Category: Psychology

The Qualia of Grief

Emotions, like any category of perception, are not unitary things. Let’s hold up grief. We use the word “grief” to describe a state that has a range of causes and functions. Discombobulated tears might accompany the death of a loved one, or appear for a parent during a child’s wedding. They might occur when one is alone, or they might occur only when surrounded by others. And a psychologist would use these differences to suss out the causes and functions of grief. Is it a behavior that strengthens social relationships? Does it prune painful memories via an associative process? Is it a by-product of a homeostatic process? Does it follow a regular time course. Does it follow culturally bound display rules? 

This is the science of grief where there is no single “grief” in the same way that vision does not exist to perceive a single object. There are depths, shapes and colors — all actively working away within the nest of vision. So it is with emotions. They are collectives, not singular things, to which the buzzing of science (itself a collective) applies iteself, bending the universe towards a place of prediction and control. The logical. The rational. The process-oriented.

But is that all there is? Does that miss anything of value? 

There is a reason why the logical, rational, and process-oriented approach of science feels so alien in relation to our emotions. To feel is to live, after all. “Are you a robot or a human being?” Emotions are just processes. Emotions are just functional states. True. …And? Isn’t there more to be said? Are they not also something felt? Don’t they possess a qualia? They are how we know we breathe, these feelings. They are how we know we are awake, are headed towards purpose. So, what would death be, but an absenting of all feeling? 

Again, let’s hold up grief, because if anything stands in opposition to the void, it is grief — that assertion of the unique living moment, or friend, or future, or loved one, or self, in the face of loss. It is the bulwark against the contaminating encroachment of dissipation and mere time. There is a reason why it shares so many qualities with disgust, another emotion centered on the purging of poisons. Grief purges, but within a different digestive realm, the realm of the historically accumulated, subjective self, the subjective identity layered as an associative thicket. 

With that in mind, I’m going to take a slightly different approach with this post. To try and consider grief on its own terms. Not pinned down in a scrapbook. Not to make a point, or rather yes, to make a point, but in the same way that the emotions that reside within us make their points: indirectly, lyrically, and laid out like the tesserae of a mosaic. It is ironic that I am going to use words to do this, because the language of emotions is not that of words. There is a reason why emotions and music reside conceptually together rather than emotions and language. But we use the tools we have. 

***

So, what does grief tell us — that feeling of convulsions and dry heaves when the world sleeps, and a voice (your voice) blurts out, “No! No, no, no, no, no, …” It is as if identity itself were a corporal force intent on the impossible — an expulsion of absence. The self again and again convulsed and emptied. Emptied yet again. Gasps and then being crumpled into a respite, only to be convulsed and drawn fetally to the floor once more. It is a feeling more complete than any after-party black out. Except here it isn’t a stomach’s attempt to empty out poison, but the body coming to the rescue of mind — it’s the body’s hand reaching into the mind’s darkness to pull out that which is missing. Grabbing and clenching it scrapes away for a thing that can’t be found, shuddering as the breaches appear again, and again. 

When I was younger I thought that there was only one way to turn grief into meaning — that grief had but one act. The solution was to cordon it off from language and lock it down. To express trauma was to belittle it. To express grief would be to dissect “it” (that necessary “it”) from the body, and wound’t this just compound loss with but another loss? Unspoken, at the very least, the necessary presence could remain, in the same way that the ink of an etching carries in it the impression of the now-absent wood. It is the room left unchanged when the children go off to college. It is Iago at the end of Othello declaring that from this point forward he will say nothing. A defiant flag planted as an ode to darkness — that shadowed landscape in which motivations and their contingent wreckage have no comprehension or sense within the breath of living. The burned images left behind after the bombs took away the living. There is that. At least there is that. A preserved totem pointing to an empty chair. To speak would be to share, and to share would be to re-experience loss by handing it over to others who can only nod, and mm-hmm, and then eerily go about their own busy lives. As eerily as robots. Here, at least, kept within the shadows they remain, ever pointing to that which was lost.

Within that refusal there is a type of purity, or a solitary imprint of purity crystalized against the tides of convenience. That is is the purpose of each convulsion. The loss will stay within, and to carry those remains, space must be made. All must be jettisoned, hollowed, and extracted. To do otherwise is to lose even more, and to lose is to no longer be. Holding on to the emptied space within is existential. As the mind laments, the body comes to the fore.

“Breathe taking.” We use the phrase to describe an encounter with that which defies language — those bones thrown out as augury when the stars and darkness impose their weight. Maybe it is the way her form once weighted itself next to you. Maybe it was the bump of shoulders on a walk in the woods. Maybe it was the furniture to be assembled and placed within the living room of a future. Maybe it was a voice — that voice — her voice — doing a silly sing-song over the telephone. “Breath taking.”

Maybe this why you gasp and shudder. A body plunging into the dark water where all else is silenced in the long sub-surface swim. The body holds its breath in the only pontomine of living that remains. At least it is something. Words? They are not breath taking. The are breath giving. A camera set back in motion. The house sold to a new family. The furniture replaced. Bulldozers brought in to build a subdivision where the orchard once spread. The large trucks arriving to cart off the detritus to time’s indiscriminate heap.

Words? They are slippery, changeable things. Breath held? This is grief’s first act. Give me silence of such weight that the  record skips and the earth ceases its turning. Time grinds to a halt to a point where loss can have no meaning. The images remain. The voices remain. They will remain.

***

When I was in my 20’s the book The English Patient made an impression on me. The title character was burnt beyond recognition – his only identity held within the echoes of Herodotus’ Histories. Its pages interleaved by his own clipped and glued additions and added observations. In the book, his is the negated vortex — an intensity existing solely within its essential absence.

Give me a map and I’ll build you a city. Give me a pencil and I will draw you a room in South Cairo, desert charts on the wall. Always the desert was among us. But… our room never appears in the detailed reports which chartered every knoll and every incident of history. (p. 145)

The English Patient is a “breath taking” book. That is its gravitational center – the collapsed weight of a grief so total that nothing now remains but the husk of this patient now restricted and compartmentalized to a hospital bed while the battle lines of WW 2 pass forward and into the distance. Detritus, that is the English  Patient. A book centered on the unpacking of a loss — which is grief — but it is also a book of the singular individual still there, alive in a hospital bed — a tangle of words that leave behind the dewed webs of morning and no spider found. Because grief is not for the generic, but the particular. And how can we account for the particular but through words?

You used to be like those artists who painted only at night, a single light on in their street. Like the worm-pickers with their old coffee cans strapped to their ankles and the helmet of light shooting down into the grass (English Patient, p. 55).

Yes, it is a dilemma. There is indeed a noble purity in grief’s first act. There is a beautiful rebellion. A refusal to give in to the “decay” and the loss of the valued particular — that  single entity made possible by her, by him, by this. There is a courageous refusal in grief to bend to the universe’s authority by letting go of the now-gone. Grief is Hamlet’s declaration that he will hold on to that which is more than, purer than, and more essential than the “windy suspiration of forced breath.”

Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief, that can denote me truly. these indeed seem. …But I have that which passes show. (Act 1, Scene 2)

To hold on to that purity, Hamlet will famously refuse to act. And that is the endpoint of grief’s first act. 

***

Here is “Hamlet” contacting the real estate agent weeks after being told that the woman he had built his life around needed another man. She wants Hamlet, she tells him, but needs to do this for herself. So, why then is he visiting the real estate agent? What delusion is he holding on to? 

Here is “Hamlet” making a picnic – crackers, cheeses, frois gras, and cold drinks to take on a hike that is the agreed upon first-time-in-a-month. They have been practicing distance and limiting calls — being friends. So why the picnic? Because the next day is the Qixi Festival. He won’t say that he knows, and in their chatting… their perfectly friendly chatting, it is never mentioned, neither by him, nor by her. He doesn’t want to ask if she knows. He doesn’t want to hear that she might not.

