The Seed of Every Human Creation. We talked about rationality against…
By: Alon Michael
Tags: Philosophy, Consciousness, Neuroscience, Emotions

Battle of Anghiari (Leonardo da Vinci)

We talked about rationality against fears and hopes, we discovered the enormity of the powers which are beyond our control and the little, instead, that we can control. We talked about desires and passions and, finally, about these little things that dictate our lives — the stories we all tell ourselves and through which we see the world and ourselves within it.

Now we can dig still deeper, to the sole generator of our life’s energies, the source of every motion within us. The driving unit of our being.

What would it take to make you achieve your goals? What is the power that can help you move mountains? Which is the driving force that is the seed of every human creation?

Before we start thinking about it, let me ask you this; do you consider yourself a rational person?

Wait, don’t answer yet.

Hold that thought and let me explain what I mean.

In my first article I explained what being irrational means; ‘emotion-based thinking’. That is, quoting that article, “Being controlled by your emotions, generating emotional, rather than rational ideas, while soothing your ego according to ever-changing moods and beliefs”.

Well, are you controlled by your emotions? Do you act while, consciously or not, trying to sooth your ego and the changing stories you tell yourself?

We all want to say that we are rational beings. We want to believe that we act only after considering and weighting our options, after foreseeing the outcomes while focusing on our rational mind rather than on our passionate heart.

Well, ‘we all want’ is a good summary of that paragraph.

Answering my question above, you would need to consider only one thing. The key to your answer, I believe, is the single most important thing one must learn and understand about the human behavior.

That thing is our emotions.

The source of every human action

Alicia Vikander in Ex-Machina

The word emotion originates from the Old French émouvoir, which means, ‘to stir up’, as in ‘to upset’. In its turn, émouvoir finds its origin in the Latin marriage of ‘ex’ and ‘movere’ — emovere. Ex is quite a beautiful word which means ‘out of’ or ‘from’, like the beautiful movie ‘Ex-Machina’ (Out of a machine). Movere on the other hand means, simply, ‘to move’.

Emotions are energy-in-motion, forever dynamic, forever moving, shifting inside our soul. Emotions are, simply and basically, what make us move and more broadly, what make us do. Do anything, for that matter.

You see, emotions are the driving force of our being. Everything within us starts, first, from an emotion.

Without the ability to feel, we would stay, forever, still.

You think that it is your mind that controls your life. That you, as Descartes said; ‘think, therefore you are’. Well, it is only partially true.

For us to understand what drives us to take any action, we must really understand how our emotional mechanism works.

Our species’ evolution imprinted upon us one very smart and effective coping mechanism, allowing us to deal with the world around us. For us to be able to handle every situation in life, be it a predator, a new environment, new social interactions, dealing with members of the opposite sex, with parenthood or with the loss of our loved ones, nature endowed us with instincts.

Any person on this plant, being attacked with an object swiped on their head from above, will defend themselves in the exact same way. Crossing our fisted hands in a cross shape, preventing the object from hitting our head. Instantly and instinctively our body sacrifices our hands to defend a much more important organ. This all happens without even the slightest conscious thought; it is an instinct.

This specific instinct, as many others, is not a practiced movement and it is shared in all of us. Evolutionary programed and ‘nature proof’, if you may.

Instincts are impersonal, universally distributed hereditary factors. We can all understand that our instincts, most of them have been created after tens of thousands of years of survival, are specifically formed forces which act upon us, much beneath any level of consciousness, pursuing their inherent goals.

One instinct’s goal is to keep us safe when facing danger, another is to keep humankind multiplying and yet another’s goal is to keep us seeking development despite potential danger, thriving instead of merely surviving.

Similar to all other species in nature, so are we, programmed to survive. Yet adapting to, and even thriving in nature is possible only with a survival plan. This plan’s blueprints, the result of endless trials and errors, is stored in our brains as instincts. Every encounter with our environment has its own, immediate, instinctual reaction.

Emotions, then, we can finally explain, are instinctive, involuntary reactions. Energies generated by our bodies when an impression from the environment is being unconsciously interpreted. Furthermore, our emotions upset the rational order of our consciousness by their elemental outbursts. They are just there, beneath any level of our control.

In his magnificent, and much recommended book, Affective Neuroscience, Jaak Panksepp explains that through the process of our evolution, and as any other mammal in nature, our ability to feel, to interpret our emotions, is a behavioral instinct which helps us to better identify events in the world around us. Events that are either biologically useful or harmful to us could only be identified as such by using this instinct, our emotions.

