It is difficult to believe that just under a year ago, the Mississippi State flag still incorporated elements of the Confederate flag. Almost 150 years after a civil war in which, yes, one side fought for the right to enslave and degrade fellow human beings, the symbols of such degradations were still being revered.
This and the photo below are taken from a three-part article entitled “The Ol Miss We Know: Wealthy alums fight to keep UM’s past alive” in the Mississippi Free Press. Read the whole thing! It’s a wonderful window into how large state universities placate the fragile, entitled egos of wealthy alums. This photo and the one below come from the University of Mississippi’s yearbook: 1958 and 1983, respectively.
This Radiolab story chronicles the fitful and emotional last gasps of a symbol – a state flag. It contains the perspective of a former colleague of mine, Kiese Laymon. A piece of cloth colored in a particular pattern. And yet, listen to the story of John Hawkins, the first Black cheerleader at Ol Miss. In 1982 John Hawkins refused the “tradition” of running out on to football fields carrying a Confederate flag. Innocuous. Reasonable. As John said in 1982:
While I’m an Ole Miss cheerleader, I’m still a black man. In my household, I wasn’t told to hate the flag, but I did have history classes and know what my ancestors went through and what the Rebel flag represents. It is my choice that I prefer not to wave one.
For this he received death threats. His college room was set on fire. He was kept at safe houses before football games where he was booed. The Klu Klux Kan staged a march, and a mob marched to and surrounded his fraternity.
A piece of cloth waved before the start of a game.
Or listen to the screaming of an adolescent white girl – who would go on to be a high school valedictorian — during a public referendum in 2001. Such forums were being held all around Mississippi as they “discussed” a referendum to remove confederate symbolism from the state flag.
Where would the slaves in America be today if it weren’t for slavery?” They’d probably still be in Africa enslaved. Or other European nations. Another person asked me to point out most — not all — of the African American race living in America today got their last name from their masters. Are you prepared to give up your name? I don’t think you are. Because if you get my flag I will get your name.
A piece of cloth.
And in its defense a young woman threatens a group in her community with an erasure of identity, as if that is not exactly what slavery entailed. Note the ownership and exclusion. “My flag.” “The African American race” who just happen to be “living in America today.”
For me, though, one of the most heartbreaking aspects of the Radiolab story is the contrast. As the reporters point out, the John Hawkins and Black attendees of the public referendums “dressed in their Sunday best” and spoke calmly and respectfully. In the end approximately 2/3 of those that voted on the referendum voted to keep flying symbols of enslavement over their fellow community members.
In 2014 Tamir Rice was shot by a white police officer – a Black boy with a toy gun in a park in Cleveland, and Eric Garner died after being choked by a white police officer for selling cigarettes in New York City. In 2015 nine Black worshipers were murdered in a church in Charleston by a white supremacist with a real gun. And on May 25, 2020, George Floyd was murdered by a white police officer whose knee pressed down on George Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. This is some of what it took for Mississippi to eventually change patterns on a piece of cloth.
Well, that and football. On June 20, 2020 the Southeast Conference announced that it would consider banning post-season athletic events from Mississippi if the flat was not changed. On June 22 Conference USA did the same, and on June 28 the Mississippi legislature finally voted to change the state flag, i.e., remove symbolism that pointed to the degradation and enslavement of fellow Mississippians.
The new state flag of Mississippi.
It’s easy to roll our eyes at the passion plays happening somewhere else. Of course, that “somewhere else” implies a privilege – the privilege of ignoring another’s history and choosing who counts and who doesn’t. “Somewhere else,” after all means “someone else.” Sure, there are sound reasons for choosing what to care about. Time is limited. Our resources are limited. We are all bounded, and such boundaries define our agency. And yet, history matters. It informs identity. It creates the social and environmental contingencies through which each of us navigates in the present. It is memory, and it is detritus, and it is a lens of perception – something that we cannot escape, however much we might wish to, and something which must be listened to and acknowledged in order to understand one another. To some extent Sophocles was right. We aren’t born free, and the furies are out there.
But so is grace.
After the Charleston church shootings, then President Obama gave a eulogy in front of the congregation. He spoke of grief. He spoke of courage. He sang. And he spoke, I would suggest, of new flags that needed planting.