Here is “Hamlet” purchasing two tickets to see a show in a month. He is alone at home now, and she lets him know that she is seeing another. She tells him that she’s sorry. Again, and again she uses that word. And he does hear it, and he does understand. She means what she says. There is no malice. But it is a form of grief that makes him buy those two tickets — the phantom limb still felt when the eyes alight on absence. Except, how can it still be grief when grief was once his act of defiance — the dark grip tightened against dissolution?

Now it begins to sink in to poor “Hamlet” that his acts of defiance are less an assertion, and more a dissipation. The held-on-absence now eating at the holder. A Polaroid slowly bleaching itself back into a void. His acts have now become an emptying of self, not a protection of the other’s purity.

“Wasn’t grief’s gold,” he asks no one, “to hold on defiantly to the unique against contingency’s encroachment? Wasn’t it that heroic insistence that denoted me truly?”

Yes.

A simple whisper now, grief.

Yes.

But that was only the beginning, dear Hamlet.

If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart
Absent thee from felicity awhile
and in this harsh world draw thy
breath in pain to tell my story. (Act 5, Scene 2)

Here we see “breath taking” giving way to “breath giving.” The importation from grief (Hamlet) to speak. The graved object granted a new living. Awkwardly at first. Breath held for so long must begin with gasps — the faces of the audience perplexed. But the attempt must be made or else that which has been lost, will only sink with the swimmer.

Read him slowly dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did… Think about tithe speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old paragraph its is otherwise (English Patient, p 94).

Yes.

In the suspirations of weeping one will find grief’s second act. The curtain slowly rising to reveal the actor returning to account. A calling of the nightingale against the eternal slumber.

***

Once Upon a Time

Once upon a time…

Once upon a time from outside the window, far below the cricket players set up their pitch. And the commuter train rattled out its clockwork. She was this. To him she was this; as well as birds in the wood and water that spilled over moss-covered rocks next to a hiked path. She was the dusk view from the fire tower and the scramble back to a car as darkness settled. She was breath taking and breath giving. Words. And words, and words, and words passed back and forth between them, sitting on the carpeted floor with a spread of dishes, and faces inches away, and in the passenger seat of a road trip, and disembodied while carried over the Pacific ocean, bouncing between satellites.

Once a blizzard thickened over the highway, and they slowly retreated their increasingly helpless car to a small parking lot. And there they sat. A thickening of specked white on the windshield and windows. The flashing light of bulldozers clearing the lots of the nearby stores. Until they decided to risk it, together, white knuckled and attuned to every slip, every utterance, every turn and dip. From her phone she declared, “We just need to make it another mile, and then it should clear.” And later, hours later, while walking the bricks of a city street, they would feel connected and impressed by what they had come through together. 

So it was. It was always a hunt with these two. Returning to a neighborhood to look for the black cat with white paint it its fur. Entering a phone booth in search of the secret entrance of a speakeasy. Once the correct number was dialed, a back door opened to reveal bookcases stacked high up to a ceiling, cushioned chairs, and candles. And there were ciphers and scavenger hunts that began with Tarot cards and ended with a gifted pair of socks hidden in a lab’s operant chamber. And maybe that, indeed, is a story worth telling. A ridiculous, wonderful story.

For, once upon a time… 

It was her birthday, and they traveled into the nearby city. She wore a new dress that sparkled and he wore a tie. And through a window, the stacked lights of the buildings stood like trees. And later in the nighttime they hurried across the city to catch the last train, running through throngs in the station, holding hands and laughing. And when the train’s doors closed, and seated, they weighted against one another as the compartment rocked and clacked the two of them, and, the other tired revelers, who when the station arrived, dispersed themselves breathless and breath-filled into a summer evening.

Emotions as compass

Outdoor teaching tents are a kind of defiance.

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 as Possession

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.

The Iliad, Samuel Butler Translation at Tufts Perseus

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 from the Complete Works of Shakespeare housed at MIT

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.

This is a loaded dice from Medieval London. The image shows the six sides. Good luck getting a 1, 2 or 3! Our visceral perceptions exist in a similar, biased landscape. Best guesses being assembled that map “need” to cause to action.
“File:A late Medieval to Post Medieval bone cuboid false dice dating 15th-16th century. (FindID 872260).jpg” by The Portable Antiquities Scheme, Stuart Wyatt, 2017-10-30 14:26:13 is licensed underCC BY 2.0

Emotions as Weather

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.

Weather or emotional conflagration?
“Chicago Weather Center radar: Aug. 23, 2011” by Amy Guth is licensed underCC BY 2.0

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.

Maps, not modules

Among certain psychologists, there is a belief that the mind is composed of “modules” that have been designed by evolution to account for very specific tasks. This kind of thinking has also been linked to the assertion that the mind is a computer, resulting in the natural rhetorical extension that “modules” are essentially equivalent to the “apps” we have on our phones. Just as your digital device has apps for banking, socializing, navigating, and finding restaurants, your mind has “modules” for tracking resources, socializing, and foraging, or so the argument goes. My own approach to and training in psychology is highly comparative and mechanistic. So, I am sympathetic to the “brain = computer, mind as modules” approach to psychology. I don’t think it is correct, though.

Let’s think this through – and not in an overly academic way. First of all, the brain is not a computer. Both might be machines that deal with inputs and outputs, but many systems deal with inputs and outputs. The solar system, is a collection of matter that handles inputs and outputs in a particular way. A hammer is a system that handles inputs and outputs in a particular way. This does not make the solar system or a hammer computational systems, at least not in any profound way. Similarly, sure, brains and computers share some descriptive features. Both make use of “memory,” both are energy intensive and need a regular replenishment of resources, and both transform information in particular ways. But this does not make brains and computers the same thing. Brains are not computers, even if the brain computes. Ultimately, computers are tools designed by humans for particular tasks. Brains are tools for… well, we’ll get to that.

Secondly, the brain is not composed of modules, even if it is modular. Sure, as we learned in the last post, perception is assembled from “products” that have been created in different areas of the brain. In other words, perception is a distributed process. However, it is a distributed process of shared networks. Just as we discussed with reference to supply chains, different visual “products” do not come from isolated modules. There is no “face” module or “chair” module. Instead, there is a system of shared networks that assemble faces or chairs. 

Still, one strength of taking a modular approach to psychology is that it emphasizes the adapted qualities of our psyches. There are indeed deep currents given to our psyches by natural selection. We do seem predisposed to detect cheaters, learn languages, use tools (at least more so than other animals), see and hear a particular range of frequencies, have a sensitized disgust response during the first trimester of pregnancy, and on, and on, and on. Even the most religiously inclined must come to terms with the animal in which each soul resides. Through natural selection, our bodies and minds have been designed to encounter and assemble their worlds in particular ways. This is where the utility of thinking in terms of modules comes in. It allows mind scientists to cleanly carve up their subject matter into the traits and adaptations that allow for research. Every science needs its units, after all.

But let’s not forget that the assembly that is done by our minds is done for a particular reason. Fundamentally the psyche is designed to locate the organism within a problem space. Where am I within this space, and what do I need to do? These are the questions that the psyche faces at every moment of its limited existence. And to answer these questions, the psyche is composed not of modules, but of maps. Perception is essentially a means of creating landmarks, directions, and layers of information on maps. Yes, the supply chains of our perception assemble “percepts,” but on some level, all supply chains, themselves, are mappings of inputs onto outputs. We are not “modules all the way down;” we are maps all the way down. It is not a collection of goods that give our psyches meaning, but directions. Our psyches are composed of, and designed to assemble maps, and in doing so, our psyches search for and achieve meaning. 

Our minds are composed of maps, not modules, even if those maps show modularity. Maps locate the organism in problem space, and it it through this that we define meaning.

