The Psychology Of Emotions, Feelings and Thoughts

my car artwork is online at www.zazzle.com/susanrozen This is the advanced version of the article, which should be read after the normal verion. It is part of a book of my complete works online here http://cnx.org/content/m16628/latest/ (there is a link to the non-advanced version of the complete works, which has a link to the non-advanced version of this article).

Emotion and Logic

Some things in life cause people to feel, these are called emotional reactions. Some things in life cause people to think, these are sometimes called logical or intellectual reactions. Thus life is divided between things that make you feel and things that make you think. The question is, if someone is feeling, does that mean that they are thinking less? It probably does. If part of your brain is being occupied by feeling, then it makes sense that you have less capacity for thought. [Saying "part of your brain" shows how feeling and thought take up the same space, or might use the same abilities or similar processes in the mind. It shows how you really can't do two things at once, especially since they are both cognitive processes.] That is obvious if you take emotional extremes, such as crying, where people can barely think at all. This does not mean that emotional people are not intelligent; it just means that they might be dumber during the times in which they are emotional. Emotion goes on and off for everyone, sometimes people cry, and sometimes they are completely serious. [This could further mean that an emotional person might be less emotional if they are doing serious thinking.]

Some things in life can identifiably cause more emotion than other things.

1. Color causes more emotion than black and white. So anything with more color in it is going to be more emotional to look at, whether it is the difference between a gold or silver sword, or a gold or silver computer. In both cases the gold is going to be more emotional. [That example with the sword makes it obvious that color is more emotional than things with less color, it usually is hard to tell if each thing is more or less emotional just based off of the color. It might be that something black is more emotional than something colorfull if they are different objects. Also, it seems like color is a shallow source of emotion, like you can identify that color causes more emotion, but if you have an attachment to something if it has a black and white color instead of being colorful, or something else is going on, then the black and white object might be more emotional than its colorful version.]

2. Things that are personal are emotional, personal things that people like and that they feel are “close” to them. Things like home or anything someone likes actually. That is the definition of emotion after all, something that causes feeling. So if you like it, it is probably going to cause more feeling. Other things aside from liking something could cause emotions from it, such as curiosity, but usually like is one of the stronger emotions. You could say that the two are directly proportional, the more you like something, the more it is going to cause feeling. [Or the more curious you are, or any other emotion, would probably generate more feeling. If you are emotional about something, that is saying that it is causing you to feel more. This is more clear when the difference between emotion and feeling is explained later in this section.]

But there are things that people like that cause thought. You could like something and it causes you to think, and we previously defined emotion as feeling, not thought. That thoughts are separate from emotions because thought is a period of thinking. What exactly is thinking then? You can think about emotions, “how did I feel then?” etc. So is thought just a period of increased attention? Or is it a sharp spike in attention focused on one particular thing that is clear? [Thought feels like you are paying clear attention to something, whereas you aren't always paying as clear attention to your feelings.] It is hard to focus that much if you are feeling a lot, however. This makes me conclude that there is an overlap of feeling and thought, like a Venn diagram. But there are still parts of thought that don’t have feeling or emotion in them, and parts of emotion that don’t have thought in them. [So thoughts are also going to influence feelings, since they overlap, not only would feelings influence thoughts.] That means that thought requires more concentration than feeling does, since we defined thought as a period of increased attention. You can be emotional and have more attention, but usually if you are emotional you are going to be less attentive than you would be if you were thinking more. [That ties into the idea that you can only do one thing at a time, if you are paying attention to your thoughts (or thinking more) it is going to be harder to pay attention to your feelings (or "feel" more) because you can only pay attention to a limited number of things at once.] Then again, if you are emotional you are being attentive to your emotions, whatever they may be, and if your emotions are on something like the sun, then when you see the sun you are going to be attentive to it, but not be thinking about it. So you can pay attention to something and not be thinking about it at the same time. [If you are paying attention to something but not thinking about it, what exactly is this increased attention doing? It could be helping you process and understand what feelings that thing causes in you, or just make you feel more about it, which would make you pay more or less attention to it. You could be feeling a lot about something and be paying attention to something else, but that is clearly going to be harder (usually, based on the circumstances) than if didn't have that emotion. That is a clear example of how emotion can be a distraction (from thought and even other emotions). But you aren’t going to be paying attention to anything else. [That further shows how emotion can take up your attention, especially if you are paying attention to the emotion, as in that example.] It seems that thought is more attention than emotion, however. If you try to “feel” your computer you still don’t give it as much attention as if you were thinking about your computer. Then again, it depends what you are thinking about your computer, if you are thinking that your computer sucks, you are going to give it less attention than thinking that it is great. It also depends what your feelings are about that computer. If you feel that the computer is good, then you are going to give it more attention than if you feel that it is bad (possibly). [Does this mean that when you think about your computer your attention is on what it is you are thinking about your computer? Thinking about your computer might generate emotions, which would then cause you to be feeling and thinking about your computer. The thought of the computer might just pull up the general feeling of the computer (the feeling from the computer you get when you usually interact with it or think about it, not some other feeling about it which wouldn't then be "general", not necessarily the feeling of the computer that corresponds with that particular thought. Those ideas raise the question, "when you have a feeling about something, what exactly is that feeling causing you to feel and think (consciously and unconsciously).] The thoughts and the feelings correspond, however. That is, if you are thinking it is bad, then you are going to feel that it is bad. Thus thought and feeling are really one and the same. [It might be that if you think it is bad, you feel that it is good, but that would only be if you are confused, like if you consciously think it is good but it really makes you feel bad.] But thoughts are really clearer than feelings. Thought and feeling may result in the same amount of attention to something, but thought is more precise. It is more precise for you to think that the computer is good, then to feel that the computer is good. Who knows why you feel the computer is good, but if you were thinking the computer is good then you would know why you thought that. Emotions and feelings are more obscure.

So, the more you like something (or hate something, or have any strong emotional reaction to anything), [Something shallow that doesn't generate a lot of feeling might not be called "emotional".] the more emotional it is, but that doesn’t mean that it might not also cause you to think about it. One can’t label everything in life as either emotion or thought however. Life isn’t a scale with emotion on one end and thought on the other. There are other factors involved, things like adrenaline and physical action, which might also cause increased attention that isn’t either emotional or thoughtful. [You could be more specific with that scale and mention which emotions, or which thoughts.] When you’re running you have a lot of attention on the fact that you are running, and you’re not thinking about it or being emotional about it. This means that just because you like something, doesn’t mean that it is emotional. You might like running, but it doesn’t cause emotions in you. [But when you think about running it is going to cause more emotions in you since you like it, and you are probably going to be experiencing better emotions when you are running if you like it then if you don't, unless you enjoy pain then you could like something that generates bad emotions in you (it could be generating negative short term emotions, but since you like it, positive emotions over the long term, or positive emotions when you think about it (or even a mix of the emotions since it is more complicated that you like it but it causes pain).] What does emotion mean then? Emotions must be thoughts that you can’t identify, when you feel something, it must be that you are thinking about something unconsciously. You just have no idea what it is, usually. Emotions and feelings are thoughts then. By that I mean that they can be broken down into parts and figured out what those parts are. And thoughts are just really parts that you can identify. So the difference between emotions, feelings and thoughts is that you know what thoughts are about, but you don’t have as good an idea of what emotions and feelings are, as they are more obscure and harder to identify.

