Wallas and Wordsworth

May 28th, 2007 Fred McVittie

William Wordsworth in the introduction to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1802 described poetry as ‘the spontaneous outflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origins from emotion recollected in tranquillity’. This remark, often held to be an example of the Romanticism which dominated much (English) poetry of the period, also suggests that poetry, as a creative act (perhaps the creative act) requires the poet to move through a series of psychological stages. Also the mention of a ’spontaneous outflow’ points toward a model of creative production which is hydraulic or pneumatic, involving some metaphorical substance that is accumulating within the mind of the poet, a mind possibly limited in capacity. The limited capacity of the mind causes the substance to be compressed and alchemically transformed into its most dense state and the eventual inevitable result of this continued accumulation is the overflowing or bursting forth of this transformed substance. The mechanism by which this accumulation and transformation takes place has a number of stages. ‘Emotion recollected in tranquility’ points to two of these stages. The ‘emotion’ stage is one in which one is immersed in the experience that is the source of the poem, it might be considered a ‘preparatory’ stage or even a period of ‘research’ (although this term suggests an emotionally-disconnected activity this is not an accurate conception of research, or indeed of any form of experiential cognition. See Damasio 2005). The ‘emotion’ stage is when the object of study is given over to the senses, it is when one metaphorically runs one’s hands over the experience, gathering subtle feelings and sensations. This is followed by a period in which one is separated from the experience, the phrase ‘recollected in tranquility’ suggests a period of calm, in which the poet is not directly involved in the conscious exploration or examination of the experience, but that other, non-conscious cognitive processes are active. It is during this period presumably that the ’substance’ circulating in the mind of the poet undergoes processes of accretion and accumulation, compression and condensation, such that it eventually overflows the container of the mind. At this point the third stage in the poetic process is entered in which the tranquility is replaced by a mental state corresponding to the bursting forth of this ’spontaneous outflow’ .

These stages show some correspondence to the stages of the creative process identified by Wallas (1923) and others since. These are the phases of Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, and Elaboration. Whereas Wallas uses the metaphor of light to relate this process, Wordsworth uses a metaphor of liquid. For Wallas, the moment of creative insight when the poet witnesses the emergence of the creative artifact into his own consciousness is seen as the sudden switching on of a light (Illumination). For Wordsworth this moment is the equally sudden breaking of a dam and the flooding of the stage of consciousness with the liquid of creativity.

Posted in Alchemy, Creativity, Damasio, Antonio, Emotion, Liquid, Metaphor, Transformation, Wallas, Graham, Wordsworth, William | No Comments »

Conscious Feelings as Cumulative Emotional Tags

June 14th, 2007 Fred McVittie

You are standing outside a football stadium while a match is being played. Inside, 90,000 people are involved, to varying degrees, in the match. Some are paying close attention to the movement of the ball, others watch the match officials, some see the shifting patterns made by the positions of the players and are quick to spot an offside infringement. Some of the match-goers are not directly observing the game at all at this moment; maybe they are talking to the person standing next to them, or standing in line at the snack bar, or queuing for the toilet. Each of these people, let’s say, is making a small noise, a hunger-fuelled rumble of the stomach from the man at the snack bar, a sigh of relief when another reaches the front of the toilet queue, the low murmur of conversation as one fan talks to another about the game. Perhaps the most common sound though is that which accompanies the ebb and flow of the game itself. As the fortunes of one side or another rise and fall, so the gasp, cries, and whoops of the individual spectators also rise and fall, shifting in lockstep with the perceptions of the game. From you position outside of the ground, you do not have access to these individual responses; what you experience is a low background roar which for most of the time stays at a fairly low level, definitely audible when you pay attention to it, but easily forgotten just like any other monotone. Punctuating this background sound however, is an occasional wave of increased intense expression. Sometimes this upwelling of sound is joyous, washing over you like a warm current of bliss and elevating you, buoying you up. At other times the sound drops away for a moment in agonising anticipation, then returns in an outpouring of ooooooooooooooooooh of grief and disappointment.

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Emotional Maths

July 13th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Imagine you are standing on a tightrope, or if that is too difficult and precarious, imagine standing on a balance beam, four inches wide, three feet above the ground. You have your hands outstretched at each side and you are standing perfectly still. In this position you feel fine: poised, in control, focussed.