According to the Christian tradition, grace is not earned. Grace is not merited. It’s not something we deserve. Rather, grace is the free and benevolent favor of God. As manifested in the salvation of sinners and the bestowal of blessings. Grace — as a nation out of this terrible tragedy, God has visited grace upon us for he has allowed us to see where we’ve been blind.
He’s given us the chance where we’ve been lost to find out best selves. We may not have earned this grace with our rancor and complacency and short-sightedness and fear of each other, but we got it all the same. He gave it to us anyway. He’s once more given us grace.
But it is up to us now to make the most of it, to receive it with gratitude and to prove ourselves worthy of this gift.
For too long, we were blind to the pain that the Confederate Flag stirred into many of our citizens.
It’s true a flag did not cause these murders. But as people from all walks of life, Republicans and Democrats, now acknowledge, including Governor Haley, whose recent eloquence on the subject is worthy of praise. As we all have to acknowledge, the flag has always represented more than just ancestral pride. For many, black and white, that flag was a reminder of systemic oppression, and racial subjugation.
We see that now.
Removing the flag from this state’s capital would not be an act of political correctness. It would not an insult to the valor of Confederate soldiers. It would simply be acknowledgement that the cause for which they fought, the cause of slavery, was wrong.
The imposition of Jim Crow after the Civil War, the resistance to civil rights for all people was wrong.
It would be one step in an honest accounting of America’s history, a modest but meaningful balm for so many unhealed wounds.
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.”
These are our visceral perceptions — a Compass Rose, tuned not to the earth’s magnetic fields and rotation, but to value (or need or fitness) and arousal “Compass Rose Prague” by Mark Morgan Trinidad B is licensed under CC BY 2.0
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.
Does the child perceive depth? Does the child fear the perceived cliff? We know that visual perception is for one of these. But where does the fear come from? What is the origins of its perception? “File:NIH visual cliff experiment (cropped).png” by From Gibson and Walk (1960). Copyright 1960 Nature Publishing Group. is licensed under CC BY 4.0
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 ]
From Reiss and Marino (2001). Figure 4 with caption as follows: “Mark-directed behavior by subject to a real mirror immediately after release from being marked. A narrow Plexiglas mirror, 41.9 cm × 101.6 cm × 0.32 cm is affixed in a vertical orientation to the exterior of one of the reflective walls (Wall 6). During this session, the mirror was the best reflective surface in the subject’s environment. The faint white line on the wall indicates the location of mirror. (B) The dolphin at Wall 1, the best reflective surface in the session, exhibiting late sham-directed behavior: a continuous and repetitive sequence of 12 dorsal-to-lateral-ventral flips exposing the location of the sham-marked area of his body, the underside and tip of the right pectoral fin, to the reflective surface. This unusual behavioral sequence continued for 32 sec.”
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).
From Russell (1980) Figure 2. This is a best-fit interpretation of subjects rating the relative similarity of the listed emotion terms.
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).
From Nummenmaa et al (2018). Figure 2. In the analytical vernacular, this figure is given by both an average distance analysis and a cluster analysis. Colored points indicate statistically significant clusters (grey being non-clustered or neutral.
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.
Emotions are a form of perception. They are sensations that provide information about the external world, and as perception they are also beliefs about the external world – albeit beliefs that I have been terming “visceral.” So, let’s keep trying to get a handle on how visceral percepts are different from those connected with sight, smell, etc. In this post I’m going to highlight what is known as the assignment of credit problem.
This is a photo of me and my daughters back in 2000 on a trip to Italy. Some of us are travel tired. Some of us are smiling for the camera. And some of us are asking “wuzzat!”
When my daughters were little, around 2-3 years old, I used to carry them on my shoulders while walking down the sidewalk. With their head perched just next to mine, they would often point out at something and say, “Wuzzat?” “A trash can.” “Wuzzat?” “A porch.” “Wuzzat?” “A doggie.” “Wuzzat?” “Ummmm…” What is the word for the structure that supports a swing at the playground?