Thus once you find out what is causing the emotion, it is no longer an emotion, but it is a thought (that is, you now call the emotion a thought, so the thought is still probably generating emotion. In your mind then there is still an emotion, but this emotion is now “part” of a thought, it becomes part of the thought associated with it because you created this link, and hence you would call the emotion/thought just a thought because while thoughts can generate emotions, emotions cannot generate thoughts (by themselves), unless you realize what the emotion is (then you are generating the thought, not the emotion generating it), but you are realizing it is a thought, not an emotion: so this realization takes over and now the emotion is part of that realization (because you consider the emotion a part of you, and you generated the realization), instead of the realization being a part of the emotion (and since it seems like the emotion belongs to the realization (you), instead of vice versa, you call it a thought instead of an emotion, because you generated the thought (and hence it also seems that you are now consciously also generating the emotion (the emotion coming from the thought))). So that would mean that all emotions have route in real things, and these real things can be explained with thoughts, so all emotions then are really thoughts that you haven’t realized; an emotion would just be a thought that you haven’t identified yet, so the term “emotion” goes away when you realize it is a thought (because that is what it really was all along, a thought) (though this thought might still be generating a feeling). So, since you perceive the emotion as belonging to you, and you generate thoughts consciously, you consider the emotion to be part of a thought, not vice versa (and hence call identified emotions “thoughts”). So when you identify an emotion, it is a thought because thoughts can generate emotions, so if the emotion is still there after you identified it you would say it falls under the category “thought”, because the thought is making it. [That brings up the question, "do thoughts about your emotions accurately represent what that emotion is?". If the thought doesn't accurately represent the emotion, then you would really need more thoughts to represent the entire emotion (show what that emotion is). Also, can you ever really perfectly explain emotion with thought? Emotion seems infinitely complicated, finite and dynamic.] You might be lazy however and not want to spend time thinking, which are what emotions are for. “Ah that gold sword is pretty” might be the emotion, but to your conscious mind you would have no idea that you like the sword because it is pretty, you might just know that you like the sword and it is making you emotional about it. Therefore, emotional things are really any feelings that cause unconscious or conscious thought. Feeling is also another word for unconscious thought. That then leads to the conclusion that thought can be emotional (because thoughts are going to be about things that can cause emotion). I think that emotions can be more emotional than thought, however, because emotions can contain more than one thought (while thoughts are very slow consciously), therefore causing it to cause more feeling, or be more emotional. [So thought is simpler than emotions and therefore they might cause less feelings by themselves, but the feeling a thought brings up is probably going to be more complicated than the thought alone, since feelings are usually more complicated than thoughts.] While you can only express a few thoughts a minute, your emotions can contain endless numbers of thoughts per minute – they are not as exact and hence don’t make as much sense as thoughts do.

So thought is just a lot of attention on one little thing. And emotion is attention on lots of individual things, or possibly one thing. So things that are emotional are things that cause you to think, consciously or unconsciously. [A conscious feeling would just be a feeling that you have identified (or recognized) more than an unconscious one.] And therefore they would cause you to feel, consciously or unconsciously. So the more you like something you can’t consciously identify as to why you like it, the more emotional it is, and the more you like something where you can consciously identify what it is, the more conscious thought it is going to cause, and the more logical that thing is going to be. Emotion is just unconscious thought.

How This Chapter shows how Intelligence is intertwined with Emotion:

Thoughts

Anything that is said or done is possibly followed by a long series of unconscious thoughts and thought processes.

What is the difference between emotion, feeling, thought, logic, and intelligence? Use of any of them requires a lot of attention. Even when you are feeling something emotional your attention is directed toward that thing. The answer is that everything in life eventually results in a feeling. Even emotion results in a feeling. Emotion is unconscious thoughts about things, and thoughts are conscious thoughts about things. Thought results in feelings, so unconscious thought (emotion) is also going to result in feelings. [The question is, do the feelings come from the thoughts simultaneously, or later on, or both (and if later on, when exactly).]

If you think about it that way, thought and emotion are both in part feelings, that is, to some extent you feel them right away, in addition to them resulting in feelings later on. But that still means that feelings are always the end result. Then again, thoughts might be the result of current thoughts. That is like emotion, unconscious emotional thoughts are going to result in unconscious emotional thoughts later on. Even feelings could be called unconscious thoughts, because thought is just focusing on one thing for a brief period of time. [When thought about that way, what is the difference between an unconscious thought and an emotion? Is the unconscious thought stronger, more specific, or just something that has more of an influence on what you are thinking than feeling. Thoughts might have a better influence on other thoughts then they do on emotions (and emotions might have a better influence on emotion then they do on thought). Think of it this way, if you are doing something, but you "feel" like you don't want to do it, that isn't going to stop you from doing it as much as you thinking unconsciously over and over that you don't want to do it. The thinking in that instance seems like it is just more intense than the emotion, but not necessarily "felt" as much since it is just thought, not feeling. It has more of an influence over your actions, however, and maybe would generate anxiety instead of emotion. It is like the unconscious thought in that instead comes from your understanding that you don't want to do that activity, and since understanding is a function of thought, you would say that your unconscious thoughts are stopping you from doing it more than your emotions are stopping you.]

Therefore emotion, thought and feeling are really just periods of focus on certain things. With thought you just recognize what it is that you are focusing on. With emotions you feel deeply about what you are focusing on, and with feelings you are focusing on it less. Physical stimulus also results in feelings, and then you focus on those feelings, you aren’t necessarily focused on what caused the feelings (the physical stimulus itself) however. [This ties into the idea that someone can only pay attention to a few number of things at once (including emotion and thought) because if you are focused on one thing, you are probably going to be less focused on something else.]

Thus life is really just different types of feelings; you could categorize all of life as feeling. Even when you think you are in a period when you’re not feeling anything, you really are feeling something; you just don’t recognize what it is that you are feeling. Remember that feelings are thoughts you can’t identify. And since a thought is going to be about something, another way to think about life is just stuff happening. Stuff happening results in feelings in your brain, where more stuff happens. It is all-concrete. [And stuff happens all the time, so you are probably going to be feeling something more than you can recognize when you are feeling something.]