Only due to our emotions we can adapt and produce suitable responses to many life-challenging circumstances.

Being instinctual, emotions are not produced in our hearts or guts, as people like to think, but in our brains. Emotions are, quite practically, circuits of electrodes laid inside our amygdala and the mid-frontal cortex. The words we use to express emotional state of being — anger, sadness, scared, happy, afraid — are only symbols used to express the brain process behind the emotion we see on the surface.

An opportunity, not a fixed game

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The fact that the most important driving force in our body is an imprinted instinctual mechanism does not mean that our emotions dictate who we are, or who we will be. Yes, the emotional instincts wired in our brains are fixed, we are born with it the way it is, but this mechanism is an opportunity, not a predetermined game.

Let me explain.

While we are born with our emotional system already circuited in our brains, what we are actually born with is a variety of intrinsic potentials, mere perhaps. Like every biological mechanism in nature, every living creature is still evolving during its own lifetime. This life-span-evolution is called epigenetic.

Epigenetic is, quite simply, the result of nature — what we are born with — and nurture — what we receive and experience during our lives (nutriment, our environment, social care, stress, safety, etc.).

While nature, or the instinctual systems with which we are born, is fixed, nurture provides opportunities for these potentials to be manifested in a diversity of ways in real life.

Thus, while basic emotional circuits are among the tools provided by nature, their ability to permanently change the life course and personalities of organisms depends on the nurturance or lack of nurturance that we are provided with.

In more precise terms, everything we see is epigenetic, a mixture of nature and nurture. Emotions as well.

What does it mean?

It means that we are not slaves of our emotions.

We are all able to feel anger, we can all feel the pleasure of love and we can all feel the crippling emotions of fear or the excitement of hope. We can all feel happy or sad. But you know for a fact that there are some emotions you feel rather too often, and some that you do not. You also know people who are angrier than you or more stressful than you. You also know that in different periods of your life, different emotions were more dominant than others.

Emotions are, as I said above, opportunities rather than a fixed game. We all have the ability to feel all kinds of emotions but the extent to which we will be inclined to feel a specific emotion depends very much on our childhood and the environment in which we grew up.

You may now think that your childhood is well behind you and what good will it bring to think about an already fixed past? But I remind you yet again — epigenetic occurs over your entire lifetime. Whatever it is that happened to you during your childhood, making you feel anger more often than not, or sad, or feel endless joy — this too can change.

Our lives, every passing second of it, is an endless conflict of evolutionarily provided instinctual emotions and environmentally acquired representations of our present world.

Our bodies, and the brain as one of its parts, together with our minds and souls are all fighting one against the other on how to interpret everything that happens to us.

Now, let me ask you again. Are you a rational human being? Can you act using your thinking brain alone? Can you shut off your emotions in order to take one, lucid action?

Beyond Human Reason

Seneca and his pupil Nero (Museo del Prado)

Not too long ago I have found myself in an uncomfortable but rather unavoidable situation. I was sitting in a room and a man I knew quite well was doing his best to shout, curse and rage hell on me. I was being, as I now see it, emotionally attacked. Knowing that this moment will come, I tried to prepare myself as best as I could. I actually pictured that moment in my head and even tried to feel it in my body. Sitting in that room, being shout at, I was lucky enough to stop and think about what is happening to me. No matter how prepared I was, no matter how much I have tried to rationalize the situation, no matter what I was trying to say to myself, dictating my thoughts, I still felt a bit scarred, uncomfortable and stressed.

How could it be, I thought to myself, that I cannot detach myself from my emotions. How can I call myself a rational man if I cannot decide to focus solely on my reason to lead me — especially through this kind of situations? My thoughts and my emotions were fighting one against the other for control.

To find the root of my problem, we can use another brilliant book, this one by Antonio Damasio, called, how interesting, Descartes’ Error. In this book, Mr. Damasio, an American-Portuguese neuroscientist, explains how emotions are wired within our brain:

“There is a region of the human brain, the ventromedial prefrontal cortices, which stores our reasoning/decision making mechanism, and our emotion/feeling mechanism — especially in the personal and social domains. One might say, metaphorically, that reason and emotion “intersect” in the ventromedial prefrontal cortices”.