I bring this story up, because we usually think that our thoughts and behavior are a direct response to the world. We see a red wheelbarrow, we point at it, we name it, we approach it, and lift its handles. We hear a sound to our left, and we turn our eyes to see the friend that has just called out to us. We smell fresh bread, and walking into the kitchen, find a loaf just out of the oven. In other words, our perceptions allow us to build maps of reality…maps that we trust as somewhat true. Yes, artists and philosophers have famously pointed out that these maps are not equivalent to reality — that they merely represent reality. Pointing at the wheelbarrow, whether by word, image or gesture, is not the same as the wheelbarrow, itself. Nonetheless, these mappings contain a high degree of confidence. The image of a pipe is not the pipe, but it is contains a high degree of “pipe”-ness.
This painting by Henri Magritte is justifiably famous as it succinctly makes the point that representations are not the things, themselves. The painting of the pipe contains features of a pipe — color, shadings, etc. — but it is not an actual pipe. Similarly, the percept that our mind registers is also not an actual pipe. It is a belief in pipes — that they exist, have been experienced, have certain qualities, etc. A very simple observation, but one that bears “keeping in mind.” Now, imagine applying the same logic to our emotions. To what do they point? “Le Trahison des Images – Rene Magritte” bydailymatador is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0
Emotions, though, don’t quite work this way.
Imagine hearing a sound to your left, someone calling your name. “Mark!” You turn your head to the left, but don’t see anyone. The room is empty. You hear your name called again, though. “Mark!” So, you get up and go over to the nearby table. Is there a speaker here? No. “Mark!” You look under the table; you look up into the lampshade; you tap the side of your head a few times; you press your ear up against a wall. …Nothing. “Mark!”
This is closer to how our feelings call out to us, and it is an important difference between “normal perception” – vision, hearing, smell, etc. — and the perceptions that we term “feelings” – hunger, pain, happiness, fear, disgust, and so on. Namely, if you see a red wheelbarrow among the chickens, you can walk over to it and touch it, measure it, draw it. The red object that you see comes from and is caused by the reality of the wheelbarrow. What though of the feelings that you register? What are their origins? Why are they happening? Do they belong to me?
Bethel, Ohio 3000 years ago? Actually, it is Agamemnon and Achilles riled up and ready to come to blows. Agamemnon will claim that his actions were not his, but rather the result of spiritual possession, i.e., inconvenient emotions. This image is a mosaic uncovered in Pompei and is in the public domain. Original mosaic housed at the Naples Museum.
There is in fact a long history of denying that feelings belong to the individual. Here is a famous passage from Homer’s Iliad that captures this externalizing of emotions. Agamemnon, the main chieftain of the Greek forces, in a fit of jealousy has taken for himself a war prize (i.e., the woman, Briseis) that “rightfully belongs” to Achilles. In response Achilles has taken his warriors and refused to participate on the battlefield. In this passage, Agamemnon and Achilles are reconciled, with Agamemnon blaming his actions on emotions planted in him by Zeus, Erinys and Ate.
Full often have the Achaeans spoken unto me this word, and were ever fain to chide me; howbeit it is not I that am at fault, but Zeus and Fate and Erinys, that walketh in darkness, seeing that in the midst of the place of gathering they cast upon my soul fierce blindness on that day, when of mine own arrogance I took from Achilles his prize. [90] But what could I do? It is God that bringeth all things to their issue. Eldest daughter of Zeus is Ate that blindeth all—a power fraught with bane; delicate are her feet, for it is not upon the ground that she fareth, but she walketh over the heads of men, bringing men to harm, and this one or that she ensnareth.
In other words, Agamemnon is suggesting that the conflicted state that caused his actions — the pride he felt in himself, and the jealousy he felt toward Achilles –originated from the gods. The emotional turbulence is not owned by him; it does not represent him; but rather was imposed on him by outside forces.
This is actually a pretty common attitude. Here is another passage taken from a work some 1,700 years later. Hamlet (Act V, Scene ii). In the passage, Hamlet is preparing to duel with Laertes, the son of a man that Hamlet has earlier mistakenly murdered in a fit of paranoid, antic rage. Prior to the duel, Hamlet publicly asks Laertes for forgiveness. However, he does so by essentially pleading insanity.
And you must needs have heard, how I am punish’d With sore distraction. What I have done, That might your nature, honour and exception Roughly awake, I here proclaim was madness. Was’t Hamlet wrong’d Laertes? Never Hamlet: If Hamlet from himself be ta’en away, And when he’s not himself does wrong Laertes, Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it. Who does it, then? His madness: if’t be so, Hamlet is of the faction that is wrong’d; His madness is poor Hamlet’s enemy.