Perception and Supply Chains

Neurons as supply chains. This image shows somatosensory neurons of a mouse that have been imbued with a a green flourescent protein. The bright blobs at the bottom are cell bodies, and the rising strands are apical dendritic bundles. In neurons, dendrites are the cell structures that receive inputs from other neurons.
“new_20x” by Robert Cudmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Since it’s been a while, I’m going to rehash some ideas and then weave in few more concepts: supply chains and maps. We’re still dealing with perceptions and beliefs in all of this.

So, in a recent post, I introduced the idea that emotions and motivations might be more accurately thought of as “visceral beliefs” – a category of perception that originates within the body, and which is built up from basic processes and learned expectations. We call these things “feelings” (I feel angry. I feel hungry. I feel curious. I feel tired…). In each case there is no such thing, really, as say anger. Rather there is a perception originating in our body that we term “anger.” One thing to realize, though, is that even if “you are not feeling it,” this does not mean that your emotional machinery isn’t nonetheless whirring away and influencing your behavior. Not all perception reaches our awareness, just as not all perception is universal. The logic is the same as what is applied to “normal perception” – sight, taste, touch, and so on. So let’s remind ourselves of some of the principles underpinning “normal perception.” 

Shipping as neurons, and yes, I’d like you to associate this image with the first image of the post. Paths of shipping in the San Francisco bay. The solid, dark grey areas are land, while the lavender / purple areas are ocean. See this post at Mapbox.Com in order to learn more about how this visualization was created.

Perceptual Machinery

Psychologists long-ago established that perception isn’t a passive transcription of external sensations, but rather involves both a direct construction and an active interpretation. The result of these bottom up and top down processes gives us many of the furnishings and rooms of our psyches. The direct construction is done by the machinery at hand. We have been imbued by evolution with machinery such as rods, cones, chemical receptors, and hair cells that react to a particular range of environmental energies and that turn those inputs into patterns of neural firing. Do all animals, or individuals for that matter, use the same machinery? Of course not. Some birds possess machinery that allows them to “see” the earth’s magnetic fields. Some fish possess machinery that responds to electric fields, and honeybees can see patterns of polarized light that can be used to navigate. As Hamlet would say, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” The dimensions of our perception are but a sliver of all possible dimensions, and humility (and wonder and a certain arrogance) goes hand-in-hand with doing good psychological science.

Further, even within a common assembly line of perception, e.g., vision, different tools allow organisms to handle different ranges of resources. Our own visual system cannot “handle” electromagnetic spectra from the ultraviolet bands, but honeybees would respond to management’s request to process UV light with “bring it on.” For honeybees ultraviolet inputs are part of their normal experience, while longer wavelengths (i.e., the color “red”) are not (see page 138 of provided link).

To use a crude metaphor, the machinery of perception is like a supply chain that assembles the lived-in environment of the psyche. Depending on the desired product, different supply chains make use of different resources. The supply chain for a rocking chair is quite different from the supply chain for an iPhone. Similarly, the supply chain for a melody will differ from one that produces the smell of cinnamon. 

Supply Chains and Perception

Let’s go ahead and push this analogy between supply chains and perception because it will allow us to intuit some general principles of perception. 

Part of the supply chain map for Jansport’s Big Student Backpack. Click through to the original interactive supply chain here. The site provides a very cool set of interactive maps for the supply chains of different products.

Here is a map of the supply chain for the Jansport Big Student Backpack. Be sure to click through to the original site, because each of the nodes can be clicked on for further information about the specific factories. Among other things, in this visualization we learn that there is a thread supplier in Malaysia, a yarn manufacturer in India, dying facilities in Thailand, rubber, zipper and yarn facilities in China and Taiwan, and an assembly facility in Indonesia that puts together the final backpack (along with many other products such as shoes, windbreakers, umbrellas, etc.) before shipping it to a primary distribution center in California. This distribution center then introduces the backpack into consumer awareness by placing it on the racks of a store or in the pages of a catalog. The consumer “sees” the final backpack, not the undergirding supply chain that makes the backpack possible.

Our own perception works according to similar principles. Dedicated areas of the brain specialize in “producing” vertical lines, horizontal lines, colors, visual movement… , and yet other areas receive these inputs and assemble them into larger products. At some point these perceptual products enter our awareness, but there is a considerable amount of assembly and processing that has already happened prior to this point. Below, for example, is a crude diagram showing the “supply chain” for visual information in Homo sapiens. Interrupt that supply chain at different locations and particular visual goods will no longer be available.

A map representing the supply chain of vision in humans. It is an adaption of Figure 4 from Behnke’s Hiearchical Neural Networks for Image Interpretation. Notice that visual supply chains classically separate into two crude pathways: one that assembles WHAT something is, and one that assembles WHERE something is. For our purposes, prosopagnosia could be thought of as involving disruptions to the WHAT supply chain. Blindsight, on the other hand, involves damage to the V1 area of the supply chain…a critical choke point for conscious perception of visual information. Nonetheless, in many blindsight patients visual factories are still hard at work in the SC, pulvinar, and from the inter laminar portions of the LGN. Additions to Behnke’s diagram are based on a number of readings, but anyone interested could start with Cowey 2010 and Fulton’s 21’st Century Paradigm Describing the Neural System (p. 129). The latter is kind of eccentric, but for this post you only need to worry about the visual circuitry diagram on page 129. Basically, we now have a better understanding of the pathways from the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) and pulvinar nucleus that by-pass the V1 area of visual processing. Also, this diagram is still extremely crude. Not shown, for example, are the many feedback pathways that are known to exist among the different cortical areas.

Prosopagnosia, for example, is a phenomenon in which individuals lose the ability to “see” faces (click here to read an article about potential treatments). prósōpon = face, a = not, and gnosis = knowledge. Prosopagnosia usually results from damage or congenital alterations to a brain region known as the fusiform gyrus.  Individuals with prosopagnosia might be able to describe the components of a face just fine: the nose is bulbous, the eyes are brown, the hair is curly and black. However, despite possessing the components of a face, they simply don’t possess the ability assemble those components into a face.

The condition known as blindsight also illustrates how disruptions in the visual “supply chain” are not an all-or-nothing thing. Blindsight is characterized by a functional blindness in which individuals nonetheless possess abilities that are dependent on vision. (If you have access to online articles, here is one that provides a nice overview and here is another.) An individual with blindsight might not be able to see a baseball, but could potentially catch one tossed their way. They might not consciously know that an object is present, but nonetheless could correctly guess as to the direction of its movement. In general the reason for the blindness of blindsight involves damage to area V1 of the visual cortex. This is an area at the back of the brain that receives the bulk of input from our retinas. However, as the figure above shows, several inputs from our retinas are sent in parallel to other brain regions (the superior colliculus and the lateral geniculate). It is thought that these inputs allow for the “sight” of blindsight. Conceptually, though, we can think of this with reference to our supply chain analogy. If we lose our “distribution center” or our “assembly factory” certain types of perception might never reach our awareness. Nonetheless, this does not stop the thread, zipper, or fabric dying factories from producing their goods – goods that can be used in other supply chains, as needed.

Figure from “To See, But Not to See.” A nice representation that uses the supply chain analogy to describe how disruptions along one pathway still allow for “deliveries” to take place along other pathways. It just so happens that only one of these pathways involves conscious awareness (the one indicated in blue).

Issues in supply chains don’t only have to do with the loss of resources such as we “see” in individuals with blindsight or prosopagnosia. For example, what would happen if a supply chain began to include inputs of colored fabric to an assembly factory that normally only received black fabric? We might end up with rainbow colored backpacks! Synthesia resembles just such an outcome. This syndrome refers to a phenomenon in which some individuals experience the stimulation of multiple sensory pathways when only a single pathway is objectively stimulated. Numbers and sounds might be “seen” to have particular colors; observing another individual’s hand being touched, might produce a sensation of touch in the observer. It should be noted that synesthesia is not an imagined or arbitrarily conjured sensation. Rather, the synesthete simply and consistently perceives a mixed sensory experience relative to what others experience. 

