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
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.
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 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.
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.