Hamlet’s understanding of his own emotions is essentially no different from Agamemnon’s. It’s the “I don’t know what came over me,” or the “it wasn’t me, it was the alcohol speaking.” It’s what will lead philosophers to place feelings and emotions outside of reason. Animals might possess emotions, but we humans are capable of reasoning…except when those pesky animalistic emotions get in the way.
Feelings, though, are simply another type of perception. We don’t say that vision or taste is somehow animalisitic. We simply accept that vision and taste are processes that help us construct and relate to the external world. Feelings are no different.
Except they are.
Imagine that when my daughters pointed out at the world and exclaimed, “Wuzzat,” imagine if I, their father, could not directly see what they were pointing at. “Wuzzat?” …pain? …hunger? …sadness? I don’t have direct access to their perception, so in this situation, I would have to ask for more information and make an educated guess. Is it coming from your belly? Your foot? Does this help? Does that? In other words, feelings, i.e., visceral perception, are different from other types of perception in that they harder to localize within a Euclidean, causal space. A ball leaves a bat and flies through the air in a particular trajectory. We see this trajectory; we hear the connection of the bat with the ball; we sense the tactile impact of the ball hitting a glove. And yet, just describing this trajectory took years of effort by physicists. But what is the trajectory of an emotion? That sadness or happiness or anxiety or anger? What are it’s contours? In what space does it reside? What is really causing it and what forces bend its coursings?
Ceci n’est pas une emotion. I say that jokingly…sort of. The point is that the representation of interoceptive perceptions is not at all straight forward. Spoken language, after all, involves exteroceptive cues. Written language exteroceptive cues. What is the appropriate language for translating emotions? Photo is of a sculpture, “Composite Wing” by Jon Shearin, which is part of the Art on Main Exhibit in Chattanooga, TN
In psychology, this ambiguity of cause is sometimes referred to as the “assignment of credit” problem. The assignment of credit problem is a mapping problem. At any given moment perception offers up a cacophony of inputs. Depending on a task, our psychological filters remove dampen and discard certain inputs, magnify others, behaviors occur, and the world changes. The assignment of credit problem has to do with the psyche’s task of determining need, determining cause, and determining a path that satisfies need. What exactly caused the world to change? What inputs were relevant? What is the shape of the closet in which you are placing the hangers of your belief?
There are many classic experiments in psychology that get at the assignment of credit problem. Importantly, though, and relevant to understanding the landscape of visceral perception, psyches rarely simply guess. Rather, animals come into the world with particular biases. [1] Rats shocked after drinking flavored water while lights are flickering, will “assume” that the flickering lights are the cause of their pain. But rats made nauseous after drinking flavored-tasting water while lights are flickering will “assume” that the taste is the cause of their distress. (Garcia & Koelling, 1966. See this article for a description and some general applications.). [2] Male college students asked to complete a survey by a young woman on a high footbridge are much more likely to call that woman later, than if she approached them on a low footbridge. The most accepted explanation is that on the high bridge, the young men “assume” that their anxious arousal is caused by the woman, rather than by the bridge height. (Dutton & Aron, 1974. The phenomenon is often termed “misattribution of arousal,” and is the reasoning behind the folklore notion of taking a date to a scary movie or to an amusement park as a means of getting them to “like you.”
For the purposes of this blog post, though, let’s just appreciate how much guessing our psyches engage in. Or if not guessing, then biased cartography. For the rat, either or both light and taste could be the cause of their discomfort. But the “space” in which this visceral perception exists causes nausea to be ascribed to taste and shocks to be ascribed to visual cues. There was no choice on the part of the rat. No reasoning. A visceral perception appeared from nowhere and the psyche attributed it to a particular antecedent. Spiritual possession, then, or natural selection? And of course, in both cases the rat is wrong. The nausea is not related to taste, and the pain is not related to flickering lights. These connections are an illusion created by the experimenter. Nonetheless, the feelings are undoubtedly real for our poor rat and exist to inform the animal of characteristics of the environment and actions that impact these characteristics.