Now imagine someone comes along and places two books in the palm of your right hand. These books are not heavy but they do affect your posture and your ability to stand perfectly still. Now your feelings have changed and you no longer feel fine. You feel the precariousness of your position, you feel out of control and anxious. Your poise is under threat. Thankfully, at this moment someone else comes along and places another two books, first one, then another, on the palm of your left hand. Your equilibrium is restored and you feel a wave of positive emotion flowing through you as your control returns and your poise regained.

This type of experience, the fully embodied sensations associated with balance and loss of balance, may form the prototype from which more conceptual notions of balance and equilibrium are drawn. For example, the practice of mathematics, particularly in dealing with formulae and equations, involves a set of parallel operations and may be fueled by similar emotional and somatic responses.

When we are confronted by an equation of the type 1 = 1 we recognise it as ‘balanced’, and whilst we may not consciously feel the same degree of poise and control that we felt on the balance beam we can nevertheless sense the ‘rightness’ of it. We might say that this equation has inherited some of the emotional content of the physical experience it mirrors and we feel fine about it in some small way similar to how we felt as motionless acrobats. When the equation is changed to 1 = 3 however, the sense of rightness disappears and is replaced by the subtle, but nevertheless present, feelings of negativity and ‘wrongness’. Just as maintaining one’s position on the balance beam when one has an uneven distribution of weight is anxiety provoking, so this unbalanced equation conveys the same uneasiness. This felt sense of rightness and wrongness, emerging as it does from a metaphorical mapping of embodied experience onto the abstractions of mathematics, shows that maths, and indeed all abstractions, are rarely free of emotional content. Indeed it is this emotional engagement which is the difference between understanding mathematics and simply wielding symbols according to certain disembodied rules.

Posted in Abstract, Embodiment, Emotion, Mathematics, Metaphor | No Comments »

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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Moderation and Consciousness

August 18th, 2007 Fred McVittie

One understanding of enlightenment is the pursuit of a state of being in which individual consciousness is minimised and a ‘larger’ or more totalising consciousness is accepted. Individual consciousness involves a close identification with the personal thoughts, opinions, desires, attitudes, and feelings of the individuated self, and this usually involves the establishing of a distinction between these entities, which we consider ‘the self’, and the rest of experience which we might consider ‘non self’. This differentiation is the duality which many spiritual and religious tradition attempt to dissolve.

Those aspects of experience which tend to draw us toward individual consciousness are recognisable by the fact that they are value-laden, by which is meant that they have a positive or negative emotional component. When I put my hand on a hotplate for example, the experience gives me an unpleasant feeling which I will most likely try to minimise by moving my hand away as quickly as possible. I can make a conscious decision to leave my hand where it is and continue to feel the sensation, prolonging the pain, but the extent to which I do this, resisting the urge to move my hand, is also the extent to which I am identifying with my individual consciousness. Or more accurately, this experience would constitute my individual consciousness. Individual consciousness is not the pain, or the sensation of pain, but rather it is my identification with the pain and my resistance to the urgings of my body to move away from that pain.

We know from neurological experiments that in an episode like this, the order in which stimuli, response, feeling, and consciousness emerge is not intuitively obvious. One might imagine that the natural order of events would be that the sensation of heat on the hand caused certain neural activity in the brain, which then coalesced into a conscious experience of pain, followed by a quick decision to move the hand away from the source of pain, and lastly the action itself. In actuality the order of events is that the sensation of heat does cause stimulation of the nerve endings, which does cause neural activity, but this is followed immediately by a decision to move and the beginnings of the movement itself in the form of the ‘readiness potential’. At this crucial stage between the rising of the readiness potential and the carrying out of the action itself consciousness inserts itself as a sluice gate which allows for the possibility that the action be not carried out. We could choose at this point to override the urgings of the emotionally tagged cognitive processes preparing the arm to withdraw, and decide consciously to leave the hand where it is. It is only at this stage that there is an experience of pain, the consciousness of that pain, and its accompanying and following thoughts, feelings and attitudes. In other words, individual consciousness is not present in the action of the hand and the hotplate until after the responsive action had been prepared for and the possibility of not carrying out that action has arisen. It is, to paraphrase Damasio, the feeling of what may or may not happen. The possibility of this choice is the source of identification.