I don’t want to push the analogy between the machinery of perception and supply chains too far. After all, it’s just an analogy. Computers aren’t the same things as brains and supply chains are not the same thing as perception. However, there’s one more point I’d like to squeeze out of the supply chain / perception analogy, and that’s the concern with balancing resilience and efficiency. 


When will these goods enter consumer awareness? When does a face become recognized as a face?
“Distribution centre” by Nick Saltmarsh is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Efficiency, blooming and pruning

A central issue faced by the management of supply chains involves balancing efficiency and resilience. For example, the coronavirus outbreak has made news for disrupting supply chains through China, and many green technologies currently face vulnerabilities in their supply chains that might affect their ability to scale up. In order to handle these issues capable managers need constantly to grow and prune their supply chains in ways that minimize costs while maximizing resilience. Extra supplies need to be maintained, backup factories need to be kept at the ready, and of course all of these contingency plans impose costs. If the world were perfectly predictable, these costs would be unnecessary. But the world is not predictable. Storms, viruses, political unrest, new technologies and competitors all impose costs. Such is life.

Supply chain or brains? In this case it’s neural networks, but conceptually the figure originates from work that seeks to emulate the synaptic pruning observed in brains. Taken from Singh (2019). Pruning deep neural networks.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the machinery of perception deals with similar demands for resilience and efficiency, and the way that our brains manage these demands shapes the environs of our individual psyches. For example, the development of our brains is characterized by an overproduction of connections, followed by a pruning of these connections. This “blooming and pruning” occurs in different areas of the brain at different times in our lives. Below, for example, is a figure showing the approximate developmental time course for several brain regions along with their hypothesized functions. What it shows is that our visual and auditory “supply chains” are crudely mapped out with a hodgepodge of connections that are then tightened up over the first three years of life. Areas involved in speech production, on the other hand, have a later “blooming” that is followed up by a pruning that occurs until approximately age 7. [Remember: these are averages and say nothing about what is happening in the brain for any single individual.] 

Figure 1 from Thompson and Nelson (2001). Developmental science and the media: early brain development. American Psychologist, 56, 5 – 15. The curves estimate the number of synapses in different brain regions at different times in an individual’s life. The central point is that waves of “blooming and pruning” are a regular part of brain development across (at least) the first 20-odd years of life.

The pruning of pathways in our brains is crudely guided by a “use it, or lose it” maxim. Connections that are repeatedly stimulated are strengthened and maintained, while those that are rarely stimulated are deleted.  The result is that our perceptual supply chains are made more efficient at delivering the products that we apparently need. If you do not need to distinguish between “l” and “r” sounds, then your brain will eliminate the wasted circuitry that produces the perception of these two distinct sounds. Simultaneously we become worse / better at associating particular lip movements with particular sounds. Similarly, as I brought up in another blog post, if you do not need to distinguish between faces that have particular racial characteristics, then your brain will eliminate the “wasted” circuitry that produces the perception of these differences. In extreme cases, experimenters have even been able to create environments in which animals lose the ability to perceive horizontal or vertical lines. Again, use it or lose it. If the world does not need you to “see” vertical lines, then your brain is not going to waste the supply lines necessary to create a perception of vertical lines. In psychology this phenomemon is termed perceptual narrowing and it is the result of synaptic pruning , but conceptually perceptual narrowing and synaptic pruning are no different from what supply chain managers do every day. 

Summing up the Supply Chain / Perception Analogy

All right, the main principles to draw from our analogy between supply chains and perception are:

  • Just as supply chains construct products by integrating and orchestrating a network or factories, the machinery of perception constructs our psychological world from many distributed areas in the brain.
  • Just as a zipper or yarn factory can help in the assembly of many different goods, perceptual “factories” can provide outputs that are used for many different types of percepts (e.g., faces, objects, animals, etc.).
  • Just as much of a supply chain is invisible to the consumer, much of the machinery of perception is invisible to our consciousness.
  • Just as supply chains are molded by concerns for efficiency and resilience, our brains mold the machinery of perception by balancing physiological costs and environmental demands.
Supply chain that outputs a dance.

Visceral beliefs

Does a chameleon feel its colors? Read on!

Not all beliefs are spoken – at least not in the way that I’ve been unpacking the term so far in this blog. We have beliefs that we articulate, but we also have beliefs concerning what we see and hear. We have beliefs about what is in the future (anticipations, predictions, hopes, expectations, etc.) and beliefs about what has transpired in the past (memories, post-hoc rationalizations, etc.). Our consciously experienced reality is in a sense nothing but belief – a constructed amalgam of history within which we each reside…indeed, within which the totality of our lived existence transpires. We see an external world, but that external world is constructed for us according the imperatives of a history embodied in the form of an eye, the tunings of neurons, and the expectations of experience. At some point I do want to pivot and think through what sort of freedom and responsibility this science permits, because I don’t think that it therefore follows that anything goes – that the mechanistic churnings of historical contingency eradicate morality or freedom. More that these things are a choice and can’t merely be taken for granted. In answer to question from Waterland a few posts back, “Does this mean that the individual never happened / doesn’t matter?” No. But we can only make that assertion when we understand what, exactly, that individual is.

So, I’d like to sit a bit longer with how our embodied beliefs of psyche are constructed. This post is going to start rummaging through a set of perceptions I’m going to term “visceral beliefs.” These are things like pain, emotions, motivations (hunger, thirst, fatigue), but I’m going to focus on emotions in this post. 

This past week it just so happens that I went to see “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” with my parents. A few days later we went to hear a performance of excerpts from Handel’s Messiah. The connection? Emotion. When I was a kid – maybe 10, I remember the first time that I heard Handel’s Messiah. It was on a set of vinyl records (I think). Anyway, what I remember is not being able to get enough of the shivers the music sent through me – a weave of layered voices, voices calling out and responding, solitary and unified, and yeah, that Hallelujah chorus! I don’t know how my parents stayed sane, because my memory is of playing the vinyl records over-and-over-and-over-and-over. The reaction I remember having then, is the same reaction that I’ve since had watching an athlete perform at an the unexpected level, or a child returning with bandages to help an injured animal, or a group of people rising to stand in solidarity with an individual, or a red car in space with earth in the background. That reaction, that emotion is something that I connect to potential. A participatory wonder and exhilaration in raw human potential. 

The world, though, isn’t necessarily designed for wonder. A book that I once assigned for a seminar, entitled Reality is Broken, essentially argues the societal imperatives of the 21st c. U.S. have minimized the emotions of wonder and exhilaration. Specifically, essential motivations connected with feelings of autonomy, competence, and meaningful social interactions have been removed from our daily experience. This is why, according to the author Jane McGonigal so many individuals have turned to games and virtual environments. Only in these environments do they encounter the sense of raw potential that they crave. In a sense this theme is no different from that found in the book The Giver. A colorlessness. An imposed blindness. And this is how “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” comes in. The movie is essentially an episode of Mr. Rogers for adults. An emotionally stunted, “blinded” protagonist learns to attend to his emotions, to accept them, and to own their meaning. Mr. Rogers is the guide, and the protagonist follows him into a place of, well, new potential. What was unseen becomes seen. As William Carlos William’s writes:

so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
Something I drew a long time ago: charcoal on paper

This poem is partially about seeing. Noticing. Attending, and it is a beautiful poem. I’m mentioning it, though, because a similar poem could be written for the perceptions that we label “emotions.” So much depends upon a feeling of sadness, or a feeling of joy, or a feeling of contentment, or a feeling of urgency. If a wheelbarrow is worthy of notice – and it is – then the emotional landscapes we inhabit are equally worthy of notice.