The definition of intellect and thoughts is almost understanding (those concrete things). Emotion is feeling, completely separate from facts or information. All facts and information are going to be about things that cause feeling, however, since all things that happen cause feelings and all facts and information are about things that happen. So facts and information are just feelings organized in a logical manner. [Unless the fact doesn't generate feeling, but most things cause feelings.] Intellect and thought also generates feelings when those thoughts are processed in your mind. Since thought is really only about feelings, it is logical that thought actually has root in feelings. For example, all events are really feelings in the mind, so thoughts are actually just comparing feelings. You take two feelings and can arrive at one thought. Take the feeling of a frog moving and the feeling of a threat of danger. The two feelings combined equal the idea or thought that the frog needs to move when there is danger – the thought is actually just understanding how feelings interact. All thought is is the understanding of how feelings and real events interact with themselves. Feeling is what provides the motivation to arrive at the answer (the thought). If you just had the facts, there is a threat, and the frog can jump, you aren’t going to arrive at the conclusion that the frog should jump away. You need to take the feeling that there is a threat and the feeling that the frog can jump and then combine the two sensory images in your head to arrive at the answer. [It is like the feeling provides the motivation, without emotion thought really wouldn't be possible because there would be no need to arrive at any conclusions.]

That shows how all intellect is powered and motivated by emotion. It also shows that frogs have thoughts; the frog has to have the thought to jump away when it sees a threat, as a thought is just the combination of two feelings resulting in the resulting feeling of wanting to move away. That process of feelings is like a thought process. Thoughts are a little different for humans, however, because humans have such a large memory that they are able to compare this experience to all the other experiences in their life while the frog only remembers the current situation and is programmed (brain wiring) to jump away. The frog doesn’t have a large enough memory to learn from new information and change its behavior. That shows how humans are very similar to frogs in how they process data (in one way at least), and that one thing that separates a human from a frog is a larger memory which can store lots of useful information and potential behavioral patterns. [That brings up the question, exactly how good is a frogs memory? It can make its way around a pool without hitting the same spot over and over, so it lasts at least a few minutes. But that is memory for simple things, it isn't smart enough (remember from the logic chapter) to process more complicated data to remember. On the other hand, humans really don't do complicated stuff most of the time, so we are very similar to frogs).]

Thoughts, especially in humans, are not that independent – they can be much more complicated and it can appear to be that nothing is as it seems. If someone says to you, “I know x”. He isn’t just saying that he knows x, but there is a chain of other thoughts that also occur in your mind. You analyze the statement he made and it causes you to think automatically, “Do I know x too?” “Why does he think I care that he knows x?” “Is there anything else about x that is significant that I am missing?” “What if this other person is smarter than me?” that doesn’t lead to a feeling of being dumb (it might), instead it leads to another concrete thing “maybe I am stupid” or the thought “maybe that person is stupid” interacting with the thought “because that thing he said was wrong”. So one simple thought for a human can mean much much more than that one thought. That example shows another way in which humans are different from frogs – they are capable of more simultaneous thoughts. It is also the memory working hand in hand with that capacity of simultaneous thought as well, if you had no memory then you wouldn’t have information to compare and bring up those simultaneous thoughts. [Remember that thoughts can lead to and are sometimes emotions (unconscious ones), so that example of the unconscious thought process was really an emotion - worry. It was worse than just worrying though, it was worrying about specific things, so the emotion was of a more specific type then just worry. Thus there isn't just one emotion of "worry" but there is "worry about your intelligence, etc".]

They can all be moving at the same time as well, not only does one thought follow another; but it occurs instantaneously. If the thing the person said was something you didn’t know, it might make you feel stupid, thus the thought results in a feeling. But that feeling can be translated to a thought. So it isn’t the feeling, “I am stupid” it is the thought “I am stupid”. Feeling stupid might make you feel bad, but it isn’t just that you are feeling bad, you are also thinking over and over “I am stupid” unconsciously, and that is what is making you feel bad. Or you are paying attention to the fact that you are stupid. Thus thought, feeling, and emotion is just paying attention to different things in your head. Concrete things. [In other words, all emotions are not only real things, but it could be said that all emotions have a source, since they are real things.]

It is a little more complicated than that, however. It is going to be a mix of a lot of concrete thoughts interacting with each other, not just the thought “I am stupid” repeated over and over but maybe also a less intense idea of “well I know x and y that that person doesn’t, maybe this was just one event”. So anything that is said or done is possibly followed by a long series of unconscious thoughts and thought processes. [Or, there might be many implications to any one thought. (there might not be, however, like you could relate almost anything to sex, but in reality that isn't necessary).]

There were two examples of thoughts, one was with the frog and the danger of a threat, and the other was a questioning of ones intellect relative to someone else. The example with the frog was an example of a thought process that was simple, while the example with the person showed how some thought processes can be much more complicated than they appear.

How This Chapter shows how Intelligence is intertwined with Emotion:

Emotion and Feelings

Emotion is more similar to conscious thought than feelings are to conscious thought. Although emotion and feeling can be described as unconscious thought, one of them is going to be more similar to conscious thought. Feelings are more like sensations, when you touch something you get a feeling. Therefore feelings are faster than emotions and thought, because when you touch something there is a slight delay before you can think of something about it (thought). Emotion is therefore just unconscious thought. Actually it would better be described as unconscious feeling. [So you feel emotions, but you also feel feelings, only feelings are more tangible (since they relate more to physical things and sensations, which cause feelings directly, not emotions). An emotion can come from something like a sight or sound or touch, but only after you have felt it as a feeling, so it is really the feeling that is causing the emotion. That also shows how the emotion is going to take longer to kick in, since it is a result of the feeling.]

You can recognize any feeling, that is what makes it a feeling. If you are sad that is a feeling, but if you are depressed that isn’t a feeling it is more like an emotion. You can’t identify why you are depressed but you can usually identify why you are sad. Feelings are more immediate, if something happens or is happening, it is going to result in a feeling. However, if something happened a long time ago, you are going to think about it unconsciously and that is going to bring up unconscious feelings (the reason the things that happened previously are going to be more similar to emotion than things that are happening currently is that sensory stimulation (or things happening currently) is a lot closer to feelings than things that are less linked to direct sensory stimulation (such as emotions which are therefore usually going to be about things which require memory to figure out, things like thoughts that are less like feelings and more like emotion)). So emotions are unconscious feelings that are the result of mostly unconscious thoughts (instead of feelings – a feeling can trigger an emotion, but it isn’t a part of it). Feeling defined there as something you can identify. Also, you can’t identify the unconscious thought that caused the unconscious feeling, but you can identify the unconscious feeling itself (aka emotion). [Memory isn't the only thing that is going to be more similar to an emotion than a feeling. Any type of thinking, (emotional thinking or non-emotional thinking) or using logic would be more like emotions since thought is deeper than feeling. Those things still generate feelings, or are in part feelings. You can't say when you bring up a memory you don't feel anything, but since this memory is less tangible than something which you are currently experiencing, it is going to be more like an emotion. It requires thought to bring up, so that is a deep experience because thought is deep, which makes it more like an emotion (because emotions are deep) but it is lacking a feeling of "realness" or reality. Thought probably also lacks that feeling, because thought is just something in your head, not something which you can feel like a physical object.]

