h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

the suggestion was just someone like you...not necessarily you.

I'm a bit like you and don't have any suggestions either.

"Presumably emotion is a form of "unthinking subconscious activity" that helps to create (animalistic) drive / directed action within the organism."

Not quite sure what you mean by that. Anything mental is ultimately an unthinking subconscious activity, that's what a brain does. There's some evidence that conscious thoughts don't originate in the conscious at all.

Emotion is key to learning and survival as an infant.
Attachment to parents, fear and 'calling' response when they are away, cute happy baby faces when they are about help to control the parent to the best interests of the child.

Equally, pain, fear, love, happiness all colour experiences in the world and feedback when the same or similar experiences are encountered again, helping to ensure the child minimises negative experiences and maximises positive ones (where +ve and -ve are subjective - a risk taking child will have different response to the same stimuli than a risk averse child). This selective control and editing of the childs experiences by the child contributes to their life experience as they grow, changing who they become as an adult.

One interesting thing about emotional memory is that it seems to be an actual replay of the emotions (as many who feel extreme emotions can attest to). Rather than a narrative memory that we felt this at that time.

It is worth noting, as well, that even as an infant, the emotions are used to manipulate for selfish ends (no, not consciously, but the behaviour is there). So maybe I revise my thoughts on social relevance, since social learning is very important, even if one is not an active socializer.

Successful control of emotions is of key interest, too. Knowing how our emotions manipulate others, and theirs manipulate us, allows those with good control to bend situations to their own advantage, or prevent others doing the same. In survival terms, this could be seen as very useful in getting others to back you up, provide aid and support or in undermining opponents and competitors in the social arena.

Cobblers, got any letters after your name to back that up?

Would it benefit a hunter/gatherer group to have both types of people?

Or is it just a case of evolution in a transition so eventually one type of brain will come to be the main feature of Homo sapiens..or whatever species eventually emerges after us?



I'm just reminding folk of my OP...

Emotions are chemical reactions going on in a brain. Some appear to have more of these type and some less....

I don't really know what I'm saying here...but it's as good as any other post on this thread

Orcus

Effers - I think my answer to that would be my earlier post - there isn't a goal or a fixed end to the changes, they just continue. Some environment may deselect for some modifications, others not so much.

Emotions clearly are important for us, as mentioned in other posts. The variations in that just reflect the biological complexity of them and the flexible, changing nature of our makeup. We don't have some individuals with extreme emotions necessarily because they are 'useful' - but rather because they are one end of a range inherent in our makeup and aren't completely dysfunctional such that the (multiple) gene lines would die out.

We may, of course, find out that a genetic predisposition to extreme emotions is related to some other useful or beneficial mutation (its never 1 gene = 1 trait) as with the schizophrenia lecture I posted earlier or things like sickle cell anemia. But there's nothing been found yet that I've read of (which is probable a reflection on my lack of reading than the research).

Well quite a few famous creatives were supposedly excessively emotional such as Mozart and Vangough

Also Churchill.

As an excesively emotional type myself I know I go good in emergency situations...and could easily risk my life for someone/something I loved deeply.

One of the strangest experiences I had was when myself and a friend were waiting at Bordeaux railway station for a connection.

I went outside for a walk....and suddenly I was in the middle of an incident involving a gunman on a balcony over a shop. He was firing...not at actual people but in the air to scare people I suppose. I ran forward to get a photo..

I didn't think of danger at all. A French policeman grabbed me. I was taken to be questioned. They thought I must be a journalist. I said I was just an English tourist....and they started laughing

Having skimmed the backlog, one thing struck me as a possibly interesting parallel..

Africans and their recent descendants are prone to sickle-cell anaemia, when they have the same two particular gene variants on a pair of their chromosomes. You might think, why's that, this must put them at a disadvantage? But if they only have one variant of this gene, it provides increased resistance against malaria.

Maybe some of the variation in brain chemistry operates for the same reasons?

yeah, that's what I was getting at, pedro.

It does seem that emotional health issues (from the interestingly strange to serious illness) do have some degree of correlation with creativity as Effers says.

