Open Your Eyes

Emotions are constructed and framed by our conscience; what we perceive as a feeling is a concept that lives inside our perception of reality, propagated by our culture.

“The human brain is a cultural artifact. We don’t load culture into a virgin brain like software loading into a computer; rather, culture helps to wire the brain. Brains then become carriers of culture, helping to create and perpetuate it.” — Lisa Feldman Barrett

Close your eyes, internalize yourself inside your body. Can you feel everything going on inside of you? Your kidneys processing the blood flowing inside your veins, your inner organs shifting and adjusting to your posture, or the cluster of neurons in your gut constantly firing signals throughout your body… Can you feel it? No, not precisely, but perhaps you can imagine how you would feel it. Your mind does have a method it employs for you to communicate with all the internal processes going on inside your body. This is called introspection, the act of feeling what is happening inside us.

We often introspect by having internal conversations, where we conceptualize and frame our thoughts and patterns. Your conscience will normally spend more than 50% of it’s time simulating and introspecting variable scenarios. The media and information you consume will seep in and offer suggestions. Passive introspection happens without you ever realizing it, but it is largely an internal process. Your body, as it shifts and contorts from within, will send your mind signals in the form of pain, pleasure, energy or lethargy. Your mind is not a reactive vessel however, it does not simply react to what is going on around you, that would be largely inefficient. Instead your mind predicts what will happen to you, let’s say in the next 5 mins or so, setting up a frame of reference for your mind to account for what is about to happen to you. This is why you tense up before the subway car starts to move or why you’re hit with waves of anxiety before you approach that girl at the bar.

These predictions are usually determined by a combination of your experiences and your imagination (the mind’s simulations). Your mind will then simultaneously correct its predictions as it interacts with the real world. Based on the errors you simultaneously discover in your predictions, your mind will release a frame of mind for you to occupy or an affect. This feeling can be based around the amount of energy your body is willing to dispense based on its predictions. This feeling can also be based on your experience or your vivid imagination. Essentially affect drives everything you do, even the fact that you make rational decisions, is driven by a pleasurable affect that is accompanied as an outcome of you making “rational” choices in life. I like to think of it as a mental conditioner, it conditions your mind to approach reality with an emphasis.

This affect, or the frame of mind your brain sets for you is also dependent on how well you maintain your health. Lack of sleep, consuming drugs, having cancer, etc will disturb your affect in a way that communicates that something is wrong. Your body will send signals via passive introspection to your mind, your mind will adjust it’s predictions around those signals and will likely punish you for mistreating yourself. This can also occur due to chemical imbalances in the brain, etc.

Affect is crucial to our daily routine, it determines our performance in the real world and it is what maintains our mental health, giving us the positivity, hope and happiness to live our lives to the best of our abilities. Yet this affect is variable to every human being, so how do you internalize the range of affect, or the different states of affect?

How you feel is best explained by communicating your emotions. Unlike what Charles Darwin believed, emotions are not unique to humanity as a whole. Not everyone feels anger, sadness, happiness or fear as you will; there is no universal fingerprint for any emotion. Your brain does not have a specific cluster of neurons designated to fire when you feel angry or sad. Instead, multiple, of the same, neurons will fire and your mind will interpret those signals and construct an emotion. Your mind will always describe or construct a concept around how you feel, based on what is happening to you in that exact moment.

Anger could be perceived as an energized sense of displeasure because your boss is ordering you to work overtime. Based on this feeling you might lash out with your fists (a different cluster of neurons in your mind prevent you from doing so if you have common sense) or you might recede into a cold state, and scheme to overcome the issue in front of you.

Anger could as easily be perceived as a heightened sadness, anxiety, stress, or fear based on the situation. There is a lot of range to our emotional concept of “Anger,” but it will encompass all stages of it as one because our language and our culture has defined a general sense of “anger”. Because of how our culture or our experience has wired the concept of “anger” into our minds, we simply feel an affect that is perceived as anger, depending on our ability to construct it as such. Anger is not unique to the universe, anger is a concept.

“Anger, sadness are not universal. The way people make sense of sensations differ by culture.” — Lisa Feldman Barrett

Professor Lisa Feldman Barrett, a neuroscientist, explores how our emotions work in her non-fiction novel How Emotions Are Made. That book has truly revolutionized my life, the ideas that I had swimming around in my head were purely constructed by my imagination, but her research is what helped me build a scientific foundation around something I’ve always known to be true: every human is the constructor of their own reality.

To humanity as a whole, our true reality is our social reality. Our social reality dictates the terms of our existence by giving us the tools we need to live fulfilling lives in an organized approach. We follow the rules of our social reality every day. We adhere to the rules set by our sense of morality or simply by a higher institution to control the chaos of our nature. We communicate with one another, passing information along to help our own lives improve against an external entity, that would otherwise fail to understand us. We distinguish between right and wrong, we make informed decisions, we argue, we do stupid things and we constantly misunderstand and misrepresent ourselves and the people around us. Our social reality is what gives us meaning in our lives, it is largely dependent on the information that we pass to one another throughout our lives.

