Emotion makes us wonderfully weird
I spend a good deal of my time researching emotion, not as an objective phenomenon, but as a subjective sensation described by the people who experience it. There’s a great deal of debate in our culture about what emotions actually are. At the heart of the matter is what it means to be human.
Our minds are not computers.
We don’t just think with our brains, and our neurons are not just squishy circuit boards. Human minds are astonishingly complex, with nervous systems fully integrated into our guts, our hormones, our skin and bones and beating hearts.
This makes humans quite odd. That oddness isn’t a bug in our programming. It’s what makes us so adaptable.
Isn’t it time we stop pretending we’re machines?
Silicon Valley projects hoping to devise digital algorithms to automatically detect and manage human emotion have failed. Transhumanist plans to upload human consciousness into supercomputers have gone nowhere.
Like it or not, it takes a human to understand a human. We can’t understand our humanity without understanding our emotions.
The first step is to acknowledge our emotional diversity. Our feelings can’t be mapped onto a color wheel, with every mood nothing more than a combination of a few basic emotions. Sophisticated explorers of human emotion can distinguish between hundreds of different frameworks of feeling, and research suggests that the more emotions we can name, the more competently we can manage the challenges of external reality.
It’s time to get serious about expanding our emotional granularity, to become literate in human consciousness.
There are many ways to research emotion. Psychologists use experimental methods to study the elements of emotional experience empirically. Such scientific work is essential in the effort to understand how our minds work.
It’s just as important, however, to engage the subjectivity of emotion on its own terms. Emotion has physiological components and behavioral consequences, but above all else, emotion is an experience. It’s an experience of feeling something on the inside, whether we express it outwardly or not.
Emotional Immersion is an intense research method that engages emotion on its own terms, by putting individuals’ unique perspectives at the center of the research. Instead of focusing on secondary manifestations of people’s emotional perspectives, Emotional Immersion uses targeted, extended interviewing techniques to plunge into the strange depths of how people are really feeling.