Another aspect of unconscious thought, emotion, or unconscious feeling (all three are the same) is that it tends to be mixed into the rest of your system because it is unconscious. If it was conscious then it remains as an individual feeling, but in its unconscious form you confuse it with the other emotions and feelings and it affects your entire system. So therefore most of what people are feeling is just a mix of feelings that your mind cannot separate out individually. That is the difference between sadness and a depression, a depression lowers your mood and affects all your feelings and emotions, but sadness is just that individual feeling. So the reason that the depression affects all your other feelings is because you can no longer recognize the individual sad emotions that caused it. The feelings become mixed. If someone can identify the reason they are sad then they become no longer depressed, just sad. Once they forget that that was the reason they are depressed however, they will become depressed again. [It is like the depressed emotion transfers to a sad feeling. That makes sense since you can only concentrate on a few things at one time, so if you are feeling it as a feeling, you are going to ignore it as an emotion.]

That is why an initial event might make someone sad, and then that sadness would later lead into a depression, is because you forget why you originally got sad. You might not consciously forget, but unconsciously you do. That is, it feels like you forget, the desire to get revenge on whatever caused the sadness fades away. When that happens it is like you “forgetting” what caused it. You may also consciously forget but what matters is how much you care about that sadness. It might be that consciously understanding why you are depressed or sad changes how much you care about your sadness, however. That would therefore change the emotion/feeling of sadness. The more you care about the sadness/depression, the more like a feeling it becomes and less like an emotion. That is because the difference between feelings and emotions is that feelings are easier to identify (because you can “feel” them easier). [And if you care about something, you are making it more important in your mind, so you are elevating that emotion into a feeling, the emotion might still be there, but you can also feel it as a feeling. In fact, if you focus on one of your emotions it becomes a feeling because you are then feeling it better since you're focused on it. This idea can be applied to various degrees of focus, you can be focused long-term (hours, minutes, whatever) on an emotion or be caring about that emotion (not just short term (seconds)), and you would "feel" it more. Or some circumstance could occur that is negative or positive causing you to think about that emotion.]

The following is a good example of the transition from caring about a feeling to not caring about a feeling. Anger as an emotion takes more energy to maintain, so if someone is punched or something, they are only likely to be mad for a brief period of time, but the sadness that it incurred might last for a much longer time. That sadness is only going to be recognizable to the person punched for a brief period of time as attributable to the person who did the punching, after that the sadness would sink into their system like a miniature depression. Affecting the other parts of their system like a depression. [Depressions are so deep that they probably cause you to feel bad in many ways. Lowing of mood because of depression shows how it can affect all your emotions and "depress" them.]

In review, both feelings and emotions are composed of unconscious thoughts, but feelings are easier to identify than emotions. Feelings are faster than emotions in terms of response (the response time of the feeling, how fast it responds to real world stimulation) and it takes someone less time to recognize feelings because they are faster. Feelings are closer to sensory stimulation, if you touch something, you feel it and that is a fast reaction. You care about the feeling so you can separate it out in your head from the other feelings. “You care” in that sentence could be translated into, the feeling is intense, so you feel it and can identify it easily. That is different from consciously understanding why you are depressed or sad. You can consciously understand why you are depressed or sad, but that might or might not affect the intensity of that sadness. [That brings up the idea that although thought clearly affects how much you are feeling, how much can thought affect emotion? Since emotion is deeper it is going to be harder to affect it with just thought than feelings are to affect. But if the thought is significant, or powerful, it could trigger strong emotions. Any thought can trigger a feeling, since feeling is shallow, but to pull someone's emotions it might take more.]

If the intensity of the sadness is brought up enough, then you can feel that sadness and it isn’t like a depression anymore, it is more like an individual feeling than something that affects your mood and brings your system down (aka a depression). Also, if you clearly enough understand what the sadness is then it is going to remain a sadness and not affect the rest of your system. That is because the feeling would get mixed in with the other feelings and start affecting them. The period of this more clear understanding of the sadness mostly occurs right after the event that caused the sadness. That is because it is clear to you what it is. Afterwards the sadness might emerge (or translate from a depression, to sadness) occasionally if you think about what caused it or just think about it in general. [So when someone says "I'm sad" that is different from saying "I'm depressed". Depression isn't like an emotion, it is something that is long term, that you notice a lowered mood, or many individual instances of sadness, but you cannot "feel" a depression like you feel an emotion, it isn't as real in real time.]

The difference between emotion and feeling is that feelings are easier to identify because they are faster, a feeling is something you are feeling right then. An emotion might be a deeper experience because it might affect more of you, but that is only because it is mixed into the rest of your system. That is, a depression affects more of you than just an isolated feeling of sadness. In other words, people can only have a few feelings at a time, but they can have many emotions at the same time. Emotions are mixed in, but to feel something you have to be able to identify what it is, or it is going to be so intense that you would be able to identify what it is. Emotions just feel deeper because it is all your feelings being affected at once. [At least, that is what it feels like is happening. A feeling is isolated and strong, but an emotion is more complicated and broad and far reaching.]

Since emotion is all your feelings being affected at once, emotions are stronger than feelings. Feelings however are a more directed focus. When you feel something you can always identify what that one thing is. When you have an emotion, the emotion is more distant, but stronger. All your feelings must feel a certain way about whatever is causing the emotion. So that one thing is affecting your entire system. Feelings can then be defined as immediate unconscious thought, and emotions as unconscious thought.

How This Chapter shows how Intelligence is intertwined with Emotion:

Emotions are Dulled Feelings

Feelings are more immediate than emotions, they are easier to identify and are “faster”. You can also have only a few feelings at a time but your emotions are possibly composed of many more components. That is, you can have a feeling about a Frisbee, and you can have a feeling about a Frisbee game as well. But if you have emotions about the Frisbee game then in order to get those strong emotions there would have to be many things you are feeling about the Frisbee game. [Since emotions are deeper, they are harder to get to than feelings. The stronger the emotional experience, the deeper the emotion it is going to envoke. So something like a Frisbee game might evoke emotions, but just sitting on a couch might not.]

So one could think of emotions as just more than feelings. Emotions are greater than feelings and therefore they must have more parts in order to cause that greater feeling. Feelings are easy to understand because they are simple, but emotions are harder to understand because they are more complicated. A moody person would be described as emotional because emotion is a component of mood. Emotion is something that affects your entire system like a depression does. A feeling such as sadness is only an individual feeling and can be identified as such. [So our person sitting on the couch might be feeling happy, but this happiness is going to be limited because they aren't doing anything intense, so they might not be as emotional.]

If something is intense, then it is a feeling, emotions aren’t intense they are deep. They aren’t as intense as feelings but you could call them intense. Feelings are more intense because that is how we define feelings, if you can feel something then it is a feeling because, well, you “feel” it. Emotion is just something that affects you, your mood, how you are, etc. That is why feelings are easier to identify, because they are more intense. Emotions are deeper, however, when someone becomes emotional you can’t just snap out of it instantly, it hangs around in your system. That is why they are probably made up of more parts than feelings are. [The simpler the emotion, the faster it would probably take to process. You could dwell on something simple, but you'd probably have to be more interested in it for it to stick, instead of it hanging around naturally because you are trying to figure it out.]