If you’re like me, you’ve sometimes felt empty or incomplete. You feel as if you have failed to feel something that everyone around you has been experiencing. You know exactly what I mean, don’t you? The fact that you can relate to this feeling from two sentences of me describing it, is incredible. If you haven’t felt like this specifically, you can somewhat understand the concept behind it. This is how emotion travels across our social reality. It’s helping us to communicate a state our minds can accompany, you might even feel it yourself. By communicating how I feel, I can elicit a response from you. In this case, it’s probably some form of sadness in understanding (emotions have the potential to elicit dangerous emotions like anger in other people as well). However you only really know what I’m talking about, if you’ve felt something similar yourself.

“You know you’re in love, when all the songs on the radio start to make sense.”



— Anonymous

Take love for instance. The concept of love exists as a powerful and desirable emotion in our culture. Love is a major theme in our movies, and our music. Media/culture in general has dictated the terms and conditions of love. Largely, we as human beings, have no idea what the fuck love actually is, yet we all biologically and culturally hunger for love, as a noun, as a verb and as an adjective. Love can be communicated by simply giving someone attention or superfluously speaking in prose with a honey-laced tongue. It can also be displayed in the act of fornication or “fucking” as a rougher, more urban concept. Love is all around us, in a throne of it’s own creation and is desired blindly by all humans alike. The thing is, love only exists in our constructed social reality, it is not a universal emotion.

Truthfully, we all experience love differently, as an emotion. Sometimes it overcomes us, or defeats us, then sometimes it invigorates us and gives us purpose. Sometimes it breeds an air of respect between two individuals, or knocks down every barrier, reducing two high functioning adults to mere children. At times it withers and fades, other times we fight and bleed for the love we share. We all feel and respond to “love” differently. We try to differentiate being “in love” versus “loving”” someone, which brings us closer to the truth: love is simply the perception of a cluster of different feelings and moods that help us to define what we are experiencing when we feel “love”.

This is why we often consult our peers when we start to feel “love”. We have no fucking clue what to do next, so we ask our friend (who probably has less of an idea of the concept) for their opinion on how to leverage, overcome or perceive “love.” In today’s world, it can be frustrating to deal with all the charades that develop as an outcome of our disillusionment with “love” (perhaps that’s just a part of natural selection). We turn to culture, or media to explain how “love” works, and in turn we can truly be let down by the reality of love. Approaching it, within a neurotic or even psychotic frame of mind, demeaning the concept of love that was initially wired into our minds. Our culture will continue to define the concept of love as a universal and absolute truth. But it’s not. Love is just a concept.

“Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.” — Albert Einstein

Love is a concept, but it doesn’t mean it’s not real. Out of all we experience in this world, love is the greatest feeling of them all. That is universally how our social reality defines it and it is perhaps how you will place love amongst all your other emotions. Naturally, it might not measure up to how culture defines love, especially not in the bollywood sense of romantic love, however you will likely feel what we perceive as “love,” if you attempt to mate with someone (experience) or simply begin to treasure a relationship that you foster with somebody else (simulation). The love you share with your mother and father, and the love you share with your wife or girlfriend, and the love you share with your friends are completely different states of mind. But these states of mind are grouped into the same concept of “Love.” Love can be sexual, romantic, paternal, maternal, respectful, narcissistic…

Love encompasses several concepts, it exists as an overall summary of something we all feel. Our social reality has dictated the terms of love, it has defined the nature of love. It has made suggestions on how to preserve or nurture more love, but the concept is still not truly universal to every human being, even if our general understanding of it is. So we continue to chase the pure bliss that accompanies love, as our culture has promised.

Happiness in general should not be dictated by a concept. Happiness as a concept, is a healthy affect, frame of mind, or mood that we should embody as a culture. It should not be weighed down by concepts that we believe are universal and unchangeable. We should have the ability to accurately define or shape what makes us happy, as individuals, and communicate that definition to the rest of the world, so they can understand it from their perception of reality. Our culture has a responsibility to build the tools we need to improve our understanding of emotions and moods.

This is how humanity evolves: we build the tools we need to improve our social reality thereby improving as a species and as individuals. In an age where disillusionment, depression and discontent is experienced by the masses, and people put their faith in leaders who manipulate their ill-informed perceptions, we will need these tools now more than ever. For our social reality to evolve and improve, we have to be able to understand how our concepts of “love” truly affect every individual. How happiness, fear, anger, sadness, disgust and all else affects everyone in their own way. That in itself, deserves more weight and understanding across our culture.

The collection of your experiences and what you choose to simulate or predict about your future will always determine how you perceive your reality. How you choose to define what you feel will determine how external forces will react to you. If your perceptions are based in ignorance, you will simply see color not a person or you will feel anger, where you have the opportunity to see love, and external forces will continue to anger you. We deserve the ability to naturally express how we truly feel, and our culture has an obligation to give us the tools to improve how we perceive our reality, because it can only be done from within.

Your mood is your own. It will either defeat you, or invigorate you to live your best life, and that’s exactly what I want for the both of us. I want you to shape and define your mood, so we can live our best lives, and absorb or transmit our culture meaningfully.

More to come in Journal 007.

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