Emotions are curious things. We are taught the need to control them, and some of us even have a fear and an embarrassment of them. An emotional reaction to emotion! Classically, too, emotions have been held to be in opposition to reason. Reason = good = human. Emotions = bad = animalistic. The thing is, though, emotions are merely another type of perception. They are really no different from vision or smell or hearing. Would we say that vision = bad = animalistic? And yet to denigrate emotional information is really no different from purposefully wearing a blindfold throughout the day.

But what kind of information is contained in an emotion? Well, as I pointed out a while back, our perceptions are constructed things. They are beliefs about the world, and illusions are fun because they remind us of this fact. I apparently have beliefs about color and shade and times of day, and these beliefs construct for me a gold and white dress where others have constructed within their psychological interior a blue and black dress. Likewise, the Hermann grid illusion produces beliefs about discolorations that are not actually present. 

Hermann Grid Illusion.

This is an illusion that is apparently created by the manner in which our brains respond to vertical and horizontal lines.

Emotions, too, are a form of perception. They don’t “just happen” any more than yellow and white dresses “just happen.” Emotions are constructed things. They are a perception or set of beliefs, albeit of visceral sensations. So, in that sense (ha! intended pun, there) emotions are visceral beliefs. In fact, I’d argue that the term “visceral belief” is a much more accurate expression than “emotion.” Here is the entymology for “emotion“:

1570s, “a (social) moving, stirring, agitation,” from Middle French émotion (16c.), from Old French emouvoir “stir up” (12c.), from Latin emovere “move out, remove, agitate,” from assimilated form of ex “out” (see ex-) + movere “to move”

Culturally, then, emotions are things that cause agitation – a stirring up from the inside. However, is gratitude a type of “stirring up” from the inside? Is depression? Is contentment? Or let me ask a different question. Is “age” an emotion? Is it a motivation? Is it a belief? From the perspective of psychology the answer is yes and yes and yes. Age is a visceral thing. A set of visceral stimuli that we psychologically “read,” build upon, learn about, and fit like a puzzle piece into cultural / social systems. In other words, we feel it. We might not attend to the feelings of “age” or have any basis for comparison or prefer to look at its “sensation scale” (i.e., more or less feelings of age / youth) from one direction vs. another, but regardless, age is a sensation, a perception that originates in the body. “Youth is wasted on the young.” “I am 40 years young.” “I’m really feeling my age, today.” All of these expressions relate to the feelings that we term “age.” 

These feelings of “age” are real, and age is certainly both an objective measure as well as a feeling. But when we use that word “feeling” what we are speaking of is a perception that originates in the body. If vision is a set of constructed beliefs about “things out there,” feelings are a set of constructed beliefs of “things in here” – where “here” is the body you inhabit. The precise terms are exteroceptive vs interoceptive stimuli. Exteroceptive stimuli are those that originate from outside the body, while interoceptive stimuli originate from within the body. Interoceptive stimuli are the change in body temperature, the constriction of blood vessels, the beat of the heart, the tingling rush of adrenalin, the vertigo, the rise of body hair, the rhythm of a walk, the roil of the stomach. 

Here’s a diagram showing how perception is (at the very least) determined by both exteroceptive and interoceptive cues. Exteroceptive cues refer to information that originates outside the body, while interoceptive cues refer to information that originates inside the body. We call the latter “feelings.”

Here is a figure to help visualize all of this. Perception is the category of experience given by our senses. Some of those senses respond to information that originates outside the body (sound waves, light waves, chemicals, pressure, etc.) while some of those senses respond to information that originate from inside the body. This latter category is what I’m terming visceral beliefs, and emotions are one type of visceral belief. Others are states like “hunger,” “thirst,” “ennui,” “age,” and so on.

I’ll quickly explain the other boxes, but I don’t want to dwell on them right now. Homeostatic state refers to the fact that our bodies are designed to monitor particular “needs.” Some of these needs are common to other animals. We monitor salt, and when we “need” salt, we crave it, and it tastes particularly good. We monitor temperature, and when we “need” temperature, warmth feels particularly good and we take actions to procure it. These homeostatic needs partly define the type of animal that we happen to be (Homo sapiens), and so we have social needs that, for example, might be absent from a turtle, and as mammals we engage in nurturing and attachment in ways that I would categorize as “motivational” (i.e., connected with homeostatic “need”). Finally, behavioral systems refers to the species typical way that we satisfy our homeostatic needs. Do we hunt in packs? Do we play? Do we perform mating rituals? Finally, learning, of course, can layer all sorts of complexity into this system, but as a starting point, it’s a decent way to begin thinking about the mechanisms constructing our psyche. 

Here’s an exteroceptive cue that might just start interacting with motivational states and interoceptive cues to produce the feeling “Mmmmmm.”

Emotions and feelings are visceral beliefs. A kind of perception that originates within the body, and which is built up from basic processes and learned expectations. Sometimes we attend to these “feelings” and at other times we do not, just like sometimes we attend to the clouds in the sky and sometimes we do not. Sometimes we purposefully “look away” from feelings in the same way that we might look away from a panhandler, or we learn to ignore feelings in the same way that we learn to ignore the train that passes by every night at 4:00. We feel tired, but push on through the night in order to complete an assignment. We feel sad, but believe that sadness is “weak” and ignore the sensations. The point is that just as the room you visually inhabit is partially constructed from color and lines and assumptions of depth, the emotional room you inhabit is constructed from the stuff of the body. 

Soapbox Aside: I’ve been meaning to remind everyone that when it comes to psychology, we need to be careful about ascribing a particular state to everyone. Just as some individuals are “color blind,” not everyone experiences empathy or fear or anxiety. Not everyone experiences pain the way that you do. Some people see colors when they hear music. Some people experience extreme disgust to situations to which others merely shrug their shoulders. Some people are attracted to women. Some are attracted to men. But “men” and “women” are variable categories, too. Some are tall. Some are short. Some have penis-like appendages. Some don’t. There’s no such thing as a “real” woman or a “real” man. Not in any scientific sense, and most of us do know this when we pause to think about it, but there is a tendency to get sloppy. For example, the other day I was listening to the radio and a very reputable commentator said, “I believe that everyone is fundamentally good.” Depending on what the commentator meant, the odds are that, no, not everyone is fundamentally good. If the commentator meant that everyone has “fellow feeling,” that is wrong. Most might possess this perception, but there is variance. Some experience it more often, while others experience it less often. On the other hand, perhaps the commentator meant that all humans have the potential to be “good,” or the commentator might be using short-hand for a belief that all individuals possess “value,” but that is a very different thing that saying that everyone is fundamentally good. The latter statement is passive, shirks responsibility and is simply inaccurate. Variance is the norm, even if broad strokes (e.g., averages, medians, modal frequencies) allow for certain generalities. Speaking of which, there is a realted generality known in psychology at the fundamental attribution error. This a tendency for people to allow variance for themselves, while dismissing it for others. Why did you do poorly on the test? Because you didn’t get a good night’s sleep. Why did that other person do poorly on the test? Because they are stupid, lazy, a member of a racial category, etc.  In this blog, if I make overarching generalizations I am either being lazy, or I am trying to make a broad point as efficiently as possible. Sometimes it makes sense to refer to averages, but it is important to always remember that there is almost always variance around and average, and that variance is normal.

A thought experiment

I have been going on for a bit about how our psyches are constructed things. But I’ve been doing so in kind of general terms. So, let’s take a breather and see if we can’t assemble a simple belief engine from some of the pieces that have shown up on the blog so far. Or if engineering isn’t your thing, you can think of this as a sort of recipe.