By the way, this notion of biased cartography is captured in psychology by notion of a “rule of thumb” or psychological “heuristic”. For example, items that we can more readily remember are felt to be more probable. This is termed the “availability heuristic” and influences the judgement that getting on an airplane is riskier than getting in a car. First of all, we get in cars much more often than we get on airplanes, and second, we are more likely to have read about airline accidents than car accidents. Therefore, the “availability” of a memory of an accident is higher when getting on a plane than when getting in a car. Or as another example, losses elicit more arousal (i.e., “feeling”) than equivalent gains, which leads us to avoid losses and demand more for items in our possession than what we paid for them ourselves. I might feel that pen is worth $1.00 when you have it, but feel like I should receive $1.50 when it’s mine. This is known as the endowment effect.
The endowment effect, the availability heuristic, and other seemingly structural mental short-cuts all relate to the assignment of credit problem. Our visceral perceptions are something like phantoms in a house of mirrors, apparently free-floating and existing only to confuse the clarity of “true,” “rational” perception. And yet there is a form to the space in which they reside. A structured supply chain built up by natural selection in the same way that vision has been built up by natural selection. That emotional vigilance you feel? Well, it might be love or it might be fear. As with vision, natural selection and your individual experience will step in to help you make the bet.
First ever image of a black hole. This single image involved the collaboration of astronomers across multiple continents, language groups, and cultures. It involved analytical and technological frameworks developed across generations. Credit: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration
As a psychologist I sometimes experience despair about the human condition. Our species is capable of imagining possibilities beyond the capabilities of any other species on the planet. Of this there is no doubt. I say this as someone who studies comparative cognition and is well-aware that non-human animals have mental capabilities that generally exceed our expectations (e.g., see here, here, here, and here). That said, we humans are extreme in our capabilities. Indeed, for all we know, our imaginations exceed anything in the universe. We can imagine a telescope lens with the diameter of the planet and use it to create a photo of a black hole 53 million light years away. (By the way, here is an explanation of why the image matches general predictions.) Heck, we can imagine that black holes exist in the first place. We can construct narratives that guide the application of pigments to the Sistine Chapel. We can control the flow of electrons and electromagnetic waves so that words appear on a computer screen and our garage doors open with the press of a button. And we can imagine an ethics that centralizes healing, sustainability and human dignity and we can strive to use this ethics as the organizing principle for our behavior. These are some of the things that our species has shown itself to be capable of.
And yet recently folks around the U.S. were claiming that the corona virus is a hoax and were going on ANTIFA witch hunts. Here, is a bus belonging to a bunch of hippies being impounded by police out of “ANTIFA paranoia.” The owners of the bus did nothing but peacefully show up to help BLM demonstrators. And here is a U.S. senator, who should know better, cravenly joining in on the hysteria. It’s easy to laugh at this sort of silliness. Except that when laughter meets violence, violence tends to win. Consider Bethel, Ohio on June 14, 2020. After a group decided to hold a march in solidarity with national Black Lives Matter protests, biker gangs and others descended on the town.
Sunday’s protest, billed as Bethel’s Solidarity with Black Lives Demonstration, was expected to have a turnout of 80 to 100 people. But soon, per a joint statement by the village’s mayor, chief of police and administrator, “several motorcycle gangs, back the blue groups, and second amendment advocates” caught wind of the event and decided to show up, armed with guns and bats. An hour before the event was scheduled to begin, village officials said, 250 motorcycles flooded the area. By the protest’s official start time, the demonstrators were outnumbered and around 800 people were present. Link to Story
Guns and bats to “counter” a march in support of basic human dignity. Why? Or for that matter, why almost 100 years ago did a mob of white residents rage through Tulsa, Oklahoma in a pogrom of racial murder and burnings? Why 23 years before that did almost the same thing take place in Wilmington, NC – a white supremacist coup d’etat that saw the murder and expulsion of black residents from the community?
This image is a screen capture taken from someone filming a portion fo the Bethel protest / counter-protest. It appears to show a crowd of “bikers” that have confronted a woman. After back and forth shoving, she is punched to the ground. Original video here.
I’d be the last person to claim that there are easy answers to these questions. At the same time, though, it’s imperative that we at least look for answers. In this post I’ll consider the possibility that part of what’s going on is related to our emotional perceptions and how they influence our explicit reasoning and behavior.
