Month: September 2020

It has been a while since the last post. The start of a school year during a pandemic has a way of soaking up one’s attention. Daughters looking for jobs and starting their own semesters amidst a pandemic. Friends moving to new cities and starting graduate programs in the middle of a pandemic. Friends ill, brothers nurturing their own children, parents navigating potential transitions…all under the weight of our shared pandemic. It did not need to be this way, of course. In the U.S. we have a leadership that understands no laws other than grievance and the accumulation of power. A virus? Fires? Hurricanes? Wind storms? You can’t sue them away. You can’t wish them away. You can’t have a fixer pay them off or have a tabloid buy up the stories and bury them. You might try to pin the blame on someone else, hide the data and do it some more, distract, and include others in your narrative so as to hide your own failure. But the behaviors that work in human social networks — status, money, grievance, power, humiliation, deceit — they have no bearing on the forces that create pandemics. While water inexorably fills the hull of the boat, the captain from his helicopter claims that the boat is just fine, and his crew, from their own lifeboats, tell the stranded passengers how great freedom is.

Just a few thoughts.

But I will say this. I teach at a liberal arts college in New York. In the lead up to the semester, tents were erected, like domed mushrooms, across the campus. Students trickled in over August. Tested, and tested again. Professors nervously watched the news as university after university after university shut down due to Covid outbreaks. And yet, on the first day of our semester, in the early morning dew, there were the students in their masks under the tents attentive and ready. And there were the professors, masked, with their voices gently spilling out from the tents. I don’t know. It gave me chills, because in some ways in the face of nature, all we have is culture. An assertion not of power, but of accumulated hope — hope passed down from one generation to the next across centuries. “This is what I know, this is what was given to me, and I hope that you will go further.”

In my last post on visceral perception, I pointed out the difficulty we have in placing these perceptions. They can appear to be free-floating; given or owned, rather than embedded. If our visceral perceptions are particularly difficult to place within our psyche’s maps, perhaps it might help to consider them as less a feature of a space and more as a type of compass. If our exteroceptive perception is like a bed, our interoceptive perceptions are the IKEA instructions on how to assemble the bed, clean the bed, sleep in the bed. Let’s unpack this idea.

We all know that our perception of taste is somehow “for” ingestion. Or to use the language I’ve been proposing: taste informs and constructs beliefs about sweetness, saltiness, sourness, and so forth. These beliefs mediate our navigation through a landscape of ingestible items. I write this while eating a chocolate walnut cookie and savoring the chalky, musky sweetness that I recognize as chocolate, a cultural artifact born of agriculture, fermentation and global supply chains. Similarly we recognize that our perception of touch relates to and constructs beliefs about comfort, warmth, safety, object qualities, and pain. In Harlow’s famous studies young monkeys preferred “surrogate mothers” that felt a particular way. Any of us that had a favorite blanket or stuffed animal as a kid, will remember that touch was a significant contributor to the safety that was experienced from the object. We know that our perception of vision concerns beliefs about distance, size, color, shape, and so forth.

Consider for example, the visual cliff experimental paradigm. Here, an animal (or young child) is placed on a small platform, a portion of which has a strong pattern covering its surface, and a portion of consists of a piece of plexiglass with the same pattern in view on the floor below. A caregiver stands on the other side of the plexiglass, and beckons for the animal / child to approach. The experimental paradigm has primarily been used to examine when perceptions of depth 1) develop and / or 2) when they relate to beliefs about safety. 

But notice what I did with each of my examples. Chocolate was not only tasted but “savored.” Touch did’t simply relate to texture but to “comfort.” And vision doesn’t simply perceive depth (itself a constructed belief), but also relate to feelings of “risk / safety.” Savoring, comfort, and risk — these are feelings, visceral perceptions that in one form or another layer on top of the world a personal sense of relative value.

So, let’s start bluntly and simply. What type of perception are feelings? They are the category of perceptions that relate to and construct our beliefs about value and arousal. 

Let’s get a bit clearer on terms. By value, here, I roughly mean valence or desirability of a perceived situation – the degree of pleasantness / unpleasantness. When something produces a perception that has a positive valence, then we “want” it. We “appreciate” it. We “enjoy,” “like,” “envy,” and / or “covet” it. Conversely, when we perceive a negative valence about a feature of the external world, we “hate” it. We find it “unpleasant,” “obnoxious,” “nasty” and / or “unsatisfying.” In either case we engage in behaviors that will maintain, protect and nurture features with a positive valence, and we engage in behaviors that eliminate, avoid, and alter features with a negative valence. 

Aside 1: By the way, dissatisfaction with the one’s self suggests that we perceive our selves as an external object much like we perceive a slice of cake as an object. There is the perception; and there is the feeling. Whether and when self-perception arises is a fascinating question. Does a child perceive itself as an external object amenable to alteration? Does an elephant or a dolphin? On the other hand, this says nothing about the emotional valence attached to the purported self (beyond self preservation). After all, one one of the tropes of adolescence is the emergence of a visceral perceptions of worth that layer value beliefs onto the self. It’s a complicated topic, but if you are interested start here, here, and here. For the purposes of this blog post, though, lets just recognize that the perception of a self is a separate perception than the visceral beliefs that we experience relative to that self. As ever, too, we should expect variation around these two categories of perception. Some aspects of sociopathy (i.e., antisocial personality disorder) and narcissistic personality disorder, for example, might suggest differences in certain normative, visceral perceptions of their selves (for Narcissism, for sociopathy ]