The reason feelings are both more intense yet shallower than emotions is probably because your system can only handle so much intensity at a time, so you can only experience shallow things intensely. If you compare it to a river, emotions would have a lot of water and be going slowly, and feelings would have less water, but be going faster. The feeling is therefore going to touch more things in your mind shallowly, and the emotion is going to touch more things in your mind deeply.

Why then do some simple things cause us to become more emotional if emotion is a deeper experience? That is because the feeling must trigger emotions, the simple thing is actually a feeling itself, but it triggers emotions. Like how color can be more emotional than black and white. It is actually that color causes more feeling, and we become emotional then about that feeling. But while you are looking at the color it is a feeling which you are feeling, not an emotion. The feeling made you feel good, however, and that good feeling infects the rest of your feelings and emotions, and then you become emotional.

In fact, all feelings make someone more emotional. The only difference between feeling and emotion is that feeling is the immediate feeling you get from something. It is the thing which you are experiencing currently. Feeling is another word for current stimulation. You can only feel something that you are either thinking about or experiencing. Otherwise you aren’t really feeling it, and it is an emotion. That is why the word feeling is the word feeling, because you can feel it intimately, closely.

How is it then that emotions are generally considered to be deeper? That is because with emotions you are actually feeling more, you just aren’t as in touch with what it is that you are feeling. So you would experience the effects of having a lot of feeling, such as heavy breathing, crying, laughing, they would be things that make all your other feelings and emotions feel the same way. However your mind isn’t intensifying that experience because it would be too much for you to handle. Therefore emotion is just many feelings (or one strong feeling) that is dulled down, and it would actually be a stronger feeling(s), you just can only experience it fully as an emotion. You can also probably experience parts of that emotion as feelings since parts of it are going to be less intense than the whole, and you can “feel” them then. [So if you're processing something complicated, you are not capable of separating out individual aspects of that easily to make them into feelings. You can't have feelings about everything in it since it is so intense, but you can have a dulled emotion of the entire thing, which would be like a summary of all the feelings of it. It might be that an isolated feeling from it arises, but too many can't arise at once because that just isn't possible. Humans can only feel so many strong feelings at one time.]

So people can basically only “feel” or focus on small amounts of feeling. If it is a feeling that is very large it becomes an emotion with more parts. It isn’t that this emotion isn’t as deep as the feeling, it is actually deeper, but you simply cannot comprehend the entire emotion at once to “feel” it like you feel feelings. You can bring up feelings from memory (by thinking about sensory stimulation) but those types of feelings are going to be less direct and therefore more like emotions (less intense) than current, direct sensory stimulation that you are feeling in the real world. [Since it is easier to focus on feelings, they are probably are going to be easier to identify too. Maybe all emotion is really feeling. Maybe when you think about your emotions, they become feelings because then you can feel them because you're thinking about them. And when you think about emotions you were having in the past (not current real time) then you feel them too, and have the misconception that they were feelings and you were feeling them, but really they were more dulled down because you weren't thinking about those emotions as much as you are now. So maybe emotion is more of an unconscious experience than feeling, which is more conscious. Since feeling is more conscious, it is more a function of conscious thought. Thought is a period of attention to something, and since you pay attention to feelings, it is almost like you think about your feelings consciously. That differs from emotions, which, since they are deeper and less "in touch" with your conscious mind, it is like you are thinking about them unconsciously. So any feeling, emotion, you could say you "feel" it or "think" about it, the two are almost the same. The difference is that when you are "thinking" about it you are slightly more consciously aware of it because you are paying it more attention then when you are just "feeling" it. That shows how feelings are shallower than thought. However, emotions can be very deep and meaningful, they just aren't completely consciously understood. In fact, since emotions are harder to figure out than feelings since they are more complicated and deeper, most of what people see when you look at you are probably emotions, since you are mostly made up of deep emotions, you're just not feeling them all the time. Someone would have an "emotional makeup" that determines who they are, not a "feeling makeup", because feelings are more short term and shallow, something like, "I felt that" versus "That is an important part of me".]

Just as feelings can generate emotions, emotions can also generate feelings. For example, something like a fly buzzing might generate the feeling of annoyance, and this feeling might generate the emotion sad. You respond to the feeling first because feelings are faster and more immediate than emotions. An example of an emotion generating a feeling would be being sad that you are depressed. The depression is more of an emotion than the sadness because it is deeper and "slower" but the sadness is more like a feeling because it can be more immediate (it can also be an emotion, but in this example it is a feeling). [Feelings and emotions are going to be mixed in a lot too, like most feelings probably feel emotional to some extent.]

How This Chapter shows how Intelligence is intertwined with Emotion:

Emotions and Feelings are Broad Thoughts

Any emotion or feeling can be broken down into the sensations and real events that caused it. And you can think about any of those things (with thoughts).

A thought is thinking about something in specific. You can have a thought about an entire paragraph, but it is going to be just a thought, it is going to be about one thing, and that one thing might be a summary of the paragraph - but it is still a thought. So what we think of as thought is really just a short period of thinking - one unit of thinking that lasts for a short period of time. An essay is composed of many thoughts, but just one thought would be “I went to the store”. [So you can think about the paragraph, that might also be a thought even though you might not be thinking in sentences. You could have just read the paragraph and be visualizing what happened in it, or thinking deeply about it without using words.]

Then again, “I went to the store, and Jason followed me” might be considered one thought as well. So how long exactly is a thought? If it is longer than “I went to the store, and Jason followed me” then it is probably going to be considered multiple thoughts. Thus humans use the word thought as just a short period of time in thinking. [A thought could also be a group of similar things that go together, or multiple things that are different, if either fits into the short period of time of thinking you could call both just one thought.]

Thoughts are in general talked about as being verbal, people rarely think of emotions and feelings as thoughts. But emotions and feelings are thoughts if you think about that emotion and feeling. The short period of time in which you think about the emotion or feeling is a thought. So thoughts can be about emotions and feelings. They are just harder to identify because they aren’t verbal. [The question is, when someone is thinking about a feeling or a thought, do they really know what they are doing? Do you know what the feeling is, what caused it, how strong it is, if there are other feelings involved? Feelings and emotions are obscure.]

The reason that verbal things are easier to identify is because they are distinct sounds (that we have definitions for). Distinct sounds, different sounds, are easy to separate. It is easy to identify one sound from another sound, and that is all words are, different sounds. So it could be that someone is talking and you don’t have any thoughts about them talking, or you are not thinking about them talking. In that case you just aren’t listening to them, or you are not paying attention to the sounds they are making. [If words are just sounds, then what are thoughts? You identify a thought by "feeling" the thought, so thoughts are really just feelings. They are going to be more specific than a feeling, however, since you probably are going to know what the thought is about.]