As I’ve pointed out in previous posts our beliefs about the world are constructed as a set of interlocking maps – maps that at a neurological level describe supply chains of assembly, but also maps at the psychological level that describe the construction and association of our perceptual beliefs with potential actions and outcomes. If I “see” an object to be a particular size, then I prepare actions to interact with the object in a particular way. Similarly, if I “see” a group of individuals as a threat to my community, then I will prepare a set of actions to interact with that threat. In both cases, my perception might be incorrect. The object might not be the size I perceive it to be. The perceived threat might not exist. The problem, of course, is that the origins of our beliefs – be they feelings or visual arrays – are often opaque to us. Further, we cannot simply wish our perceptions away. To hark back to the famous yellow / blue dress – if you see the dress as blue, you cannot simply wish to see it as yellow. Similarly, if you feel an emotion, you cannot simply wish that emotion away. Perception does not work this way.
I have suggested that perception IS belief. This is true of our classic five senses, but it is also true of visceral perceptions like hunger, vertigo, anger, depression, anxiety, and so on. These visceral perceptions are visceral beliefs. When I “feel” hungry, I believe that I am hungry. When I “feel” angry, I believe that I am angry.
One of the yawning holes to be filled in psychology, though, stems from the poverty of tools we possess for understanding visceral beliefs. We might be able to take our telescope out and see Jupiter. We can measure its contours, take a photo, and describe its colors. We can read about its moons and how radiation and gravity from the planet rips at Europa. A feeling, though. What is it, exactly? What are its dimensions? How does it fit into the landscape of the psyche? On to what does it map? How does it behave? It’s as if we’ve been given the keys to a machine that can kill us, but we don’t know which buttons and levers do what.
Or, to switch metaphors and broaden the scope, the psychological science of emotions is akin to being a meteorologist 200 years ago. An individual, a community, and a country have emotional systems that roil and impact the social landscape. Like a weather map of cold fronts and storms, visceral beliefs converge, dissipate, and ravage, but also like weather visceral beliefs are predictable. We just don’t know enough. In this sense “guns and bats” are less “crazy” than sadly predictable. As are massacres, degradations, and brutality. Our tools for seeing, measuring and mitigating these storms is at its infancy, which is ironic given the relative importance for understanding this sort of perception as compared to, say, understanding how our sense of color comes about.
So, let’s spend of moment to unpack a few ways that our visceral perceptual system, i.e., our feelings, are unique relative to our more well-known perceptual systems. I’m going to just pull out three attributes: assignment-of-credit, valuation, and the role feelings play in post-hoc reasoning.
Ringing the bells in Prague after 9/11. I grabbed the photo in 2001, and I am not sure of the source.
I’ll get back to the psychology of “feelings” soon. In the meantime, here is an Easter interlude.
When the Trade Center Towers came down in 2001, I was living in Konstanz, Germany. I was up at the lab at Uni Konstanz. A sunny afternoon, and I was checking the New York Times site like I did most afternoons. There it was: a breaking story of a plane that had accidentally collided with one of the towers. I remember it as just a headline, but after a refresh there was a photo with a hole and smoke. Then the site slowed to a crawl, and apprehension set in, followed by the reveal of a photo showing that the second tower had been hit. That’s when I left the lab and rode my bike back home to be with my then wife and my daughters. There we huddled to watch the news on the television. The images of falling bodies. The gaping holes vomiting smoke. Another sudden jet crashing into the Pentagon in D.C., a scramble of reports about additional attacks, additional planes, firefighters rushing up stairwells, and the scrambling of military jets. And then, one after another, the two towers fell.
As much as I remember the vulnerability, shock, and fear for my young daughters, what I also remember is the immediate solidarity in the days that followed of ordinary strangers. German colleagues and students who checked in on me and my family. The city-wide moment of silence. The flowers left at embassies. The candle-light vigils. The tolling of bells.
Munich, Germany after 9/11 2001. Also an unknown source.