Ingredient List

1 c. Visual perception of faces

1 c. The other race effect

1 Tbs. Generalization

Stir with a dash of cultural experience

Faces. Faces are a construct of our visual system, and a lot could be said out them. For example, here is an image from a well-known experiment seeking to determine if infants are born with an innate ability to recognize face-like images

From Morton and Johnson (1991)

The basic idea is to take a face and show it to infants of different ages. Of course, you then need other images so that you can make comparisons. Like, maybe make sure that the infant isn’t simply responding to the nose, mouth, etc., no matter how they are arranged (Linear). Or maybe check out if it’s a triangular arrangement of stimuli that the infant “likes” and compare that a more normal face, and the same image with the triangular arrangement flipped. This is some of what psychologists do!

Whether infants are innately predisposed to respond to face-like images, over time, most of us become better at distinguishing between faces. When our eyes encounter a face-like stimulus they tend to bounce around in a manner that picks out particular features.

Saccades registering the features that will be turned into a face
Orginal work done by Alfred Yarbus (1967) and image found here.

Like any skill, this is something at which we become better and more efficient with repeated practice. We don’t just pick out faces as generic visual objects, but individual faces for our friends, parents, siblings and so on. And yes, we know that all of this construction is happening in a brain, and since that is the case, damage to the brain can interfere with our ability to construct faces. Prosopagnosia is a syndrome that refers to an inability to recognize faces brought on by strokes / damage. Individuals experiencing prosopagnosia might be able to perfectly describe the features of a face: the nose, the color of they eyes, the shape of a chin – but they cannot “see” the face.

The Other Race Effect. As we encounter faces, we become more and more adept at pulling out features that allow us to efficiently “recognize” the individual attached to any particular arrangement of these features. The general thinking is that this process results in the creation of a prototypical face. You can think of this as being the weighted average of all of the face-features that an individual has encountered in their day-to-day living. That prototype is then going to become your psyche’s starting point for recognizing new faces. Just like a few posts back, when we talked about how our visual system has beliefs about depth, and size, and relative brightness, our visual system constructs beliefs about faces. One of these beliefs goes by the name the other race effect.

Basically, the other race effect refers to the fact that your psyche is better at recognizing prototypical faces. If you’ve ever tried to use money in another country, you’ll have an appropriate analogy. Even after living in Germany for four year, I would sometimes get hung up on counting out change. I had trouble remembering which coins went with which amounts, and strangely this made it more difficult to simply add up and subtract amounts. The other race effect is something like that. It refers to the fact that individuals who regularly experience faces within a particular ethnic / racial category find it harder to distinguish between faces outside of that category.

A study from 2007 published in Psychological Science provides a nice conceptual demonstration of the other race effect. 

In this particular study, the researchers asked about the development of the effect. In other words, they asked whether very young children showed the effect, and if not, when did it become pronounced. Their subject pool consisted of Caucasian infants from three age groups: 3-month, 6-month, and 9-month. In the experiment, these infants were presented with faces from four “ethnic categories”: Caucasian, African, Middle-Eastern, and Chinese. Please note that these are the designations from the article. All of the faces were taken from students who were 23 – 27 years old.

The way that these experiments typically work, is that an infant will be shown a stimulus until they become bored. “Bored” is measured by the amount of time that the infant spends looking at a stimulus vs. looking elsewhere (remember, in science we have to measure something!). This “boredom” is referred to as habituation. Once an infant is habituated to a stimulus, an experimenter can show that infant another stimulus and ask: “Does the infant remain bored?” If so, then that means that the infant doesn’t recognize a difference between the two stimuli. On the other hand, if the infant’s attention perks up, then we can conclude that the infant DOES recognize a difference between the stimuli. 

That is the logic that was used to examine the development of the other race effect in the Daley et al. study. Infants were be shown a particular face until they habituated to it. Then there were shown the same face along with another novel face. That novel face either came from the same or another ethnic category. The question was whether the infants would recognize the difference of novel faces within an ethnic category. For example, if the infants were habituated to a Chinese face, would they perk up when presented with a new Chinese face? 

Re-visualization of data from Kelly et al (2007). Bars above the dotted line indicate that the infants are recognizing faces as unique.

Here is their data. I’ve changed it from what was provided in the actual paper, because the data there consisted of numbers in a table. I took those numbers and created a graph that makes the same points. Any bars above the dotted line indicate that the infants “recognized” the novel faces as novel. 3-mo old infants essentially treated all faces as unique. 6-mo olds, though, treated Caucasian and Chinese faces as unique, while tending to clump African and Middle-Eastern faces into generic categories. Finally, at 9 months, the infants showed the full on “Other Race Effect.” They treated faces from their own ethnic group, Caucasian, as unique, but tended to treat the faces from the other three ethnic categories as generic.

Generalization. Ok, so we know that faces are visually constructed things. We also know that we tend to learn to distinguish between commonly encountered faces, and that is going to tend to produce better recognition of faces within our ethnic group as opposed to outside of ethnic group. All of this is simple engineering. Let’s start to push it in a direction that we’d connect with more traditional notions of belief. We’ll do this by reminding ourselves of a psychological phenomenon known as generalization.

Like so many things in psychology, generalization is conceptually simple, but incredibly complex in its details. The basic phenomenon is this. If you learn something about a situation, you will tend to transfer that learning to “similar” situations. This transfer to “similar” situations, contexts and stimuli is termed generalization, and it is seen in so many animals that it is considered a basic feature of learning. Here is an example of generalization in pigeons. Pigeons that have learned that a vertical line either indicates food or the absence of food, will tend to generalize that learning to other line orientations.

Figure from Honig et al (1963). Responses here are pecks at the stimuli shown on the x-axis. Positive or negative training occurred to the vertical line.

However, notice that I put “similar” in quotes. Usually we think of “similar” as sharing features. If you are humiliated when you recite a poem in 4th grade, then maybe you will feel emotions of humiliation whenever you enter any classroom. Classrooms, after all, are “similar.” However, when we use the term “similar” what we really mean is that your brain is not recognizing a situation as completely unique. Someone else’s brain might very well. Also, this is not to say that at some point in the future you won’t recognize difference. You might very well learn that situation A is quite different from situation B. 

So “similar” is a subjective thing. When we transfer learning, feelings, and assumptions to new situations, this says more about what we as individuals recognize as “similar” at that particular moment. As an example, when we learn a new language, one of the humps we have to overcome is hearing sounds as unique that we start off hearing as generic. In any event, generalization is the phenomenon of transferring learning to “similar” situations and stimuli. But remember, “similar” means, to some degree, “not recognizing difference.” 

A Dash of Cultural Experience. So here is where we mix all of our ingredients together to construct a larger belief. First, we’ve pointed out that our visual system uses features in the environment to construct faces. Whether some of this construction is innate, or not, is beside the point. Faces are constructed things. Second, we’ve pointed out that how this happens creates categories of faces that we recognize as unique, and categories of faces that we treat as generic. Thirdly, we’ve reminded ourselves that if stimuli are generic, then this means that they are “similar,” and learning will tend to generalize across similar stimuli. What will happen, then, if culture pulls out a single face from an ethnic group and portrays it in a particular way? For example, let’s suppose that we are Caucasian child from the Kelly et al study. We see a show that portrays a Caucasian as a criminal. Well, since we tend to treat Caucasian faces as unique, then we won’t generalize criminality to a broad range of Caucasian faces. On the other hand, if we see a show that portrays an African, Middle-Eastern, or Chinese individual as a criminal, we will be more likely to generalize “criminality” to a broad range of African, Middle-Eastern, or Chinese individuals. That’s the thought experiment for this blog post.

A Study of Gratitude

Since it is the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, how about a study about gratitude? This particular study comes from the lab of David DeSteno. Prof. DeSteno is at Northeastern University, and he is the PI for a group that studies emotional effects on prosocial behaviors. You could do worse than to read his book, Emotional Success: the power of gratitude, compassion and pride. I would quibble with some of the evolutionary accounts that he provides in the book, but the general gist – that emotions are informational, adaptive “lenses” – is an important perspective. I’ll definitely try to unpack this perspective a bit at some point in this blog. 

