Friday, November 30, 2007
What's up there?
This thing we call our head, have you noticed how funny it is? It does such an incredible amount of work: all the learning, the understanding, coordinating all our movements (no wonder we land up being so clumsy :) ), but all this seems so mundane compared to the way we feel. The depth of sadness, the dizzy lightheartedness, the warmth of a sudden smile, the excitement of a new realization, the frustration of confusion, guilt, jealousy, even the numbness of boredom: our mind involves itself so completely in each emotion. And not only does it produce this spectrum of emotions, it somehow manages to contain them all and yet not mix them up. And although it is always coloured in at least one of these emotions, it manages to go beyond itself in a way and analyse itself: the extent of the emotion, the most likely reason for it and possible outcomes. Amazing!
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5 comments:
Aquila, I can't tell you how much I loved your post and how much it resembles my thoughts about the brain.
In a deep sense of wonder about this powerful thing that we have!
Drifting slightly, I am also interested in understanding how the brain achieved all this through natural selection (Ah, not again! Phew!) and how some of its limitations can be seen to have assisted in human survival and hence, these have also been encouraged through natural selection etc!
The brain is one truly awesome thing!
Hey! I think I was trying to convey a sense of poetic wondering more than scientific wondering. And I've not travelled so far down the science road that I'll confuse the two. :) But this was something that I hadn't thought of earlier: Why was the whole process of emotions naturally selected? Logically speaking, emotions can be very debilitating, but again, nearly all of our creative abilties kind of stem from our emotional sides. :)
I guess the greatest achievement of the human brain is the self-awareness, just the thought of thinking about thought processes... that a bunch of cells could do all that. Marvelous.
To answer that question of yours - Aren't emotions are vital for a social group? In a society, mere information means nothing, but the same information when communicated with different emotions may be much more effective. Emotions are partially debilitating at best, only when they get the better of you. :)
But can you truly imagine leading a life with absolutely no likes or dislikes, no preferences, no priorities, nothing?
@ Pavan: But that's the point. The fact that we can't even imagine living without emotions, shows how important they are for us. But at the same time, animals live without experiencing the whole spectrum of emotions. If you don't include 'creativity' in the same category, then I guess, in terms of achievement we'll still be able to achieve that much. But that's something I hadn't realised earlier: emotions provide the motivation to do what we do. They're the spark plug, for better or worse. :)
Actually, it seems highly presumptuous of us to think that animals don't have emotions. Animals do show anger and fear. Loyalty and love to a certain extent even. If a prey weren't afraid of it's predator, would the prey run away from it?
I guess emotions act like social cues - bared teeth indicating anger and implying that the other animal should back off. With the development of complex societies in humans, the need for more complex social cues arose... which must've led to the development of more complex emotions and varied ways of expressing them.
Language is still catching up to that, I think... and that might be causing the mess - words present a way to effectively communicate all emotion, but we still have some "primitive" ways of communication such as body language, gestures, tone of speech etc., which is still very much in use. In fact, we respond better to these than mere words, wouldn't you say?
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