So thought then is really just any short period of high attention. And thinking is long or short periods of high attention. So if you are thinking for more than a few seconds, then you are probably going to be thinking about several thoughts. Since you can think about emotions and feelings too, however, you can think about your emotions or feelings for long periods of time. [So if you have a strong emotion for a while, you could say that you were thinking about that emotion for a while, since you were just paying a lot of attention to it since it was strong, and a thought is when you pay attention to something.]

Just as thinking is made up of individual components of thought, feeling, or emotion, each of those components is made up of their own further components. In fact, when you think about an emotion or feeling you intensify that feeling or emotion a lot. Each emotion, however, is made up of experiences in the real world. The real world can include thoughts and feelings in your head as well. [So you could be emotional about a string of things you were thinking, or feeling, not just be emotional about real things.]

So emotions, feelings and thoughts are made up of real experiences. A thought isn’t just a thing in your head, but it is something that has components that are real in the world. Those things might be sounds (when you think about someone speaking, you make that sound in your head). A sound in your head is just like a sound in reality, you are mimicking the emotion that the sound in reality is causing in your head by yourself, without having the real sound be there. Just try it and think about any sound, it produces the same emotions as when the sound itself occurred outside your head. [So even though emotion and thought is made up of real experiences, all of these experiences are processed in your mind. That makes the experience a matter of perception and your personal view, in other words, you are going to feel some way about everything. Nothing is just "reality" but it is "what you felt about reality".]

So a thought in the end boils down to you thinking about sensations, any sensation, taste, touch, sound, smell, feeling, or emotion. How can a thought be of emotion? Aren’t thoughts supposed to be specific and quantifiable? Well a thought about an emotion is basically a summary of that emotion. If you played Frisbee and you get an emotion from playing Frisbee, then that emotion is a summary of the things in which you remember about playing Frisbee. The same goes with feelings. The feeling you have about something is really all the feelings that that thing causes in you, and when you focus on different aspects of that feeling, you are focusing on different aspects of the real experience which caused the feeling. [So an emotion of an experience is what you got out of that experience, if you only get an emotion from part of the experience, when you think about the entire experience you are probably going to focus more on the emotional part.]

So when you think about an emotion you are intensifying the feeling of those real experiences. You have no conscious idea of which parts of the feeling you are thinking about, however. Maybe if you think about directly different parts of the real experience you can link it up to different parts of its emotion. [If you think about a part of the experience it might generate an emotion, but that might not be the same emotion as the emotion that stayed with you about that experience, the feelings you have about the experience in real time might be different from how you feel about it later on.]

Thus any emotion or feeling can be broken down into the sensations and real events that caused it. And you can think about any of those things (with thoughts). You can also think about those things as individual thoughts. A thought isn’t just a short period of your attention, but it is a short period of your attention during which you are trying to think about something (at least it feels like you are trying, you could not be trying and have a thought). Your natural attention span varies, but if you think about something you can boost that attention, you are trying to boost that attention on something specific or something broad (like an emotion). [If thought is attention to something, then people are really thinking all the time, since they are always paying attention to something.]

Emotions and feelings are so intense, however, that it is like you are trying to focus your attention on them. So emotions, feelings, and thoughts are all periods of focused attention. A thought is just more focused attention than a feeling or emotion (unless it is a thought about a feeling or an emotion, in which case it is going to be even more attention than the feeling or thought or emotion by itself since it is a combination). [So you could make an experience very intense by having intense thought, and intense emotion involved.]

So emotions, feelings, and thoughts are all related, they are all things that you pay more attention to. And since emotion and feelings are made up of stuff which occurs in the real world, you could label each one of those things which occurs in the real world a thought, and say that emotions are made up of thoughts, or are broad thoughts. That is, you pay attention to your thoughts, and you pay attention to your emotions, so you could say that emotions are just a bunch of individual thoughts squished into one thing.

What then is the difference between a thought and an emotion? Emotions are usually more intense and therefore last longer in your brain when you think about them, or “bring them up”. You usually can only bring them up by thinking about them, however. Other things might bring up an emotion, like other emotions or other feelings, consciously or unconsciously. The same with feelings and thoughts. [So you have less control over emotions then you do over thoughts. If you bring up an emotion it might linger for a while. Sometimes it is hard to have control over thoughts, however.]

People "bring up" emotions, feelings and thoughts in various ways. One way to bring up an emotion would be using thought, such as thinking "I like my dog" would bring up the emotion of the dog. You could also think directly about the emotion of the dog without using the verbal discourse, however. This could also be described as just "feeling", "feeling out" or "being emotional about" your dog. A feeling could also bring up a thought (and all the other combinations of "bringing up" between thoughts, feelings and emotions). They might also be concurrent, that is, when you have one emotion there is an associated feeling with it (and the other combinations of that with feelings, thoughts and emotions). Don't forget that one of those combinations is that thoughts can also bring up or be concurrent with other thoughts (as with feelings and emotions).

How This Chapter shows how Intelligence is intertwined with Emotion:

Emotion vs. Logic

What is the difference between logic and emotion? When someone says that they are “emotional” which emotions do they mean? I guess they mean that they experience all emotions more. They could specify further, however, and say which emotions they experience more, which emotions they are more prone to.

If someone is emotional does that mean that they enjoy life more? What if someone was emotional, but only experienced positive emotions more than most people, and didn’t experience negative emotions. Then that person would be happier I guess. Unless they separated out the emotions joy and sadness and just talked about those. Can you be an emotional person and just have excess amounts of the emotion happy? So anyone just “happy” is therefore being emotional. You’d probably be a lot more emotional if you were happy and sad at the same time however (the mix of the two would drive someone mad most likely, however). [If you look at it that way, theoretically everyone is emotional, since everyone experiences emotion. So being emotional then might mean that you experience emotions a lot. Is it a big difference in life between someone who experiences emotions most of the time versus someone who experiences little? Theoretically someone doesn't need emotions to live (they could just act like they have emotions, and respond in a similar way, but necessarily have them) so then I guess it doesn't matter if someone is non-emotional.]

Happy and sad seem to be the two strongest emotions. They are stronger than fear, anger, surprise, disgust, acceptance, and curiosity. That would make anyone bipolar (experiencing swings from happy to sad) very emotional. Does the swing mean that someone is more emotional than just experiencing one at a time? The emotional change is hard I think and that is more of an experience than just being very happy all the time, so the change from happy to sad is what adds the emotion in. That is, your body goes through changes as it experiences major emotional changes. [Generating emotion from just your own emotions changing doesn't seem like a "real" source of emotion. It seems like that is just causing unnecessary stress. What then is "real" emotion? (probably emotion that has a real source) Does emotion even need to be real? Wouldn't then all excessive emotions (like in fights) be considered to be non-real since they are just ramping up their own tempers/emotions?]

There are two degrees of change in emotion however; one is a major change from depression to mania (which is what bipolar is). Another is just your ordinary change from sad to happy, which can occur many times in a day. So if someone is manic or depressed are they being more emotional than someone who is just happy or just sad? [Emotional in a different way.]