Anyway, for this particular study, Desteno asks a question concerning impulsivity. The question is whether all emotions get in the way of non-impulsive, rational, deliberative choice. Or, are there particular emotional states that actually reduce impulsivity? Certainly the zeitgeist is that emotions are a hindrance to deliberation. Zen, man. That’s the ticket. 

A modern psychologist, though, would tend to say that “Zen, man” is as much an emotion as “anger.” The issue isn’t clearing away emotion, so much as it is understanding the congruence between the decisions you are being asked / attempting to make and the emotional state from which you are attempting to make them. If you are being asked to saw a board in two, a hammer isn’t of much use. The same could be said of emotions. So, is there an emotional state that helps rational, deliberative choice?

That’s a loaded question, of course. So let’s anchor it with a more specific question. Are there particular emotions that make us less impulsive? This is the question that DeSteno et al sought to address in their study “Gratitude: a tool for addressing economic impatience” (DeSteno, Li, Dickens and Lerner, 2014).

Now, the first thing to appreciate about any scientific study, is that when a researcher asks about whether x affects y, x and y are going to be defined in operationable terms. This means, they are going to be defined in measurable terms. Not only that, but they are going to be defined in measurable terms that are described in such a way that other scientists can go out an perform the same measurements. Impulsivity is a word. You might be able to provide a meaning for it: “actuated or swayed by emotional or involuntary impulses” However, this definition is meaningless for a scientist. How do you determine actuated or swayed? What counts as an involuntary impulse? What counts as an impulse?

Here is how DeSteno et al operationalized impulsive behavior: How much money do I need to give you in T amount of time so that you will choose to wait rather than take a different choice of money now? For example in the image below a subject has been presented with a choice between $4.50 now versus $10.00 in 30 days. Which would you choose? 

Which of these two outcomes would you choose?

Impulsivity, then, is being measured in terms of a choice between a dollar amount now vs. a dollar amount in the future. Sometimes in the literature this is referred to as a temporal-discounting or delay-discounting curve, and the information it provides is essentially “how easily you can wait.” The more money I have to give you to wait, the higher your impulsivity score. 

Ok, so in the the DeSteno et al study subjects will be primed with a particular emotion: happiness, neutrality, or gratitude. This is done by having the subjects in each of these groups write about an autobiographical moment in which they felt this emotion. Next, the subjects will be given a series of questions that ask them to rank (1 – 5) their current emotional state. Finally, the subjects will be given a series of choices between a dollar amount now versus a dollar amount in the future. By the way, subjects had a 1-in-3 chance of actually receiving one of the dollar choices that they made. If you were one of these lucky subjects, the experimenters randomly selected one of your choices (e.g., $30 in 6 months), and made it a reality.

  1. Trigger Emotions: Happy, Neutral, Grateful. 
  2. Compare subjects in each group in terms of their impulsivity scale. 

That’s the study. Here is what was found.

Figure is taken from Desteno et al (2014)

What this figure shows is the average impulsivity score for each group.  The numbers on the y-axis can essentially be interpreted as a measure of patience. Specifically, they indicate the ratio between an amount of money now, and an equivalent psychological amount a year from now. In other words, a discount factor of .5 would mean that $10 now equals an offer of $20 a year from now. A discount factor of .1 would mean that $10 now equals $100 a year from now. In other words, you would need to pay the “.1 subject” five times as much money to wait a year, than you would need to pay a “.5 subject.” 

Back to the figure, when you look at how the different emotional groups scored, it is clear that the gratitude group displayed more patience. This is true even when compared to another group that was feeling a positive emotion – the happy group. Feeling happy did not make a subject any more patient that feeling “neutral.” The only emotion of the three manipulated that improved impulsivity was gratitude.

Gratitude. Patience. The season stretches out towards winter and the cold settles in. Thanksgiving readies our waiting, keeping a future spring valued and available.

Happy Thanksgiving 2019!

Some fall colors

[Edit: Talk about coincidence. Who should have a column in the NY Times, but David DeSteno! Give it a read to learn some more about the science of gratitude.]

Fractals, turtles, and lying eyes

Today’s words are fractals, turtles and lying eyes. Let’s see what we can do with these.

Fractal

Here’s the first two sentences of the Wikipedia entry for “fractals”: 

In mathematics, a fractal is a subset of a Euclidean space for which the Hausdorff dimension strictly exceeds the topological dimension. Fractals appear the same at different levels, as illustrated in successive magnifications of the Mandelbrot set.

Got that? Fractals, like so much in math, are utterly cool…and mostly beyond my ability to understand in anything other than the most superficial level. For the purposes of this post, though, we’re going to think of fractals as a pattern that recurs at multiple levels: from the large to the tiny. Why and how isn’t something to worry about right now — just the idea of recursive repetition from the tiny to the large. And just to set your mind at ease: no, “recursive” and “repetition” are not identical concepts.  Recursive means to define a thing in terms of itself, while repetition is the carrying of a pattern across time and/or space. Tricky things, words.


“Mod” by kevin dooley is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Turtles

So, that’s fractals. What about turtles? Turtles amble in to the post with the phrase “turtles all the way down.” This is where we connect fractals to belief. “Turtles all the way down” is what results when a mischievous 4-y.o. is put into a blender with a pompous priest: the fractal question of “but why” linked to doctrine. The expression apparently originates from beliefs about the earth. What supports the earth? Well, the earth has nine corners that hold up the heavens, and each corner rests on the back of an elephant. And what supports the elephants? Why, the elephants stand on the back of a turtle. And what supports the turtle? Why, another turtle. And what does that turtle stand on? Well, another turtle… And so it goes – turtles all the way down the teleological rabbit hole. A free-floating, authoritative assertion of scales, carapace and reptilian eyes. Maybe the reptilian overlords conspiracy theory is correct after all. Or dinosaurs did drown in the flood of Genesis. It’s like the internal logic of a dream, a language of pure emotion overlaid and painted with the imagery of our internal eye.

However, I am going to suggest that there is a deeper significance here – that our beliefs are…well, not “nothing more” than fractals, but rather are constructed at a profoundly deep level. So much so, that as with turtles all the way down, our psychological living (which is the only living any of us know), is constructed on beliefs that are constructed on beliefs that are constructed on beliefs, …all the way down. It’s not that there is no “there, there” when it comes to belief, but rather that all we are is belief, and that this goes all the way down, all the way up, all the way back, and all the way forward. It’s more than just the narrative constructions of doctrine – those delivered stories that make us smile in disbelief. Those we mostly grow out of, or as the famous quote from 1stCorinthian puts it:

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

The point I’d like to make here is that putting away “childish things” is not as easy as all that, and the reason is that there is never any “putting away.” That is not how the mind works, and more to the point, that is not what a mind is. Each of us are turtles all the way down. Put aside one turtle, and there are infinite more chomping away, carapace to plastron, one supporting the other. The “I” never separates itself from its own construction, and here’s where the final phrase comes in: “lyin’ eyes.” 

Taking a rest from supporting all of your fake news

“Lyin’ Eyes”

A man is caught in bed with another woman; a group of thieves are caught rustling cattle; a man sees his sweetheart with another man; an actress jokes about her age – and the common refrain is some version of “who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes.” As blatantly, absurdly, gutsy, and desperately as this phrase is, there is no getting away from its nugget of truth. When CAN you trust your eyes? Or to put it differently, does perception feed up facts that are “out there” or does it construct beliefs of what is “out there.” Because let’s face it, if you are going to put aside childish things and embrace the truer, authoritative, responsible, practical beliefs of adulthood, there is the assumption that one can be distinguished from the other – that eyes don’t lie, and that perception and its echoes (i.e., memories) are the bedrock of our truth.

