The Winding Path

While we still don’t have a crystal clear picture of how the brain works, a combination of neurological, psychological, and related research, has over the years formed a convincing picture of the processes involved.

Emotions surface in response to perceptions and thoughts. Thoughts surface in response to perceptions or other thoughts. We take action in response to certain feelings, which in turn are triggered by certain thoughts or perceptions. Emotion, thought and action are all deeply intertwined and each has implications for the others. Everything we do reduces to chains of stimulus and response.

What we sometimes consider pure feeling is often a combination of emotional response as well as associated ideas embedded in our brain, beyond the focus of our conscious attention. What we consider intuition often involves those same subconscious ideas, masked by their lack of individual clarity as the emotions they’re collectively associated with.

Take the impression of a first date as an example. When you first meet your date you’re experiencing a range of fairly strong emotions and, if you’re at all like me, not very much conscious thought. Yet your brain is working away the whole time, noting details and responding to those details with impressions previously associated with similar details. All of this happens in an instant, on a surprisingly large scale, and most often beyond our conscious awareness.

But we are aware of the emotions we feel, triggered by that shower of subconscious activity. You might feel anxious, your previous confidence quickly dwindling after the first few stammered sentences go back and forth. Or you might feel relieved, your pulse slowing and your words flowing freely as your date enthusiastically responds to your opening words.

Did you think anything immediately before those emotions arose? Probably not. You might have thought something after the fact, and you might have been mentally rehearsing what you were doing to say, but the first response to your perception of your date is emotional. But that doesn’t mean thoughts aren’t involved, or that your reaction has purely emotional content. The emotions themselves are a response to what you perceive, and that response is conditioned by either instinct, or repeated exposure.

The more frequently you perceive a certain thing, and the stronger your emotions associated with it, the more readily you recognise it. The more readily you recognise something, the less likely you are to think about it. Therefore you are more likely to consider your reaction to be purely emotional, or intuitive, regardless of the conscious attention and thought required to condition that reaction in the first place!

So what happens in our brain to create these responses? Well it seems that the part of our brain which oversees our working memory and our ability to reason also uses a large amount of energy to do its work. However, when that work is carried out repeatedly the same functions are gradually made possible by other parts of the brain; new wiring is created to handle those functions, and to handle them automatically! The latter, hard-wired portions of the brain deal with the specific tasks they were created for (and are related to), whereas the working memory and reasoning centre must be more dynamic, able to cope with any situation, whether encountered before or not, and be able to create the more static parts.

This is good for a number of reasons, one of which is that once we’ve learned a certain response, such as pleasure in response to being accepted by your date, you don’t have to think about it any more in order to gain the rewards. Another positive is that once a response has been conditioned, it is still possible to change that response if necessary, by once again directing conscious attention to your response when the stimulus occurs. So you become less nervous on those first dates as you repeat the experience while focusing on the positive outcome.

But this isn’t a “how to” so I’ll leave that to someone else.

PS: Feel free to rip my words apart if you have an alternate view

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 11th, 2007 at 4:24 pm and is filed under Psychology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.