Then again, there have been some very talented creatives who didn't have any such issues as far as we know. And plenty who have strong emotions but who apparently aren't so talented.

And, of course, if it were that there was some correlation (it wouldn't be causation, just that both traits were a consequence of the same genetic/environmental setup) then we'd have to work out whether or not the correlated trait was adaptive if we were going for the 'beneficial' explanation.

So, from what Effers has proposed (and obviously much research would be required and a mechanism found before any degree of certainty could be applied) we'd then have to work out whether or not there was any survival benefit to humans of art.

creativity is not restricted to artists.

Scientists have to be very creative to adapt known technologies and invent new ones.
It was a creative idea to notice, for example, that those nice nourishing grains could be planted year after year in the same place and we could settle down and farm them, rather than roam about looking for them all the time.
Another was that that fire thing could be started by us - why not *use* it to heat ourselves and our food...

What Orcus said... I find the idea that 'creative' and 'practical' are mutually exclusive a little odd.

Can't remember where I read it but there is also some doubt these days about the whole right/left hemishphere dominance thing too.

very true, Orcus.
And, of course, one could propose that those with a strong emotional response get more out of their discoveries in the form of the emotional reward they experience when they discover something or figure something out.

I've also wondered, in the past, if there is an emotional quality to curiosity?

"the whole right/left hemishphere dominance thing too."

Well, the two sides are different in their focus but it isn't clear cut by any means. And whether this has any meaning, whether it just so happens that the physical processing modules happen to be organised as they are or if there is some organisational principle at work is not known. Certainly the whole left brain thinker/right brain thinker is a little too simplistic to be of much use, really.

And, of course, left brain can do right brain things due to the plasticity of the brain, especially if damage or impairement happens early enough.

At artschool, at which I spent the happiest 3 years of my life...not a sniff of mental illness..I'd say 90% of people had a kind of 'emotional intensity' type of psyche.

We were all right at home together.

Only towards the end of the final year did it come out that most of us were on tablets and seeing a therapist or had.. We were all hiding it from each other..

And yes of course creativity isn't restricted to artists.

I doubt Darwin and any number of research scientists got that spark of suddenly seeing things in a new light from being uncreative.

Hmm, I wonder.
Seems to me that a lot of creativity is about making mental connections that others don't - or seeing things in a way others don't. The same raw processing power is at work (there are people of all intelligences who are not what you'd call creative) but, if you like, it isn't so constrained and has more variables to work with.

If we are suggesting a link between this and emotion, then do those with strong, less controlled etc emotions merely react in a stronger manner to the same causal events? Or do they react to more events, find emotional responses to more stimuli than those with reduced emotional experiences?

The wonderful thing about emotion is that is to do with the unconscious.

Anything might come up. But hopefully you have the rationality to sort the wheat from the chaff.

That's what it all rides on IMO.

It's like a ing waterfall...a river...the sea..

But you need to be able to catch those fish.

the unconscious isn't some sort of mystical randomness, it's full of rules and processing. And I'm not so sure about splitting things into unconscious and conscious. I mean, vision is unconscious processing. Our conscious perception of it is the post processed, full of errors, selective view of things. Yet we process that feed consciously. Same as we process our emotions consciously as well, allowing them, magnifying them or reducing and controlling them.

Emotions we consciously feel are those which are of enough importance to feed into the conscious processing bits (whatever that might mean). Hence my question.

To take a for example (and sorry if this has triggers for anyone) - my mum's diagnosis with breast cancer (clear for 2 yrs now). My younger sister did the whole weepy-woe-is-us-emotional thing. I and my older sister played it far less emotional. In my case at least because at that point there were a lot of options and plenty of reason to think it would turn out ok. It just wasn't emotional, really, for me. Worrying, sure. But not gripped by terror.

And my younger sis is like this, weepy at weddings, funerals etc etc. I'm not. I have emotions, of course. But they don't seem to come to that degree.

So is it that she has a wider variety of triggers for emotion - or that I simply have a lower emotional response to the same triggers?

Or different screening mechanisms between emotion and response...?

>the unconscious isn't some sort of mystical randomness,<

Really Icky? Who has said anything about mystical randomness.

It's a language.