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Cool hack: You can re-create these emotions by hacking the body sensations. Neuronal connections are bi-directional ("Neurons that fire together wire together"
by orasis 13y ago
Cool hack: You can re-create these emotions by hacking the body sensations.
Neuronal connections are bi-directional ("Neurons that fire together wire together"), so if you want to experience happiness, focus on feeling sensation all over the body just like the emotions maps.
A really easy (though not necessarily fun) one to try is disgust. Right now, just focus on the sensations in your neck. If you have any body awareness you should feel some yuckiness there. If you are unable to feel it, you may be a habitually hyper head-oriented person and may be totally disconnected from your emotional body. If this the case, I highly recommend learning to meditate to fix the issue.
For larger body sensations like happiness, just focusing your attention may not be enough though since your concentration may not be high enough and will naturally flit around. So in addition to focusing attention, move those parts of the body to generate sensation.
- cstavish 13y agoI wonder to what extent the results of such experiments would be due to the power of suggestion.
- hosh 13y agoSuggestion work precisely because people parse the suggestion into these body sensations.
- orasis 13y agoFrom my substantial subjective experience with Vipassana meditation I have found the correlations very strong. When doing Vipassana, especially the form called "Mahasi Noting", attention will "randomly" move around during the session. At various points you might have spontaneous thoughts of fear or disgust. Without any scripting it will be apparent that the body energy changed which caused the emotions associated with those body areas to arise. It's really really weird to be blissed out one second and experiencing existential fear the next, but that's what happens.
- hosh 13y agoAnd sometimes the bliss and fear happens at the same time.
- hosh 13y agoYep. This also happens to be the basis for traditional teachings and methods along these lines. Also: while emotions largely follow the average, individuals have specific variations that I think relate to habits or hangups accrued from living. In the meditative world, these bodily sensations that give variations from the basic emotions are called obscurations. If you focus your awareness on parts of it, then you can see memories and thoughts associated with that particular obscuration (as it arises from the body). Even cooler is when you watch it long enough, you start seeing how the whole pattern/set of these different body sensations change in a predictable pattern, sometimes even "triggering" another set of patterns. Finally, these very sensations also makes it difficult for people to "let go", like during meditation, or when things are going well. The mind is habituated to feeling these patterns of sensations, and when they don't happen, you literally start feeling like a different person ... and for many folks, that is frightening.
- jevinskie 13y agoVery interesting. I'm compelled to investigate further; are there any websites/books you could recommend for further reading? I have no meditation experience.
- hosh 13y agoSure. The one where you observe things as they arise is called insight meditation, or vipassana. Other commenters have referenced this :-D If you are looking for a book, "Mindfulness in Plain English" does well, but for many folks, it is easier to learn when someone walks you through it. There are also 10 day Vipassana retreats that can jumpstart your practice. (It is easy to fool yourself into thinking you are being mindful when you are not).