Over the years, Easter for me has come to signify an acknowledgment of sacrifice in the service of healing and renewal. It’s the doctors, nurses and healthcare workers who have thrown themselves into the breach of the COVID-19 pandemic. The parents and grandparents who cared for us when we were children, washing our clothes, wiping our noses, and massaging tightened calves in the middle of the night. Friends who have helped in moves. The ordinary workers in Konstanz, Germany who took a moment to stand quietly at noon in solidarity with those hurt and killed an ocean away in the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Easter celebrates these behaviors: small, often betrayed, but load bearing. This after all was the soil of Christ’s ministry: the peacemakers, the persecuted outcasts, the mourners, the ordinary. And the lesson of Easter is that despite the mocking humiliations of the powerful — the taunts of “Freedom Fries” and “Old Europe” or the resistance to covering the medical bills of first responders — despite these attempts to silence and punish and deaden, the spring soil will continue to answer the sun’s call.
This particular poem I wrote as a sort of Easter mosaic, and it is dedicated to a couple, Juan and Ute Delius, who showed my family tremendous kindness when we lived in Germany.
Lazarus
(For Juan and Ute)
1.
Draw thread through skin
numb &
engraved in winter.
The grief-sung vertebrae
of wind
chimes at night,
the
ululations of church bells
over field and
orchard — once
pear, plum,
wheat and apple.
Come, then, senescence and hum
your metal.
That sing-songgestern caught gaunt and callow
like moths
circling the harbinger of heaven,
like
constellations sirened numbly forward —
a music of
nets in which the dolphins thrash
when the lines
are drawn in, anchored, and pulled tight.
2.
This heft of enwrapped waters,
draw upon
convenient draw,
caught trumpet
of consciousness
liquored like a
dog at its wounds
or the way
the white wake
of a plane,
far above,
silently streams,
spreads and splays.
A depth that contains the
scattered flurry of vision,
arranged like
pastels haphazard in the box.
The cargo of a former life carried
elsewhere,
memories resting
like water in the pitted roads
where birth
gives way to the night-time swarms,
the jazz of corruption
begat from reflected heaven’s breeding.
3.
Each moment tapped,
pregnant and
fitted,
as if laying
stone
to make a
road.
So many eyes staring
like a
peacock’s bloom,
an exchange of
wild flowers for a
a sunset
spread red as wine
Produce
in the church square
Potatoes Carrots and Apples
Kilo weights, raw and cold
Flesh from the butcher
sliced and
jointed, jointed and drawn.
4.
Too sweet for some,
Like a custard’s breath –
hard in learning,
awkward in fact.
Unbecoming’s active pursuit
like a pole to the shadow
cast —
an anchored
still to the sun’s pass,
that cloth
that wipes over and over.
Over the ever-opportune
weeds that burst,
yes, burst
forth into their calling –
a pack of
girls keen to see
upon whom the
glance will fall.
5.
Yes, with bracken
grows
nettle.Wrappers
and peels.
The plastic cups.
Gravy,
puddings, ketchup.
Cars and trucks,
and cars and
trucks,
and trucks
and trucks.
24 7, death she moans this rush,
planted heavily
and sucking breath,
while the three
ladies, their buttocks sway
the gospel of
fate, a necessity bellowed out,
rough ropes in
hand, with each pull and release –
thus, they
frog-grunt their imprints of industry.
6.
Tongue-tasted,
coins swallowed
and the
candle lit.
Night ember, social safe
and tucked in
bed.
Now cargoed
purpose sleeps,
The tethered morning chorus
guarded and
groomed, mulched and clipped.
String of fate and string of
rescue, spooled
and strung to
where the delivery trucks come,
to where the
workers call at the dock —
those many
voices of dying, calling and calling
in their
approach to the maze’s bloated point.
7.
This,
night’s new year.
A cast of sparks —
And then, percussive born.
And the bells beat.
And the bells beat
more flares of
midnight
crackling out light
Roosted buildings, cobbled street.
Hollowed.Inverted.
Explosive
moments.
Distant reports
For a city that wrestles drunkenly
forth
in answer to
the fireworks from across the water.
8.
Red among
yellow.
Red among
green.
Sailboats laid
upon the lake
hot air
balloons above
the distant
mountains
roaring fire and
straining at ascent.
How loss becomes heartbeat
swaddled in such
feminine hands.
How familiar dawn, stray thread
comes
with the
strangled raucous of crows,
hop-hopping,
and lifted up
into the trees
that buckle the graveyard’s fence.
Your eyes have been pocketed
across an ocean of desire
bilk and seepage with the
risen. Again, Lazarus, rise.
