Perception Archives - Page 2 of 3

What Are So-Called
Secondary Emotions?

December 23, 2024 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

It isn’t exactly news, but the evidence that we are all walking around, unaware, inside our personal fog of vagueness is becoming hard to ignore. We not only lack clarity, but we are also unable to pin down (be specific about) what’s important to us. We use words, we engage in verbal communication, we consider and think about things, but we are often in the dark about the meaning of our own words, let alone the words of others.

So it is not such a surprise that much like investigating the ephemeral concept of empathy, investigating what is meant by secondary emotions leads to less clarity and more confusion. Empathy, as I previously discovered, is not a thing. The same can be said about secondary emotions.

Psychologists, psychotherapists, and other wellness-minded individuals don’t agree on what constitutes secondary emotions in the first place. In other words, the meaning is vague.

“Secondary” as a Characteristic

Some of them believe “secondary” is an attribute of particular emotions, meaning that those emotions labeled as such are never “primary.” But they do not agree about which emotions are secondary and which are primary. Nor is it easy to determine what this theory is based on or how it serves us in terms of survival.

There is a commonly-held belief that secondary emotions “mask” other emotions, but that would actually defeat the purpose of emotions, which is to provide us with information. Emotions are generated by the brain to keep us apprised of our current state of affairs. We may consciously attempt to hide our feelings from others or to change our emotional experience (for which we can’t blame emotions, since they don’t have intentions). But it’s one thing for us to want to keep that information to ourselves; it’s another thing altogether to want to keep it from ourselves.

The brain is attempting to tell us what it perceives we need to know (11 million bits of information condensed into a 40-bit stream); nothing more and nothing less. It’s not playing games with us or actively attempting to mislead us. If, for example, you’re feeling guilty, your brain generated that emotional response based on the circumstances and your personal mental model of the world. The conscious you may not enjoy feeling guilty. Your brain doesn’t care. It’s giving it to you straight—and automatically. It’s telling you that you violated your own moral code in some manner or to some extent. You get to brush it off, distract yourself, examine the situation and/or underlying beliefs, or rationalize it away. That’s on you, not your brain.

The same goes for psychology’s favorite secondary emotion, anger, which I’ve also written about. In that post from two years ago, I mentioned being unsuccessful in my attempt to determine the source of this concept of secondary emotions. I also considered that people who are uncomfortable with expressions of anger might be motivated to view it as a secondary emotion:

I suspect the secondary emotion idea is an attempt to cut anger down to size, so to speak. So-and-so isn’t really angry; he or she is actually sad or anxious or depressed or afraid or hurt: wounded in some manner. They’re not threatening; they’re vulnerable.

Of course, people may also apply this reasoning to themselves.

At this point, I’m more inclined to view the reaction from a broader perspective, though: less as discomfort with expressions of anger and more as discomfort with discomfort. Discomfort with expressions of anger is situational. Discomfort with discomfort is existential.

“Secondary” as a Sequence

Others believe secondary emotions are those that immediately follow the initial, primary, emotion. In that case, “secondary” is not an attribute of the emotion: any emotion can be either primary or secondary depending on where it shows up in an apparent sequence of emotional responses. But is that 10 seconds later, 10 minutes later, 10 days later, or 10 months later?

If you don’t understand that the brain is focused on what to do right now, then it seems conceivable that an emotion you’re experiencing today is a result of an experience you had two days ago. Your brain uses past experience to determine current action, but it doesn’t live in the past. The emotions you’re experiencing now are a response to what is going on, externally and internally, in the present.

I don’t know what makes a secondary emotion, in this context, significant. Are there always secondary emotions—emotions that are a reaction to a previous emotion? (If not, why not?) If so, aren’t all emotions secondary emotions given that there was always a prior emotion? But then the term is meaningless because there are no actual primary emotions. There are just emotions, one after another. Which, as it turns out, happens to be the case.

Categorizing Emotions

There are many different ways one could classify or categorize emotions. The brain categorizes things in order to get a quick grasp of what something is and how it pertains to us so it can figure out what to do about it. Speed is of the essence if you’re pursuing rewards but even more so if you’re dodging threats. Classifying emotions as primary or secondary is completely unhelpful to this process. In my opinion, it’s nothing more than psychobabble. Classifying emotions as good or bad may be easier to justify (potential reward or potential threat). But it’s not fail safe given that context and personal neurochemistry play a bigger role in determining how we experience an emotion than these black or white categories suggest.

