Feeling Feeling

July 23rd, 2007 Fred McVittie

When we feel a surface and sense its texture, running our hands over a plank of wood, the tweed of a jacket, a peach, what is it that we are really feeling? The individual nerve endings on our finger tips are not sensitive to these sensation, they can only register the fact of stimulation and the intensity of that stimuli, so when we say ‘this wood is rough’ we cannot be referring to the information provided simply by the nerve endings. Rather we must be reacting to the pattern of activation of large numbers of nerve endings, the rhythm at which these populations of nerves send their signals and the area over which these signals are distributed. To feel this pattern is a kind of ‘interpretation’ carried out by the close synchronisation of brain and central nervous system, certainly pre-conscious and resulting in the conscious perception of tactile texture.

This interpretative process underpinning the perception of a felt surface may serve as an analogy for the process of those other ‘feelings’ which take place in the mind: sorrow, happiness, pain, pleasure, etc. Antonio Damasio and Joseph Ledoux both make the distinction between ‘feelings’, the conscious sense accompanying and colouring thought with significance, and ‘emotions’, which they regard as the unconscious tagging of cognitive processes with positive or negative value. So, for example, if I were to put my hand on a hotplate, the non-conscious processes which formed the perception of that physical act would be given an emotional tag which was negative. My conscious experience of this negative tagging would be the undeniably negative feeling of pain.

This separation of emotion and feeling, in which feeling becomes the (self)conscious awareness of emotion, allows for an understanding of various aspects of human and non-human response. For example, when I put my hand on a hotplate, like everyone else I begin to move my hand away before I begin to experience the negative feeling of pain. This instinctive reaction results from the equally negative non-conscious emotions accompanying the processing of the sensory information before it reaches conscious awareness.

To return to the analogy between the physical feeling of touch sensation and the ‘feelings’ of being, the relationship between these two phenomena may be of a similar order. Obviously, at any one time we are receiving a vast amount of data through our senses; tastes, smells, sights, sounds, kinesthetic information, and tactile sensations. Each of these elements of data, as part of their processing, is presumably being tagged for its emotional value, and these values may vary: the feeling of the sun on my face is given a positive value, the sun in my eyes is given a negative, the faint roaring sound I hear is vaguely threatening and is awarded a negative, whilst the sight of my partner is a source of a positive. Unless I choose to focus on one of these sensations however, my consciousness does not have a singular positive or negative reaction. Instead I am experiencing the totality of these non-conscious emotions as a single, largely coherent unity which I would call a ‘feeling’, and this feeling, rather like the physical feeling of tweed or wood, is not a result of any one emotionally tagged sense but an interpretation of the activation pattern of those sensations. Or to use another metaphor, whilst our emotions all sound their individual notes, our feelings are the single chord produced by these voices.

It may be significant to note that whilst we tend to categorise feelings relatively simplistically, particularly regarding the more dramatic manifestations of response noted above: anger, joy, etc. it is likely that there are much more subtle variations and modulations of feeling than is expressed by these and similar terms. It is likely that in addition to the rough tweed of emotional feeling there is also the smooth silk; in addition to the crashing Wagnerian operas there is also the quiet murmur of the river and the wind in the grass.

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