Body: The “Brains” Behind the Whole Operation
To the despisers of the body I want to speak. I would not have them learn and teach differently, but merely say farewell to their own bodies - and thus become silent. "Body am I, and soul" - so says the child. And why should one not speak like children? But the awakened and the knowing say: "Body am I entirely, and nothing more; and soul is only a word for something about the body." The body is a great intelligence, a multiplicity with one sense, a war and a peace, a herd and a shepherd. An instrument of your body is also your little intelligence, my brother, which you call "spirit" - a little instrument and toy of your great intelligence. "I," you say, and are proud of that word. But greater is that in which you do not wish to believe - your body with its great intelligence; it does not says "I," but does “I." [Zarathustra, 30]
Pay attention to what follows and your personal life will be enriched by the insights of a 19th-century dead white male who gets university buildings named after him.James speculated about how the brain decides what emotion we're feeling. Something happens, your brain figures out its emotional response - anger, elation, arousal, terror, whatever.Then your brain tells your body how to respond - your heart races, you breathe faster, get gooseflesh, whatever. These responses are controlled by the autonomic nervous system which is involved in things that are automatic (that is, autonomic) throughout your body.But James came up with a seemingly nutty idea that reverses the direction of all this. He believed that your body's autonomic response, not your brain, determines your emotion. In James's view, your brain assesses the situation too quickly for you to be consciously aware yet of how you feel about it, and rapidly kicks your body into gear with whatever autonomic response it is going to have.Your brain then canvasses your body to see how it's reacting to the situation. So, conscious emotions don't shape your autonomic bodily response; your autonomic response shapes your emotions.Weird, backwards, has to be wrong. But his ideas are turning out to be true in many ways. Your autonomic nervous system may not quite determine your precise emotion, but it sure influences the emotional intensity.Quadriplegics - people who not only are paralysed but also get no tactile feeling coming in from their bodies - have blunted emotions. The same goes for people with diseases that affect the autonomic nervous system. They have normal tactile sensations and experience pleasure, anger, and fear like anyone else.They just have no visceral responses to those emotions. If they're afraid, for example, their hearts don't race, their skin doesn't get clammy. If saddened, they don't cry. If angered, their muscles don't tense. And they feel less emotion than normal.You can exploit your autonomic system to change your emotions. Force someone to make an emotionally charged facial expression over and over, and he'll start to feel an emotion that agrees with the expression: depressed people who make big, booming smiles repeatedly usually start feeling better. Sapolsky, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/3343112/And-another-thing.html