What I’ve learned from those who specialize in researching the origins and functions of emotions is that there are many benefits and few, if any downsides, to getting granular (specific, not vague) and to getting comfortable experiencing a wide range of them.

It’s a Schabziger Moon. Or Is It?

November 30, 2024 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

We can’t ask (or answer) true or false questions about something if it isn’t real to begin with. By that, I mean that reality and truth are not the same thing. I also mean that there’s a hierarchy in that we have to first determine the reality of something before we can entertain questions about its characteristics or the nature of it.

I may be able to imagine a moon made of green cheese (a notion deriving from a Slavic tale involving, of course, a trickster—in this case a fox), but since such a thing doesn’t exist, I can’t claim to be able to determine that the cheese in question is Swiss green cheese.

On the other hand Swiss green cheese does exist; it’s called Schabziger. So I can ask if Schabziger is a cow’s milk cheese or a goat’s milk cheese.

What Is Real?

Dictionary definitions of the word real leave much to be desired. For example, one definition says real means:

existing or occurring in the physical world; not imaginary, fictitious,
or theoretical; actual

Something that is real, we are told, must be:

tangible: concrete; perceptible by the senses; not abstract or imaginary
objective: existing independently of perception or an individual’s conceptions; non-subjective
factual: accurate; true/truthful; conforming exactly or almost exactly to fact or to a standard

That would mean, among other things, that anything that is purely or primarily conceptual is not real. Hope, for example, or commitment or justice. What are we to make of the fact that people have apparently lived and died and killed for things—ideas, ideals, concepts, radical notions—that are, based on these definitions, not real?

Let’s put aside this characterization of real because it’s not useful—and it’s not based in neural reality. Neural correlates exist for every emotion we feel, every thought we have, and every sensation we experience. So there’s a physical basis for everything we’re aware of or even imagine. The specific thing or things we imagine may not be real, but neural activity related to our imagining can be tracked by an fMRI machine.

When I imagine a moon made of green cheese, the activity in my brain is real. The image in my mind is real, even though the image does not reflect physical reality. So I can imagine this moon to be made of Schabziger cheese—or any other kind of cheese: a different kind of cheese every day. Not only is my imagination not constrained by physical reality, it is also not constrained by a requirement for consistency. How cool is that?

What we seem to be asking when we ask whether or not something is real is does it exist, or in some cases, is it capable of existing. In fact, the definition of exist is to have being or reality; to be. Something can exist with or without being tangible. When I write fiction, I do a lot of mental pre-writing before I put words on paper or on a computer page. Those stories or story fragments are no less real when they exist only in my imagination. They don’t become real upon being written or typed. And whether or not a fictional story is transcribed, its characters and events (content) are not real, but the story is real. The story exists.

There are, of course, things we don’t know or don’t know about and things we can neither confirm nor deny the existence of. However, the idea that there are things that exist objectively, independent of our perception, is impossible to validate. Everything we perceive/experience has—necessarily—neural correlates.

What Is True (or Factual)?

The definitions of factual are even less helpful than the definitions of real, given that the words are often treated as synonyms. But as we all know, experience is real, and experience is not an accurate—or factual—reflection of reality. Our sense of self, of being a single self, is also real, but the single self we sense does not exist. It’s an illusion created by multiple processes in the brain. Our experience of it is real but it is not factual.

When we perceive a threat and experience fear, both the perception and the experience are real, but there may, in fact, be no actual threat. In order to define the nature (truth) of a perceived threat—and therefore the best response to it—we must first determine whether or not the threat is real.

Here are some things that are real, along with some facts about them that are true:

Three things that are real:

Climate
Humidity
Hurricanes

Three things that are true:

Average global temperature has increased by about 2° Fahrenheit since 1880.
Both air temperature and relative humidity affect the heat index (how hot it feels).
Since 1980, hurricanes have caused more damage in the U.S. than any other type of weather-related disaster.

Three more things that are real:

The book Deviate: The Creative Power of Transforming Your Perception
Beau Lotto
Neuroscience

Three more things that are true:

Deviate was written by Beau Lotto.
Beau Lotto is a neuroscientist.
Neuroscientists have identified patterns of brain activity that reveal how our expectations influence interpretation of sensory data.