But of course eyes do lie. In fact, they do nothing but lie day in and day out. The psychological science on this couldn’t be any clearer. The processes of perception don’t relay reality to us, but rather construct a reality for us. These perceptual beliefs might have utility, but they are still beliefs, which isn’t to say that these “lies” constructed by our perceptions are “wrong.” It’s simply a matter of mechanism. Let’s see if we can’t untangle this.

The dress

A few years ago in 2015 a meme swept through the internet that involved a photo of a dress. Here is the photo:

Original Source for Image of “The Dress”

And here’s the question that accompanies the photo: what color is the dress? If you are like me, and approximately 60% of viewers, you answered something along the lines of “gold and ivory.” If you are like the other approximately 30% of viewers, though, you answered “blue and black.” Which is correct? Well, the actual dress is indeed blue and black. Here’s a photo of it:

Taken from AliExpress Site

No question there, right? Blue and black, which means that all of you that see it as “gold and ivory” in the first photo are wrong. Wrong or lying. The dress is blue and black, after all. If you were being interrogated by the police, maybe you’d be indicted for perjury. Locked away for spreading falsehoods. A public menace.

But of course, the dress in the first image IS “gold and ivory.” That is what I see, and I can’t unsee it. You can tell me that you see blue and black all you want, but it makes no difference. This I/eye that is me sees what it sees. 

Thankfully, science being science can offer up a belief-preserver of sorts. Here is a wonderful deconstruction of what is going on with “the dress.” And here is a write up of that deconstruction written for a more general audience. Basically, the way that we perceive color depends on many contextual variables that our brains filter and interpret in various ways. For example, did you know that the light of mid-day contains more blue in it than the light of, say, morning? Our brains filter that information out in order to keep colors constant. Or take shadow. If an object is back-lit and in shadow, our brains take that information into account in order to provide us with a perception of color. Mid-day or morning, back-lit or front-lit, our brain maintains for us the red of the apple. So, let’s get back to the dress. Is it in shadow or not? Is it mid-day or not? These are some of the questions that our brain is asking, whether we realize it or not, and the assumed answers change the psychological filters that are slotted into place in order to provide us with the belief that the dress is either blue/black or gold/ivory. Our brains even factor in whether most of our visual experience occurs in the morning (e.g., if you are an early riser) or late in the evening (i.e., a night owl). The former are biased to see the dress as gold/ivory, while the latter are biased to see the dress as blue/black.

It just so happens that the photo of the dress cleverly provides multiple, ambiguous perspectives embedded within its static field. In a sense, it is no different from a Necker cube. There is no cube, just as really there is no dress, just wavelengths of light differentially absorbed and reflected. But we see a cube, and not only that, but we see two potential cubes – the image rebounding from one to the other, depending on our point of reference.

You, too, can build one these at home!

I can’t emphasize enough, either, that there is no choice here. There’s no “putting aside the childish gold/ivory” of the dress for the truer, more adult blue/black of the dress, any more than one can put aside the filled in blindspot that sits a little off to the left and right of our eye’s field of vision. Yes, we see a complete field of vision and do not see the empty holes where our optic bundles exit the back of our retinas. Those empty holes are there, but our brains fill them in for us, providing us with a belief in a complete image. Or take the vision so many of us have experienced of a huge moon sitting just at the horizon. That is what we see, even if we know that the size of the moon does not change as it traverses the sky. Magnification of the atmosphere? No, not at all. Once again our brains are using assumptions to construct a visual reality – a set of beliefs about how distance and size are related to one another. On the back of our retinas the projected image of the moon is the same, whether on the horizon or overhead, and yet what we see in our mind’s I/eye differs. This so-called moon illusion, is related conceptually to many illusions, one of which I’ve tried to create below. Both cylinders are the same size, but our brains make one appear slightly bigger. 

An even simpler version can be found here, and is called the Ponzo illusion. Two objects, both the same size, and yet our mind offers them up as different. This is a difference predicated on assumptions, on beliefs offered up at the very start of our interaction with reality. There is no escaping these beliefs, nor are these beliefs of perception the bottom. They, themselves, are constructed by processes that are constructed by processes that are constructed by processes…. and on down it goes.

It reminds me of a quote from Graham Swift’s Waterland. Waterland is a meditation on history and memory – their tributaries, swamps, and recursive repetitions. Here is the protagonist, a high school history teacher, relating the ambiguities of the French Revolution and dealing with a student who wants facts.

“So where does it lie, this revolution? Is it merely a term of convenience? Does it really lie in some impenetrable mesh of circumstances too complex for definition? It’s a curious thing, Price, but the more you try to dissect events, the more you lose hold of them – the more they seem to have occurred largely in people’s imagination …’

‘Should we be writing this down, sir? The French Revolution never really happened. It only happened in the imagination.’

Laughter.

‘Don’t be literal, Price.’

…

 ‘I’m speculating, it’s true, Price. But we’re all free to interpret.’

‘You mean, so we can find whatever meaning we like in history?”

I’m taking that from my digital version of the book, but it’s right at the end of Chapter 14. The quote nicely summarizes the point of this particular blog post, and really the series of posts that I’ve made so far. A psyche is a constructed thing — processes strung together across history, and this “I” that each of us inhabits is a unique, particular and utterly confounded thing. A thing to hold lightly. A thing to hold humbly. Because just like there is no French Revolution, not really, there is no “I” beyond the confluence of processes that temporarily uphold it. And yet, just as the horrors of revolution emerged from processes of belief, so too do our own beliefs emerge from their own hidden furnaces. 

*****

I don’t want to end so heavily, though, so here’s a personal story to close out this post. It’s a story about belief and perception.

When I was a kid, growing up in the South, I went to a school that required all seventh graders to take “bible.” Our teacher was nicknamed “Yo” by all the students at the school. Yo Strang. Yo was one of the kindest souls I’ve ever met. A prisoner of war during WW II, he wore a heavy coat even on the hottest of days. The rumor was that it had something to do with the suffering that he had seen and experienced as a P.O.W. Yo was totally devoted to the kids in his classroom. Whether they were drawing pictures of penises in their notes or grade-anxiously writing down every word, Yo always projected a simple goodness.

Anyways, the seat that I sat in during Yo’s bible class was right next to a bulletin board.  On the bulletin board was a cut-out clipping from a newspaper with a caption that read something like: “Photographer takes photo of wooded scene only to discover the miraculous face of Jesus looking back.” The paper was yellowed, and the photo was in black and white. As a kid in a bible class, I sat next to this photo for most of our journey through the Old Testament, and all I saw was a photo of a some trees and snow. Jacob fighting the angel? Trees and snow. Moses up on Mount Sinai? Trees and snow. David having a husband killed so that he could sleep with his wife? Trees and snow. I wasn’t particularly devout in my thinking about Christianity, but I was a bit concerned that here I was with a 99.4 average in the class, but I couldn’t make out the face of Jesus in a newspaper photo. Finally, I asked one of my friends about the photo. They pointed to one blotch after another, “Here’s the beard. Here’s the eyes,…” 

and the face popped out.

A bit anti-climatic, actually, even then. Anyone who has looked at clouds in the sky knows that we “see” objects that aren’t there. A dragon. A train. And when it comes to faces, well, we see faces everywhere. Mars. Queen Elizabeth’s hair. The side of a mountain (until recently). In fact, “seeing” or “hearing” specific objects or words in an ambiguous sensory environment is so common that psychologists have a word for it: pareidolia. The basic idea isn’t so complicated: when you’ve got a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Or in other words, when you are so used to interpreting particular combinations of stimuli in a particular way, that’s the way you’ll tend to interpret new combinations.

By the way, if you are curious about where the word pareidolia comes from, it’s a combination of greek bits. Para (“before”) combined with eídōlon, which means “image” or “representation.” So the word means a sort of pre-representation of what is actually there. An image of expectation, rather than an image of reality. The large moon on the horizon, or the gold/ivory dress. Like I say, it’s turtles all the way down.