Symptoms of mania ("The highs"):

The symptoms of bipolar depression are the same as those of major depression and include:

I don’t think that people with the two extremes of mania and depression are any more emotional than people who are just happy or sad. That is because being too happy or too sad shuts off the other emotions people would experience like anger, fear, disgust, surprise, acceptance, and curiosity. Why does it? Because with all the other symptoms of mania and depression, there isn’t really any room left for emotions other than happy and sad, a person’s system can only handle so much emotion. If you are crying all the time (like you would if you were severely depressed) there isn’t any more room for you to experience other emotions. Or if you are as happy as you can be, you’re probably too out of it (in your happy land) to think about anything else. [That ties into previously discussed how you can only feel a few feelings at once, pay attention to a few things at once, and not think a lot and feel a lot at the same time.]

A person could be happy or sad and be less emotional than someone with mania or depression, however. But a person (if they were experiencing the other emotions other than happy and sad) could be just as emotional as someone with mania or depression. Although those people may be crying or have expressions of extreme glee on their faces, happy and sad are not the only emotions someone can experience and therefore they may not be as emotional. [Someone is so happy when they are manic, that it might not be like an emotion entirely, but more like a thought/emotion because you are so focused on the happiness that it is like you are thinking about it (remember we defined thought as a period of high attention).]

Emotion means that you are feeling something; if you are feeling emotions other than happy and sad, then wouldn’t the other emotions (if they were positive) increase the happy emotion and you then have a happy emotion that is larger than the other positive emotions you are experiencing? I guess that would be happy, but it would probably lead to overload. That is why it makes sense that people who are emotional experience a range of emotions from happy to sad ones, so that if they just experienced happy ones it would lead to too much happiness causing overload. [Remember there isn't just the few basic emotions, but there is a variation of each emotion based on the circumstance. In each circumstance there is going to be a different emotion because something happened that was different. The emotion is based off of the real experience, if you are worried in one situation, that worry is going to be different in another situation (but both are still the emotion worry). That shows how you can be very emotional without the emotions happy and sad.]

Why would emotions be balanced, why not just have only positive emotions? Because if you are curious, your curiosity is going to backfire when there is a failure (you’d be curious in a failure). Or if you are overly surprised, you would be just as surprised at a bad thing happening as you would as a good thing happening, leading to being happy and sad. Or if you got angry at something, you are then likely to become pleased by the opposite thing happening, so the emotions tend to balance out.

So is it really that the positive and negative emotions balance out? It is probably too hard for your mind to wait to become emotional at things that are only going to lead it to become happy. That is, you would have to consciously say to each thing, ah that is a positive emotion, I can have that emotion now. It seems more natural that when something bad happens, you get more upset, and when something good happens, you get happier. So you don’t have to calculate and spend time to assess if you should “feel” in those instances. [Someone might be emotional and respond better to happy emotions, but then they would get more upset when something bad happened.]

That is a good way to size people up, assess how happy they get from what things, and how sad they get from other things. Why is it that happy and sad are the two strongest emotions? It seems that way because all the other emotions follow suit with them. When someone is happier they are likely to be more curious, or more accepting. When someone is sad it also makes him or her less reactive to things (the surprise emotion).

The other emotions don’t occur as much as well. You can easily be happy or sad all the time, no matter what you are doing, but the other emotions need to fit into what you are doing. Like the emotion curiosity needs something to be curious in, and the emotion disgust needs something to be disgusted by. When you are doing nothing the emotion you are going to feel most of the time is just plain happy or sad, thus those two emotions are also our “idling” emotions (when we are idle we have them). [So every object even might have it's own emotion that you can't really label as one of the general emotions. Even those emotions, every emotion, is going to make you feel happy, sad, or neither. It is like being happy is a conscious conclusion based on thought that the object is good, or that things are going well for you. It isn't like people are excessively happy all the time, they are probably experiencing other emotions most of the time, and since these are emotions good "think" they are happy.]

If the other emotions don’t occur as much, then why would someone be happy or sad in the first place? Are the emotions happy and sad simply the result of other emotions in your body? If that is the case, how is it possible for someone to become manic or depressed? Mania and depression are such extremes of happy and sad that other emotions can’t be experienced as well. What then is the source of that extreme happiness or sadness? [Like I said before, it seems as if they are over-inflating the emotion (probably with thought, since thought is more under their control than emotion alone).]

Either it seems like life has enough in it to justify being manic or depressed or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t then the mania and depression would arise from people just being unstable and fragile creatures, easily upset and disturbed. If it does then by a logic process one should be able to figure out the cause of their mania or depression is and solve it.

How This Chapter shows how Intelligence is intertwined with Emotion:

Laws of Emotion

There is a uniform way in which emotions behave, whereby in similar instances they always respond in a similar fashion. For instance, people respond negatively to pain. “Respond negatively” means that pain makes them feel bad. It could be that someone enjoys pain, but if they do, the enjoyment would only come after the pain itself (and the bad feeling the pain generates) so they are still responding negatively to pain because the pain made them feel bad, they are just enjoying it later on. This “enjoyment” of the pain must come from thoughts, not emotions, since it occurs after the real stimulus, which was some type of physical occurrence that generated pain. By “thoughts” I don’t mean you have to think something verbal, I just mean that something about the pain meant something to you in a good way, which made you feel good. Thoughts generate emotions which are more removed from real stimulus because real stimulation is more tangible, and therefore usually generates a lot more emotion. For instance, if someone gets in a verbal fight, although the fight is verbal, they are still seeing someone else’s expression, which is probably going to be drastic, and it would be accompanied by loud sounds. It isn’t really possible to get that riled up in a debate with yourself.

Seeing the real world and any of the physical sensations is going to generate tangible emotion. If you just think about the real world that would generate less emotion then actually doing that thought in the world. This doesn’t mean that people aren’t feeling most of the time if they aren’t doing intense activity, because even just sitting around you are still taking in lots of sensory data about the real world.

In the chapter “How Emotion is Processed”, I discuss how people are more open to positive emotional experiences than negative ones. But what does that mean exactly? What is the mental significance if someone is more open to positive emotions? Since the mind only has three components of emotion, feeling and thought, the only significance it could have is either on emotion, feeling or thought. Therefore if people are more open to positive experiences, they are going to have better thoughts because of a positive experience. These better thoughts might lead to better emotions, so it would cycle, positive experience – positive emotion – positive thought – even more positive emotion because of positive thought. That might make a positive experience more drawn out then a negative one because you are “playing it up” in your head. People would naturally want to shut out negative things since negative things cause pain. In this way, very strong emotions are probably only positive, since it would take thought to make the emotion very strong. Not necessarily verbal thought, but it could just be a process of recognizing the initial emotion from the stimulus, then saying to yourself (not verbally) “ok, that is a good emotion” and then you would feel better about that. So it is like you get a good emotion, then you feel good about that good emotion, which prolongs the good feeling and deepens it.