The ventromedial prefrontal cortices sit in the upper front part of our brain, right behind our forehead. What Damasio explains, simply, is that “certain aspects of the process of emotion and feeling are indispensable for rationality. Emotion, feeling, and biological regulation all play a role in human reason”.

We cannot, it seems, be only rational. Our feelings, as explained by Damasio, are an intrinsic part of our reasoning process. Damasio called his book ‘Descartes’ Error’ because when Descartes famously said “I think, therefore I am” he ignored the emotional part in the rationing process.

But what is left for us to do then?

In an earlier piece, I wrote: “Emotions are meant for feeling, not for thinking”, I also explained that in order to make rational decisions, we must detach ourselves from our emotions. But how could that be possible if our reason and emotions stem from the same neural system?

Since our emotional system has widespread consequences in our brain, virtually all other behaviors, our reason faculty included, are typically affected by emotional arousal.

How then, can we aspire to be rational beings, to act not emotionally, instinctively, but rationally?

Not controlled by, not ignored — but integrated

Ancient philosophies like Stoicism or Buddhism were teaching people to shut off their emotional stimulation, focusing on the thinking mind alone. Wisdom, not emotions or desires, they claimed, is the only way for ‘the good life’. Those philosophies’ illusions are created by our strangely human need to aspire to be more than we are — to feel closer to imagined angels than to other, real, animals.

On the other hand, being controlled by our emotions, seeing the world around us through our noisy emotional prism, will destroy us.

The answer then, like many other things in life, is to find a balanced middle ground.

We must learn to think, analyze and rationalize the world around and within us, taking into consideration our emotions. But in order to do that we must see emotions for what they truly are for us.

We said that emotions are instincts that help us deal with the environment around us. The key is then, to properly interpret each and every emotion we feel, trying to find the hidden message behind it.

Emotions have one job — making us aware of what happens around us, for good or bad. The emotion we feel in a specific moment, and a specific environment, is leading us towards, or against, that situation. Feeling anxious, we need to understand what is it in our environment that may put us at risk. Feeling blissful joy, we need to look for the people and situations that help us be in that state of feeling. What is it that we are joyous about?

Emotions could take you to the highest highs but just a moment after they can drag you to the lowest lows.

It does not mean we must avoid ‘feeling’, absolutely not. It only means that we must observe and learn the origin of our emotions so we could strip these chemical drivers off their mask. See them for what they are — triggers and effects. An outside action, we cannot control, followed by an emotion that instinctively steers us. Our control comes when we see the emotion for what our bodies try to tell us and decide whether we want to listen, or not.

Eventually, it all comes down to using the emotions as instructive instruments rather than actual guides.

When rationalizing, we must take our emotions into consideration but what we must remember is that emotions are only internal instinctive interpretation of our environment. Reflections of what is going around us. Making a decision based solely on these instincts is useless, while ignoring them completely will isolate our mind from our bodies and our animal nature.

The way to do that is one. Whenever you feel an emotion, any emotion — joy or anger, frustration or excitement — stirred within you, stop. Stop everything and listen. Listen to your body. Feel, fully, that emotion. Now look around you. Try to find the external source that your body instinctively interpret, creating that emotion you now feel.

Now that you clarified what is it that you feel and more importantly, what is it that made you feel this way, now you can think. Now you can take into consideration your reason, your feelings and the reality around you to weigh against the best potential outcome you can perceive.

Coming back to my story, sitting in that room while being aggressively shout at, I tried to identify the emotions: scared, stressed and feeling uncomfortable edginess.

Why should I be scared, I asked myself — this man cannot physically hurt me and there is nothing he can take away from me. The stress I felt, while thinking about it, was not mine but his. Shouting, fisting his hands, turning red, he was trying to contaminate my being with his stress and nervousness. But I have my constitute, I have nothing to be stressed about. And for the edginess? Well, being shout at isn’t nice but it ain’t so bad either. I knew that sooner or later he will get tired and out of breath. No reason to be edgy or uncomfortable.

And so, even while I definitely felt these emotions, I could make a better decision than the two proposed by my instincts: flight — run away, or fight him. Why didn’t I walked out of that room you ask? Well, whenever I have a good session in the gym, I tend to stay a bit longer and enjoy these feelings of joy and strength. Walking away from that room would cut short my ‘emotional-gym’ session, and why? I was doing great.

We can all practice this ability; to feel while thinking through the feeling as well. We can find a new reason, reason that is thought but also felt.

Master this practice and, for the first time, you would be able to answer positively to my question above. Now you could become a rational human being.