The brain has to interpret sensory data in order to figure out what, if anything, we should do about it or in response to it. To do so, the brain constantly makes best guesses that are “good enough” for us to successfully navigate the world we live in: i.e., survive. Our brain did not evolve to interpret sensory data “factually”—meaning with complete accuracy. But we take our experience for granted—at face value—without much skepticism or even curiosity. As a result, we sometimes we get caught up in trying to determine the exact nature of the cheese constituting our imaginary moon without realizing the moon is not real.

Procrastination Is NOT a Thing

July 1, 2024 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

I just read another article about self-sabotage—which is also not a thing. Your brain does not have ill intentions toward you; believing that it does is irrational. This particular article used procrastination as evidence of the brain’s self-sabotaging tendencies.

The word procrastinate is meant to describe delaying or postponing taking a particular action: the emphasis is on not doing something. But when we’re awake we’re always doing something. Procrastinating doesn’t mean you’re sitting vacantly in a chair staring off into space or out a window not doing instead of cleaning the house or finishing a report or making that one phone call. No, it means you’re doing something else instead of the thing you think you should be doing. That seems obvious, right?

So why isn’t there a word for eating a cheeseburger for lunch when you planned to eat a salad? Why isn’t there a word for staying up late at night when you meant to get to bed before midnight? Why isn’t there a word for binge-watching a TV show when you intended to go to the gym? There’s only a word for doing one thing when you strongly believe you should be doing something else if it’s based on a real or self-imposed deadline.

There is no substantive difference between doing something other than the thing you think you should be doing, whether that involves what you eat, when you got to bed, how much exercise you do or don’t get, and say, when you complete a report or project.

All these incidences of doing something other than what you think you should be doing have a couple of things in common. One is the false belief that understanding the benefit of a particular behavior ought to automatically cause us to “do the right thing.” But understanding has no direct impact on behavior. So it’s completely unsurprising that we’re likely to do whatever we’ve been doing rather than do something different based on information or vague desires to shape up or be better.

Rewards ARE a Thing

Another is the fact that the brain moves toward what it believes will provide a reward and away from things it considers a threat. That means we’re inclined to do things that give us pleasure and avoid things that provide less pleasure or may even amp up stress neurochemicals.

If you like cleaning the house or writing reports or eating cheeseburgers or watching You Tube videos, you’re likely to do more of those things and less of other things. This is why we use rewards to motivate us to do things we don’t otherwise get pleasure from when we’re doing them but nevertheless want to have done. This is called using your brain. If you decide your problem is procrastination, however, you have diagnosed yourself with an imaginary condition that you have to explain (why do I sabotage myself?) and treat. Or you may simply use this imaginary condition to explain yourself to yourself and others. Neither approach will generate any change in behavior. There’s no solution to the problem of procrastination because procrastination is not a thing.

There is one difference between the behaviors that fall under the category of procrastination and other behaviors like the ones I used as examples. That difference is time. You can convince yourself you’ll choose the salad tomorrow or the next day; you can get to bed on time…eventually; you can start going to the gym next month. But if something has a deadline, you don’t have more time than that.

Nevertheless, moment-to-moment, the brain still moves toward what it thinks it will like and away from what it thinks it will dislike. A deadline in the future, with potential negative or positive consequences, is not compelling to the brain until the task becomes an emergency. Failure to eat a healthy diet or get enough sleep or enough exercise are not, moment-to-moment, perceived as emergencies by the brain because we believe that we have more time to get them right.

If you look at all these behaviors through the same lens, though, you can see that they all involve doing something in the present that we understand would be a good idea (good for us in one way or another) but that we don’t particularly want to do right now. We may believe that we should want to do them right now, but the fact is that we don’t.

The belief that we should want to do things that we don’t want to do because we know they’re good for us is one of the most counterproductive beliefs we can have. It’s an enormous obstacle on the path of creating any level of behavior change, let alone transformational change.

What would it look like if you gave this belief up? What might then be possible?

Although I haven’t mentioned specific neurotransmitters in this post, it is part of the series on neurotransmitters that both affect our behavior and are affected by our behavior.

It’s All about the Action

April 12, 2024 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

“I think therefore I am.” So declared Rene Descartes sometime in 1640.

Cogito ergo sum! was the culmination of his attempt to identify something he could be certain of, some bedrock truth of which there was no doubt.

