Virtual Environments of the Mind

December 24th, 2006 Fred McVittie Posted in Cognition, Emotion, Evolution, Feeling, Fuzzy trace |

What we choose to think about changes the way we feel. This is an obviousness, but it is worth looking at in more detail. The way we feel, our feelings, are the observable, experienced evidence of complex cognitive processes; processes which are non-rational, non-conscious, and multi-valent. The cognition which results in feelings is far more complex than that which is available to us consciously (1). This suggest that when we think of a certain idea, and this thinking makes us feel a certain way, the content of our conscious thoughts is causing changes to take place across the complex networks of non-conscious processing, resulting in certain emotionally-tagged, felt responses.

Remembering also that, ultimately, feelings and the cognitive processes of which they are a result, exist because they confer (or conferred in the past) some kind of survival and/or reproductive advantage to the organism experiencing those feelings; we feel pain when we put our hand on a hotplate because this feeling motivates the adaptively advantageous action of moving the hand. More complex feelings; love, jealousy, fear etc. confer similar advantages, but with more circuitous pathways between the stimulus, the feeling engendered by the stimulus, and an appropriate response. This implies that our ability to produce certain feelings by the action of dwelling on particular conscious thoughts effectively modifies what might be called the ‘virtual environment’ of our minds. This in turn causes an emotional response to be evoked which would be adaptively advantageous in that environment.

1. For an interesting explanation of this, see the gist or Fuzzy Trace theory of Reyna and Brainerd. Adv Child Dev Behav. 2001;28:41-100.