What we feel, see, smell, touch, hear, and taste are as important and striking as our emotions. Emotions are our soul songs that croon their ‘hearts’ out — they understand, they analyse, they slide, and go deep into the vast recesses of our being. They caress us just as much as they do for others.
It is, indeed, the irony of life that some of us reject our essential feelings — the fulsomeness of our emotions. In addition, most of us block our sense of vision, or ward off what we don’t want to hear. Emotions are as precious as a chip is to a gadget. To highlight a common paradigm — all of us go through difficulties, and when something brings us solace, or comfort, we just go about our business by merely shaking our heads, or shrugging our shoulders: “Ah, this was what that happened; and, this was how we managed to navigate through Catch-22s.” In other words, we often glide through the surface and do not attempt to scratch the label deep within — to exploring the crux of the matter.
“Wouldn’t it be ‘loverly,’” as Eliza Doolittle [Audrey Hepburn] uttered in “My Fair Lady” is a simple, yet skilfully articulated visage of our experience. It grants our emotions far more importance than we do, because we do not always acknowledge in terms of facts. We do not look at everything we do in life based on facts. We don’t fall in love based on facts. We don’t fondle a charming child based on facts. We follow our call with our emotions, not facts — when our natural instincts tell us to caress a child, we just do it. If something stops us, we just don’t. It’s as simple as that. But, look at the mode through which we make our life so complex, or awfully difficult.
As the American neuroscientist, Jaak Panksepp, suggested, “Emotions are the psychoneural processes that are influential in controlling the vigour and patterning of actions in the dynamic flow of intense behavioural interchanges between [people], as well as with certain objects that are important for survival. Hence, each emotion has a characteristic ‘feeling tone’ that is especially important in encoding the intrinsic values of these interactions, depending on their likelihood of either promoting, or hindering survival — both in the immediate ‘personal’ and long-term ‘reproductive’ sense. Subjective experiential feelings arise from the interactions of various emotional systems with the fundamental brain substrates of ‘the self’ that is important in encoding new information as well as retrieving information on subsequent events and allowing individuals efficiently to generalise new events and make decisions.”
“The most fundamental emotions, or basic emotions,” as Joseph LeDoux — a neuroscientist, whose work on survival circuits, emotions, such as fear and anxiety, are significant — put it, “are those of anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise.” Such emotions have a long history in human evolution; they have developed primarily to help us make rapid judgments about stimuli and also to swiftly direct appropriate behaviour. The fundamental emotions are determined by one of the oldest parts of our brain, the limbic system, including the amygdala, hypothalamus and thalamus. That they are primarily, also evolutionarily, moulded makes the whole process just as well experienced and showcased in much the same way across cultures, where people are pretty accurate at judging the facial expressions of people from diverse cultures.
It is not that all our emotions emerge from the pristine parts of our brain. We habitually, without a prompt, deduce our experiences to create a complex assortment of emotional experiences. For instance, the amygdala may sense fear when it ‘feels’ that the body is ‘falling,’ but this fear may be construed as entirely different [perhaps, even as exhilaration] when we are falling on a roller-coaster ride rather than when we are falling from the sky in an airplane that has lost control. They relate to cognitive elucidations that escort emotions, while allowing us to experiencing a much larger, more complex set of ancillary emotions.
Why we are sometimes not what we are is a reflection of our thoughts, emotions and responses, because we may not always attend to our inner call — the use of empathy to perceive emotions as a resource. It’s also a paradox that many of us view our emotions through terrified eyes. We often think, “What if others call us emotional fools?” The result is a clichéd outcome — of being judged by others, as having poor emotional health, or being impulsive, or irrational, by way of responses. We will do well for ourselves if we grasp the idea that impetuous and unreasonable behaviours occur only when we are destabilised by the faults and apathy of our emotions — while being insensitive, or apprehensive. It isn’t difficult to change and amend the equation, if only we use our emotional intensities to process our emotions as we experience them. Once this happens, we are less likely to experience the anxieties that occur when unanswered troubles are activated, or set-off, by topical events.
Have you not seen certain people depending exclusively on the intellect and hard numerical data in the process of problem solving? Most successful people, for instance, often recount as to how a suitable decision was ‘engineered’ at the spur of the moment, a ‘gut feeling,’ which turned the tables and made them what they are today. Yet, how many of us use our gut feelings, a major component of our emotional attributes, in decision-making? Things work best when we become more conscious and responsive to our feelings and make good use of them and evaluate their impact on our own and others’ behaviour. Or, recognise, and appreciate, why they were created, released, and resolved in our minds. Most importantly, we’d all do well to understand that we are much more intelligent than what modern science, perhaps, suggests.
— First published in The Himalayan Times, Nepal
