2004, Duke University researchers have discovered that
the human brain's emotional center, called the amygdala, interacts with memory-related brain regions during the formation of emotional memories, perhaps to give such memories their indelible emotional resonance.
People seem to enjoy doing something jointly with other people. There is a lot of evidence that the emotional resonance singing may unlock the brain.
Have you ever noticed that an emotional state seems to feed upon itself?
Anger, for example: something your cat does, like walking behind that vase on
the top book shelf, causing it to wobble and you to panic, really ticks you
off. So you’re there in a helpless rage, and you begin to think about all the
other annoying things he does (and he seems to know exactly what annoys you),
and pretty soon you are thinking of everything the cat does that makes you
angry, and you’re getting angrier and angrier by the minute.
In domestic relationships, such experiences lead to what one popular
psychologist called "the kitchen sink" argument: a person and their spouse get
into a tiff about some minor incident or habit, and instead of settling that
issue and letting it go, one is reminded of other incidents that have aroused
the same anger. "And another thing," they begin, and soon they’ve thrown
"everything but the kitchen sink" at their partner, relating all the times
they’ve felt the same kind of anger.
Anger, like other emotions, causes specific bodily sensations. Very likely
the sensations are the result of particular electro-chemical changes in the
body, the release of certain hormones, and those changes come to be recognized
by the person not individually but collectively as "anger." We feel angry.
Or we feel sad.
Our memories are stimulated by similarities. We re-cognize a familiar face.
We re-member an old melody. Our brain makes connections—synapses—and
similar connections create patterns. Pattern recognition is one of the most
basic of our mental faculties. Sometimes the patterns we recognize are
completely out of our awareness, but our brains are busily comparing this
situation or sensation with others, looking for similarities so that it can
organize our experiences into coherent life.
When those similarities are perceived, even on an unconscious level, all of
the individual elements become more readily available to our consciousness. That
particular shade of pink in the wallpaper reminds us of another, seemingly
unrelated experience from a long time ago, perhaps a woman who often wore that
shade of lipstick. Odors, because they are often indescribable in words, have an
especially strong effect on our memory without being cluttered by rational
processes. That shade of lipstick reminds us of her perfume, and that reminds us
of an emotional scene the day she left. Our noticing the wallpaper in a room
reminds us of her, and of our pain. Wallpaper makes us sad.
So much of our daily experience is non-verbal. If we try hard, we can often
put words to our experiences so that we can describe them to someone else. But
the other person may not have the same felt sense stimulated by our
words, so that even though they hear us and understand what we are saying, they
don’t get the same emotional experience. On the other hand, a good novelist or
poet or musician can remind us of familiar feelings by creating familiar
patterns in our sensations.
There’s a whole language that we develop inside our brains and bodies, a
language that’s unique to us, that can only be approximated when we try to
communicate with others. My shade of sky blue reminds me of a particular sky, on
a particular day, with a particular person—and a particular emotional situation.
Your "sky blue" stimulates a totally different memory in you.
So, when we suddenly feel an emotion—anger, sadness, happiness, fear—that
seems irrelevant to the current situation, it may be helpful to explore the
other contexts of that emotion. Very likely there’s a pattern. It may have
nothing to do with what’s going on now, but it is flavoring the current
experience. An emotional resonance.
"I don’t like that person. I don’t know why. Something about the way he combs
his hair." That person is emotionally crossed off my list of potential friends.
Or trusted associates. Whether we want to or not, we react to people and
experiences—we even perceive differently—because of subtle chemical changes in
our bodies, and dusty old synapses, buried deep beneath our consciousness.
Perhaps a lot of psychotherapy involves trying to untangle the mess of yarn that
we call our minds.
Back in the 1970s a book entitled "The Crack in the Cosmic Egg," by Joseph
Chilton Pearce, posed the idea that we are born with a very close relationship
to the universe, but are taught to ignore that relationship and instead pay
attention to the people around us. We slowly absorb the assumptions of our
culture and its language, and lose touch with that original "taste" of reality.
Now, it’s well that we do that; since we have to live in our culture, we need
the tools to survive in it. Most of those tools come to us through
language - words and syntax. ("Syntax," you remember, means "pattern.") A noted
anthropologist once said that a chimpanzee cannot be a chimpanzee alone; it
needs the company (and the culture) of other chimpanzees. The same must be true
of humans. We are human because we grow and live among humans. We feel the
things that other people feel, due to the words that we share to describe those
feelings.
But I can’t help but think that there’s more to us than we know—that is, than
we have words for. When I try to be aware of the felt sense of anger, I’m
at a loss for words. If I could identify the particular sensations, perhaps I
could avoid the trap of calling a feeling "anger" and then being reminded of all
the other "angers" in my life. Maybe this situation is unique after all. Maybe
my life could be vastly richer, if only I could pay closer attention. Just as in
listening to a piece of music over and over, maybe I could begin to discern the
subtleties that are there, right in front of my face, that I have overlooked all
these years.
Donald Skiff, January 31, 2002