligations; they structure the efforts of people to control and/or develop harmony with each other in often subtle ways.

Except for the fact that in the mixing the primary emotions are typically used in conjunction with the social emotions (I get angry because I was made to feel guilty, and so forth), the functions of the primary emotions considered in isolation are more straightforward. For instance, anger involves the tensing of muscles and display of a physical readiness to alter the outer world (often another person) to behave the way you want. When in fear, you freeze, evaluate the situation, and prepare to fight or flee, depending. Scientists of emotion believe that the evolutionary origin of disgust came from the need to make crucial judgments about what belongs in the mouth or not. Sadness seems to serve as the body’s way of creating a quiet retreat, perhaps to mull things over. This withdrawal is quite different from the retreat behavior caused by fear, for example.

It’s interesting that so many of the primary and even secondary emotions have a negative tone. Consider that the emotions, overall, are various means to change oneself or the local physical or social environment. Thus a preponderance of negative emotions makes some degree of evolutionary sense: if emotions have functions, these functions would be most required when we drift or are forced away from a desirable state of equilibrium with the world. Most emotions, in this line of logic, are ways to help us smartly react when things aren’t going all right. Because there are a variety of generic ways in which things aren’t right—threats, spoiled food, being cheated—we have a corresponding stock of negative emotions as responses.

Along a different line of reasoning, one might think that the importance of a healthy equilibrium state in which one has plenty of food, clothing, and shelter, as well as the social support to provide these, would prompt evolution to create a positive emotion whose function is to keep us in that state. Certainly happiness or joy serves in that way. Surprise, too, perhaps (but to me that one seems dual-sided). Yet because it’s the shifts away from equilibrium that require immediate and specifically-targeted actions, perhaps that’s why there are so many negative emotions that are not necessarily balanced on a one-to-one basis with positive ones. As Tolstoy indicated in the famous opening sentence of Anna Karenina, there are many more ways of being unhappy than happy.

What is the purpose of all this introspection? Why put myself through frustration if not to create, in the end, a sense of joy? So joy might be taken as the goal of thinking of thinking. Joy is perhaps the most mysterious of the primary emotions. The smile, going back in time to the spontaneous smile of the infant—what is its purpose? It might be to create communication with the mother or other caregiver. If the baby smiles, laughs, and shows other signs of exuberant happiness, the mother will tend to relate to that little one as a real spirited being of joy, and feel confident that all is well, and not worry about a needy creature who is only emotional when angry, frustrated, sad, fearful, and don’t forget smelly, though that’s not an emotion. The joy beamed outwards by the infant helps mother or any caregiver overcome any sense of worry about the infant and this affirmation of good quality moments facilitates bonding. The shared joy is then a key emotion in the early exchanges between mother and the helpless creature she has to care for. Numerous researchers think this emotional bonding sets the stage for the later, more highly cognitive aspects of the developing stream of merged multiple tributaries of personal consciousness.

NOTE:

Over many years I have benefited from talks about these matters with my friend, New York University neuroscientist Joe LeDoux. For example, see his books:

• The Four Realms of Existence: A New Theory of Being Human (2023, hardcover)
• The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains (2020, paperback)
• The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (1998, paperback).

© 2024 by Tyler Volk

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