It might be assumed that prior to the moment at which consciousness became identified with this action and pain it had been identified with something else. Individual consciousness simply had another focus, another set of contents, although possibly less laden with emotional value and the urgency which accompanies it. If this is the case, then this consciousness would be constituted through the successive feelings of whatever has happened, arising in response to the hailing of emotionally tagged stimuli. Just as my momentary consciousness (of pain) is individuated as a response to the hotplate, allowing me the option to maintain that sensation, so my apparently continuous individual consciousness arises as a neverending succession of such individuations.

One conclusion we may draw from this is that, if one is trying to minimize individual consciousness in order to enter some kind of enlightened state, then one should avoid situations in which such decision-making must take place.

Posted in Damasio, Antonio, Emotion, Enlightenment, Feeling | No Comments »

Thinking and Feeling

August 27th, 2007 Fred McVittie

In ‘Descartes Error’ Antonio Damasio makes the point that the common separation we make between emotional ‘feelings’ and rational ‘thoughts’ does not stand up to close scrutiny. Damasio draws particularly on the case of railroad worker Henry Gage, who suffered severe damage to the brain in an explosion that blasted a six feet tamping iron through his head. The unfortunate Gage, whilst he did not suffer physically debilitating injury, was profoundly changed by the accident, and that change resulted from his ability to experience appropriate emotional responses. Although Gage was apparently able to use his full capacities for logical thought and reason, the damage to his emotional responses meant that the purpose or reason for such thought was absent or misplaced. Decisions which should have been easily made became impossible, and choices in which one option would be self-evidently the best were often made badly. The reason for this was that the emotional intelligence which gave the alternatives presented by such choices and decisions different felt values was missing. In the absence of the emotional weight which we normally feel is attached to the various possibilities offered by a choice of action, there is no guide to tell us which possibility is correct. After his accident, Henry Gage became a drifter and something of a delinquent. Being unable to plan his individual life or to function well in society he stumbled through the last of his days in a chaos of ill-judged and disengaged behaviour. The lack of a properly functioning set of emotions prevented his otherwise unimpaired brain from being rational.

An analogy to the unusual circumstances described above, this ability to use the felt sense of what happens, is routine in daily life and the consequences of its absence are easily imagined. When I accidentally put my hand on a hotplate the pain I receive is a highly effective cue to move my hand away and to ensure that I do not repeat the experience. The hard-wired intelligence of the body, in the form of the pain response, leads me to the rational act of moving my hand away from the source of that pain. If I were somehow unable to feel pain, this instinctively rational act of self-preservation would presumably still be a good idea but it is one that I would have to arrive at through a process of logical thought, weighing up the alternative possibilities to decide whether to move my now-smouldering hand from the source of heat. It may even be the case that, if I truly was devoid of any emotional relationship to the outcomes of any action, then even this weighing-up would not be possible. One outcome would not appear any more valuable than another: burning or not burning, surviving or not surviving: each possibility would be equally lacking in attractiveness or repulsion, and I would presumably have no reason not to leave my charred limb where it was until someone with a better functioning brain came along.

This literal sense of feeling, grounded in the ‘primitive’ pleasure/pain responses of the body and central nervous system, may be only tangentially related to the type of ‘feelings’ we usually talk about when we think of emotional intelligence (although Ledoux and others make greater claims). ‘Feelings’, as a synonym for ‘emotions’ usually refers to complex mental states rather than the apparently simple knee-jerk cognition of pain and pleasure. The analogy, if that is indeed what it is, is nevertheless telling, as evidenced by the case of Henry Gage noted above. Lack of an emotional component to cognition, whether this be the simple CNS action of withdrawing from a source of pain or the complex and powerful emotional responses which accompany difficult, fully conscious decisions (think ‘Sophie’s Choice’), leads to an inability to make good rational choices, or indeed any choices at all. In this sense, all intelligent rational thought and action is dependent upon the emotional weight we distribute throughout the structure of those thoughts and actions.