Even he knew, way back then, that sensory perception can be incredibly misleading and was not to be trusted. His thinking led him to wonder if we are all hallucinating our experiences. Or part of the Matrix. These are not new thoughts.

In coming to his conclusion, Descartes assumed a separation between the physical and the mental that many members of the species continue to grapple with, at the same time he elevated the mental beyond all proportion.

Right off the bat, however, the first two words, as translated—“I think”—are totally misleading. They imply agency and intent. It would be more accurate to say “I have thoughts” or better, “thoughts have me.” Most of the thoughts running through our mind at any given time are involuntary and unintended. The best analogy is to the air we breathe.

Having air circulate via the nostrils, throat, lungs, etc. is highly desirable, but (fortunately) it isn’t under our voluntary control. It’s debatable how desirable it is to have thoughts continually circulating in the mind, but circulating thoughts, like circulating air, is not something to take credit for or, in the case of Descartes, crow about.

This is all to say that at least since Descartes, thinking has been assumed to be the crowning glory, so to speak, of the species. Granted, there are some tasks only thinking (i.e., System 2 logical/linear, voluntary/intentional thinking) can and should handle. But that kind of thinking is extremely hard, so we do very little of it. And even when we do it, if we don’t follow it up with action, there isn’t much point to it.

A number of false assumptions follow from the false belief that it’s what we think that matters most. The most significant of these assumptions is:

Understanding something will automatically have an effect on behavior, as will having a desire or an intention to do something.

Two more false assumptions:

We don’t need to pay much conscious attention to what we do.
Only some of the actions we take are worth paying attention to, in any case.

The unconscious part of the brain, however, pays attention to everything we do, including the things we’d really prefer no one—including us—noticed at all. It pays considerably less attention to what we think or even what we think about doing.

What Is the Brain for?

The purpose of the brain is to figure out what to do (what action to take) and then to make those actions happen.

It’s blindingly obvious why we have a brain. We have a brain for one reason and one reason only, and that’s to produce adaptable and complex movements. There is no other reason to have a brain. Think about it. Movement is the only way you have of affecting the world around you. —Daniel Wolpert, neuroscientist

It’s also via the actions we take that the brain figures out how to interpret the information it receives, including who we are and what things mean. It’s via repetitive actions that the brain determines what behaviors to turn into habits and hand off to the basal ganglia to administer. It’s via persistent actions that the brain changes: trajectory, perception, identity, awareness, and areas of attention.

Yes, it’s annoying that the brain pays attention to all our actions—including those we aren’t paying attention to. It’s as if the brain maintains or modifies our mental model of the world according to its own parameters rather than to our wishes. [That was sarcasm. Of course that’s what it’s doing.] But since our wishes, like our thoughts, are fleeting and contradictory and ephemeral, it’s a good thing the brain doesn’t take them seriously because that would result in chaos.

As we know, our moment-to-moment choices—or actions—are not consciously determined. Rather, it’s our unconscious that determines out actions based on its interpretations of the internal and external sensory data it views through our mental model of the world.

Since action is the only way we can affect the world (of which we are a part), then the only way to create change is to get our brain to take different actions than the actions it is currently taking. And that requires modifying the brain’s interpretations of the sensory data it processes.

How does the brain modify its interpretations? By the actions we take. If this sounds like a vicious cycle, it really isn’t. This is where thinking comes into the process. Thinking can provide a bridge between the undesired actions (and outcome) and the desired actions (and outcome). It can do that by identifying the outcome we want, the actions that are likely to produce that outcome, and the contrivance or contrivance we can use to train the brain to take the actions we want it to take.

This is what contrivances are for: to train the brain (our movement organ) to automatically take the actions we want it to take rather than the actions it’s automatically taking now. This is how to use the brain to create a satisfying and meaningful life. The process isn’t complicated or complex. It’s our thoughts about the process that get in the way.

Note: This post is an update of an article in lucidwaking from February 2022. Look for the companion piece next week!

Existential Troublesome Knowledge

January 18, 2024 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

There’s troublesome knowledge—and then there’s existential troublesome knowledge.

The concept of troublesome knowledge was developed in academia and has since been applied and utilized in many academic and non-academic areas including scientific exploration, mathematics, politics, finance, history, and even writing.

