EMOTION IS UNCONSCIOUS
Emotion is unconscious. What we call the “sub” conscious is only a small fraction of what’s going on in the brain. Everything mammal, which is the great bulk of our accumulated genome, is not at all conscious, but rather the neuroelectric management of everything inside our skin, plus some recorded info about what’s outside the skin, coded as sensations. Most of it is about regulation of substances and processes: thirst, need for salt, throwing out waste, and so on. Also, the mechanics of arms, legs and the neck, etc.
A part of the neuroelectric network is assigned to organs and triggers their soluble messaging through the autonomic system and the blood, the vascular system. It is more hydraulic than electrical, constricting or relaxing certain liquid feed systems, triggering molecules, and so on. It is mostly unconscious, reacting before we are aware of what’s happening.
Awareness of what that system is doing is what we call “emotion,” a subsection of the mammalian control system. It is not much noted by our conscious minds until the effects — trembling, flushing, syncope, tensing, eyes widening, vocalization — have taken hold. Then we notice. And then we give them concepts — joy, fear, amusement, attraction — and then we give the concepts representing the state of the body names according to our cultural categories. love, pleasure, horror, indignation.
These concepts of states, which “live” in the un/sub-conscious, can be accessed through the arts, dreams, echoing in repetition — all sorted but connected by sensations. I learned this in acting class because it is Stanislavsky’s “Method” for actors: locating in oneself the moments in memory that can put the actor back into the state that fits the moment in the script. What was the weather? What the clothes and smells? Time of day? Sounds?
Today’s humans of whatever vocation tend to handle all of this backwards. They begin with the culturally defined emotion which they call feeling, when the feeling they should begin with is physical sensations in the concrete world. This mistake is partly because so much of our thinking now is determined by moments on a screen that only supplies sight and sound. Our consciousness gets used to only minding those two streams. Hypnotism or even guided concentration, as keeps showing up in the TV program “Criminal Minds”, can access far more sense memories. Probably intuition and gut feelings are not-quite-conscious sense information that wasn’t allowed.
Happily, words exist in a cloud of allusions and can summon sense impressions through talk and writing. Even abstract art carries an aura of unconscious emotional meaning. But it must be admitted that some people either cannot sense very much or cannot become aware of auras, shadow meanings, implications and associations. This is the hardest part of crossing from one culture to another because they won’t transfer and aren’t conscious or even rational.
In fact, they’re very hard to teach or even point out. The light dawned for me when at a workshop Peter Matthiessen pointed out why I should not say a buffalo had a purple mouth like a chow dog because both buffalo and dog have a cloud of association besides the literal meaning, and it is on that level that “buffalo” is a huge, dangerous, majestic wild creature but a “chow dog” is domestic, possibly low status, and a pet. (Actually, real chow dogs are biters and aggressive, so maybe I wasn’t that far off. I just knew chow dogs more vividly.)
At the time in that writing workshop, there were several young men who could not grasp this idea. They were of a science/math turn of mind in which things are specific and limited and any associations, emotional or not, must be excluded. Over time I’ve run into a lot of people who really did not perceive the associations of ideas and words. Many simply couldn’t — at least no amount of explanation met with more than a stare.
But others just didn’t have enough experience in the world or even its representation to have developed what is a sort of second vocabulary, a sub-liminal thesaurus of not-quite-the-same ideas and mental pictures. A body of thinkers like Mithen and Ingold, mostly in England, have been thinking about the evolving development of new concepts and their vocabulary in order to meet the needs of the neolithic thinkers developing new ideas and noticing new things. What must the flint-knapper perceive to find the right kind of substance and what concepts help him to shape the stone into the object he’s making and therefore needs to have a name?
This link is to an article by Mithen.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1469605318793958
“How did people come to ‘think Neolithic’? While there has been considerable progress in reconstructing the environmental, economic, technological and social changes associated with the transition from mobile hunter-gathering to sedentary farming and herding communities, we remain limited in our understanding of how Neolithic culture in its most profound sense arose. I suggest that the formation of new words required for that new lifestyle was as much a driver as a consequence of the Neolithic transition, illustrating this with a sample of Neolithic innovations from the southern Levant that appears likely to have required new words. Such words, I argue, helped to establish new concepts in the mind, shaped thought, influenced perception and ultimately the human deeds in the world that left an archaeological trace.”
Without the concepts developed by flint-knappers, we could not create faceted gem stones like diamonds. Without deep understanding of human emotional states and the words connected to them and to the sensations in which they are embedded, we could not write poetry or novels.
No one teaches this to writers. Instead the preoccupation is about writing as much as possible, as quickly as possible, for as much money as possible. “Grammarly” aside, which is mostly a matter of clarity, this deeper and more lasting understanding must mostly be acquired by reading by those who know how to do it. If you have capacity, your subconscious will teach you.