One implication that emerges from these findings relates to the making of decisions or the thinking of thoughts with which we do not, or cannot, have any emotional relationship. This might include decisions which affect others but not ourselves or close friends or family, and ideological or political philosophical thought in which there is an apparent need for the development of rational ideas uncoloured by partisan feeling. However, these seemingly detached thought processes are usually drawn within the orbit of emotional access by the application of some version of the Golden Rule. We generally make decisions which affect others by ‘putting ourselves into their shoes’ and imagining what positive or negative effect a particular decision would have on their well-being. This identification supplies the necessary emotional weight which makes rational thought and action, even at a distance, possible. (This does depend, of course, on our willingness to carry out such identification. History is littered with atrocities resulting from ‘rational’ decisions in which the emotional responses of millions carried no weight whatsoever).

This interpersonal, ‘EQ by proxy’ method of effective thinking is a standard part of moral philosophy, although it may not be phrased in quite this way. This aspect of feeling and thought is outside the aims of this writing however and will not be developed here. A more interesting problem from my point of view is a consideration of how effective thought and action can take place when the contents of that thought are not human, or even human-scale. We routinely think about concepts which are either too large, too small, to brief or too extended in duration, or simply too abstract to merit what we usually think of as an emotional component. We confront highly technical and often counter-intuitive ideas and find ourselves working with these ideas and making decisions in their light, yet these ideas concern entities, forces, or principles which are way beyond human embodiment and scarcely within the reach of human comprehension. How do we think about the origin of the Universe? What ‘emotional intelligence’ informs the way we conceive of a Higgs Boson or a Charmed Quark? Or regarding a possibly more pressing abstraction, how do we make good choices about climate change or foreign policy?

Posted in Consciousness, Damasio, Antonio, Embodiment, Emotion, Feeling | No Comments »

Emotion and Cognition

October 4th, 2007 Fred McVittie

There is no cognition without emotion, even though we are often unaware of the emotional aspects of our thinking’. (Johnson, M. 2007. p.9)

Johnson, M. (2007). The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding. University of Chicago Press. London.

Posted in Aesthetics, Cognition, Emotion, Johnson, Mark | No Comments »

buddhism emotion cognition

October 7th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Buddhist Thought and Contemporary Science

Ayya Khema:

“In Pali, heart and mind are one word (citta), but in English we have to differentiate between the two to make the meaning clear.
When we attend to the mind, we are concerned with the thinking process and the intellectual understanding that derives from knowledge, and with our ability to retain knowledge and make use of it.
When we speak of “heart” we think of feelings and emotions, our ability to respond with our fundamental being.
Although we may believe that we are leading our lives according to our thinking process, that is not the case. If we examine this more closely, we will find that we are leading our lives according to our feelings and that our thinking is dependent upon our feelings. The emotional aspect of ourselves is of such great importance that its purification is the basis for a harmonious and peaceful life, and also for good meditation.”

There is a parallel here to Damasio, Ledoux, on role of emotion in cognition.

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The Order of Fear

November 17th, 2007 Fred McVittie

When we see something that scares us, and causes us to back away, intuition tells us that the order of events in this process is as follows;

1. The information from the world, say the light reflected off the tiger, enters our eyes
2. The information is processed by the visual centres of the brain, allowing us to consciously recognise the tiger
3. Because we know that tigers are dangerous we are consciously fearful
4. Also because of our knowledge of the dangers we decide to run away.

This order, whilst it seems logical, is inaccurate. A more likely chain of events is as follows;

1. The information from the world, say the light reflected off the tiger, enters our eyes, along with a lot of other information-bearing light
2. The pattern-seeking systems in the brain search the data for particularly salient features, particularly those offering opportunities and threats
3. The salience is dependent upon the affordances offered by the pattern, so this affordance is what is searched for. In the case of the tiger it would be the potential for causing physical harm.
4. A tiger-shaped pattern or ‘affordance structure’ is recognised.
5. The recognition of this affordance structure causes an immediate physical response pattern, that off running away.
6. Part of this response pattern is the release of chemicals into the body that facilitate prompt action.
7. After the action has already been triggered the conscious parts of the mind note the physical and biochemical changes and experience these changes as ‘fear’.
8. Alongside this feeling of fear there is conscious awareness and recognition of the tiger.
9. This conscious recognition allows us, if we choose, to block the action of running which has been initiated, if we wish to protect our loved ones for example.

Posted in Consciousness, Emotion, Fear, Feeling, Sense | No Comments »