To refresh, knowledge is troublesome when it:

conflicts with preexisting beliefs, especially if those beliefs are deeply held
is counterintuitive or seems illogical
is complex or difficult to understand
is disconcerting
requires a (transformational) change in self-perception

Troublesome knowledge within a field of inquiry or endeavor is one thing. But troublesome knowledge about the very nature of how we as humans function and our experience in and of the world—i.e., existential troublesome knowledge—is something else altogether. It’s troublesomeness squared, at the very least.

Many of our most basic assumptions about ourselves…are false. —Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal

Phenomenal Individualism and Its Implications

The pursuit of existential troublesome knowledge leads us to a number of inescapable conclusions that point in the direction of what has been called phenomenal individualism.

Our experience is not an accurate reflection of reality, which means things are not as they seem.
We cannot fully know or access the experience of any other person or creature.
What we don’t know far exceeds what we know, and no matter how much we learn, this will always be the case; yet we operate as if what we see is all there is (WYSIATI).
Not only is everything everywhere in motion all the time, but everything (including each of us) is a process, and everything is an interpretation.
Rather than being, or resembling, a mechanical system, each of us is a complex adaptive system, physically, mentally, and emotionally.
These factors all constrain our experience of being in the world—and there is no way out of these constraints—but they also create a space of possibilities, including the possibility of creating transformational change.

I believe the fact that our experience is not an accurate reflection of reality is the foundational threshold concept that we must get (incorporate into our mental model) in order to grasp the nature of our existence and experience: our space of possibilities.

You may recall that threshold concepts are likely to be, among other things:

Transformative: they lead to a significant shift in perspective that alters our sense of who we are as well as what we see, the way we see it, and how we feel and think about it.
Irreversible: they involve crossing a “threshold,” after which our previous understanding is no longer readily accessible.
Integrated: they reveal relationships and connections of aspects and ideas that were previously seen as unrelated.
Troublesome: they are difficult concepts to grasp and are therefore troublesome (see troublesome knowledge above).

The Space of Possibilities

What you or I make of the characteristics that circumscribe our existence—how we interpret them and work with them—depends on our mental model of the world, which includes our personality and our beliefs.

Do you find the idea that things are not only not as they seem, but never as they seem disturbing, confusing, trivial, or intriguing?

Is the idea that the extent of what we don’t know will always be far greater than the extent of what we know frustrating, obvious, or expansive?

Does knowing that everything you experience is the result of your brain’s interpretation of data that other brains are very likely interpreting differently make you curious or does it feel unnerving or even threatening?

The Thin Slice

It has become clear that our brains sample just a small bit of the surrounding physical world. —David Eagleman, Incognito

Although what Eagleman says is true, and it’s possible to grasp the concept intellectually, it is simply impossible for us to experience. That’s because our brain is continuously assessing and interpreting the data it has access to as if it is all the data there is. How else could it operate?

If we really understand and acknowledge this aspect of reality—that we are always working with limited information we treat as if it is all the information—we must realize that a likely majority of the conclusions and explanations we take for granted are inaccurate, sometimes extremely so. Our brain can’t take into account factors of which it is unaware. Yet there are always factors that affect us of which we and our brain are unaware.

The conclusions and explanations we arrive at daily are often good enough for us to get by—not so erroneous they threaten our survival. But that isn’t always the case. And even if they don’t threaten our survival, they can modify our mental model in ways that lead to maladaptive perceptions of our internal and external world. Taking all of our perceptions for granted can have detrimental effects on our experience and therefore on our actions in and reactions to the world, as well as our wellbeing, and our relationships with others.

We are not significantly different from humans of the past who didn’t believe in the existence of germs or bacteria because they couldn’t see them with the naked eye. Or humans who believed the earth was the center of the solar system. Or that the brain was a useless organ—or that we only use 10% of it. Or that our memories are accurate, and eye-witness accounts are reliable.

When more information was obtained, we modified our understanding of germs and the solar system and the brain and memory and eye-witness accounts. We have enough information now to modify our understanding of how we operate and how our experience is based on our interpretations.

If we don’t, or don’t want to, understand this thing called phenomenal individualism, we will constantly be at the effect of our mistaken beliefs, locked into a perceptual and experiential system within which we have very little room to maneuver and no room at all to create transformational change.

On the other hand, we can step into and take an active role within this space of possibilities.

More to come!