Back to our terms, though. If value refers to valence, to what does arousal refer?  Arousal refers to the relative energetic readiness of the individual. This readiness might be actual or expected. For example, we might find something incredibly enjoyable, but find ourselves simultaneously in a state of low arousal. Everything is finished and nothing needs to be done! Think of lying in a comfortable bed on a Saturday, knowing that you don’t have the day off, for example. Similarly, we might find something incredibly enjoyable, but find ourselves in a state of high arousal. Think being in the zone while playing basketball or jumping up and down at a live show or going on a rollercoaster. Conversely, we might feel a situation as unpleasant, while being mildly aroused. Think boredom or mild irritation directed at a housemate who forgot to pick up a requested item from the grocery store while out running errands. What though if the housemate regularly forgets to pick up requested items? Well here, the expected energetic output is going to be higher. After all it will take more energy to alter the situation. Irritation becomes anger. Or think of the anxiety connected with being unprepared for a talk that is a month away vs. the panic triggered by a dream in which you are unprepared for a talk that needs to be given in a few minutes (while only partially dressed, of course). 

Using the dimensions of value and arousal, psychologists have been somewhat successful in categorizing a broad array emotions. Here is a statistical map created by James Russell in 1980. I say statistical, because it is a map that provides the mathematically simplest categorization of 28 “emotional” terms. Essentially, subjects were asked to either rate the relative similarity of terms or, in this case, to position the terms on the edge of a circle. When this is done emotional categorizations tend to be well-described by the dimensions of arousal and value / valence. More recent work has found that these two dimensions are descriptive even when more objective measures of emotionality are used (e.g., skin conductance, fMRI’s, etc.)

So, one way of approaching visceral beliefs is to hypothesize that they are for value and anticipated arousal. We might say that they layer “meaning” on top of our exteroceptive perceptions, but we should be careful with our claims. Our exteroceptive perceptions are already “meaningful” in the sense that natural selection has designed us to be a species that sees, smells, and hears particular features in of the universe. We do not see magnetic fields or polarized light and we do not hear the ultrasonic calls of bats. Without tools to aid our perception, these features of the world have no “meaning” for our species. Similarly, we are designed to “feel” the world in a particular way. We value status and social belonging and hence perceive feelings that relate to these variables as “meaningful,” while a ferret, ant, or hawk might not. Our feelings (visceral beliefs) concerning social “anxiety” or “covetousness” or “validation” might be psychologically real, but they are ultimately as arbitrary as the color red. In other words, our interoceptive perception doesn’t add meaning so much as orient our selves to the meaning that natural selection has embedded within our psyches.

A Clarification of Terms

In my recent posts I have been using the term “feelings” as interchangeable with “visceral beliefs” and with “emotions.” Let’s be a bit more careful. I am using “feelings” in the colloquial sense as a placeholder for what someone might term emotions and drives. Emotions are perceptions that we label “happiness,” “sadness,” “jealousy,” “anger,” “depression,” “anxiety,” and so forth, while drives are perceptions that we label “hunger,” “thirst,” “lust,”etc. Personally, I think that there are good reasons to lump emotions and motivations into a single perceptual category.  I’m fully aware, though, that visceral “feelings” encompass many more phenomena than just emotions and motivations. For example, here is a “map of subjective feelings” produced by Nummenmaa et al (2018).

Dizziness, headaches, memorizing a list of terms, and daydreaming all possess particular visceral qualities – in other words, these sensations feel a particular way. The same goes for the sensation of forgetting something previously remembered. In their study, Nummenmaa et al suggest that these visceral feelings can be meaningfully categorized (using a variety of measures) and distinguished from other “feelings” such as anger and hunger. 

I don’t necessarily agree with Nummenmaa et al’s clustering and terminology, and I have issues with some of their methodology. For example, we’ll see in a few posts that “wanting” needs to be distinguished from “pleasure,” despite the fact that they are placed within a single cluster here. Also, the study crudely collapses the proprioceptive qualities of behaviors (e.g., eating, shivering, breathing) with language categorized, interoceptive qualities of visceral states (gratitude, despair, sympathy). However, the point of the Nummenmaa et al’s article is well-taken. Our psyches engage in quite a bit of visceral perception. In fact, on some level all perception is visceral, given that it is instantiated in the biology of our bodies. Those philosophers who would distinguish “feelings” from “rationality” would do well to consider whether rationality isn’t simply a particular state of feeling. Similarly, those moralists who would separate body from soul based on the subjective qualities of a “religious experience” would do well to remember that the subjective experience of a religious experience is housed in the body. This says nothing about the origins of those perceptions. If I see a UFO, then it is possible that I am seeing a legitimate alien craft, and if I feel touched by a god, it is possible that I have legitimately been touched by a god. On the other hand, these perceptions, though subjectively real, might be illusions, delusions, or the random firings of neurons during a dream.

For the purposes of the current set of blog posts, though, when I refer to “feelings,” I am using the terms as synonymous to “emotions” / “motivations.” And when I refer to “visceral beliefs,” or “visceral perception,” I am also referring to emotions / motivations. I am not simply using the term emotions, though, because my point is to anchor this concept within both perception and the body. Emotions are perceptions of the body – but not a body as a piece of meat, but a body as a nexus of evolutionary and contextual pressures.