That is very significant, because it means that events in real life can have a significance larger than that which they would immediately seem to have. Some event might have a certain immediate emotional impact, but that emotional impact might in turn have a cognitive impact on your thoughts, which would make you realize how significant that emotional event was, which might make you feel “touchy-feely” about it, or whatnot. It might even change what the initial emotional reaction is. That is, maybe it is these thought processes which determine what the immediate emotional response is to begin with. Like if someone picks on you you would feel bad, but why? It is because you think something bad is happening to you. Even if you don’t consciously think that, you unconsciously probably would, and therefore it is going to make you feel bad. But that immediate response isn’t as under our control as the longer emotional response, which is the response right after the immediate one, which you could really change because of your attitude. If your attitude is that you like being picked on, you would probably feel even worse when made fun of then if you didn’t like it. That is because if you didn’t like it you would mentally “shut off” the negative stimulus and it wouldn’t hang around as much. But then again, maybe if your attitude was strong enough that you liked being picked on, you wouldn’t feel bad if you were picked on in the first place. So it is all a matter of how you “really” feel about something that is going to determine your emotional response to it.

Pain is a little different from that, however, because your attitude isn’t going to have as big an impact on how much pain you are going to feel. The examples still show that feeling bad when picked on is a learned response, that is, it is because of your understanding that being picked on is a bad thing that makes you feel bad. That makes sense, since being picked on is a complicated emotional experience, so it would have to be processed cognitively and with thoughts (by thoughts there I just mean a thought structure in your brain, not necessarily you actually thinking). So there are things in life which can please you on a thought level, which could determine your emotional response, and other things in life that are more immediately emotional (which would mean less related to thought and complicated emotions, which are going to be more related to thought since the thought would make them more complicated). So this might mean that someone could like someone but it doesn’t make sense (to an outside observer) that they like them because they respond differently in all other circumstances. But it could be that that person is satisfying a part of the other person’s “thought structures”, like a trick in the system whereby that person makes the other person “think” that they should generate positive emotion in them, and since they think that they should make them feel good, actually would. If anyone believes sincerely enough that something is going to be good for them, then that thing probably is going to generate positive emotion.

But there are limitations, because thought can only do so much. You still need to take in the reality of life, and what actually generates “real” emotion in order feel things that are real, not created by thought. So the title of this section “rules of emotion” is misleading, because these rules can be bend and changed just based on your attitude, how you feel, and your thoughts.

The next question is, “what then generates real emotion, especially since your own thought process can make you feel different things in different ways”. The answer to that is that your thought process works along with reality, so although your thought process can change how you feel emotions, it ultimately itself is going to be based in reality. Reality would be things like, “physical pain causes emotional pain”. That is logical, if something causes physical pain you should feel bad emotionally about it. There might be a person out there who feels good about physical pain, but then the source of that good feeling would generate from that person’s philosophy of life, or attitude towards life. That is because they would be thinking at some level that pain is a good thing, and that would be generating the positive emotion. Why would someone think that pain is a good thing, however? Maybe for them, when they feel pain, people in the world respond more positively to them. So maybe they got positive reinforcement somehow from pain. They are not going to be able to change the immediate painful response when they feel something, and that is because that type of feeling is too fundamental to who they are. You can’t change something that as that fast of a reaction, because it doesn’t seem to be a mental thing that is related to thought, it just seems to be a fact of life.

Or beautiful things cause good emotions is something else that seems to be a fact of life. It is these facts of life that your thoughts determine what is good and what is bad, so that is why you are usually going to think that pain is a bad thing, because in reality it is bad. But if you get “enough” positive stimulus from pain in the real world, then maybe that could override the idea of the pain being bad for you. But the point is, all your thoughts are going to be tied into reality in the first place. Like when people pick on you you understand that is bad because that would cause you to think bad things about yourself, which makes you feel bad because then you image yourself in situations where you are a failure. Maybe that then makes you think about not getting food, starving, since in life if you are a failure you might wind up starving. There are chains of thought you cannot change based on your attitude either, and if one of those thoughts is a thing that is more tied into reality that you can’t “change” no matter your attitude, then you are going to have to base how you feel and therefore the rest of your thoughts off of that reality. Reality is going to determine your thoughts (or your thought structures which determine how “good” or “bad” something is for you), which in turn is going to determine how you feel. You can only change so much from reality.

So how do you know what you are feeling is real, if your thoughts and what you believe about the stimulus can change the feeling so much? Your thoughts are probably going to be accurate, however, and thus they are going to enhance a certain truth about the stimulus. An example of them not being accurate would be a delusion in a romantic relationship, someone thinking their mate is good at something significant, and that might raise their appreciation for that person. It might be that that only changes their view a little, that at the unconscious level you respond to how that person really is because your feelings know if that other person actually has skill. That is why it is important to identify if the feeling you are feeling is really real, if you can really feel it. Things that aren't as related to reality aren't going to be as significant as more important details. For instance, someone being a fast runner might not be as important as them being a good person. You should try to identify what qualities cause which emotions in you, and if that person really "radiates" those qualities or they aren't present at all. Like the fast runner might have a different physical presence, or they might not. Emotions should be accurate and true.

A way to test that would be to say, "what feelings does this cause me directly, not what feelings happen when I think about that thing". You can compare the feeling you get in the presence of the stimulus to the feeling you get when you think about it. When you think about it your thoughts are going to have a greater influence because you are thinking. You could also test and say, "If I thought this, what feelings would this generate in me, versus thinking that or (even better) nothing". You can say to yourself, "I am open-minded, I am going to accept the feeling this causes in me, I'm not going to let my thoughts control what the reality this is presenting is". Also, asking yourself if you really care about the stimulus might have an effect. That would be you influencing your feelings to feel less about somehing that might have otherwise generated a lot of emotion. Some things might seem exciting, but not be exciting in reality, so at first you might get into it and feel a lot of false shallow feelings, but you could recognize that those feelings aren't deep or real, you can choose to not care about them and they might go away. Remember that caring about a feeling or emotion intensifies it (that probably happens becuase you are changing how much attention you are paying to that feeling, remember thought is a period of high attention on something).

Life Occurs In Sharp Spikes

Life occurs during the brief periods of time when people are actually paying attention, in spikes.

People need to pay attention to things in order to keep their minds alive and active. They need to pay attention to little things all the time. That is why spikes occur, when people refocus their attention on little things over and over it occurs as a spike, because the new object needs to be processed as a whole and this processing takes energy in the form of a “spike”. [The key thing there is that the object needs to be processed as a whole. You pay attention to lots of little things all the time, but you only pay attention to complete things infrequently, so infrequently that when you actually do pay attention, it occurs as a spike.]

Humans cannot pay attention to everything, and the things they do pay attention to they need to “spike” their attention initially to get that object into their attention and focus. It is possible to not use spikes of attention, but if you did that then life would be boring. In order for life to be interesting people naturally spike their attention on certain things every so often (once a minute or so) to make life more exciting. Life would be boring if you never paid sharp attention to anything. Spikes of attention keep life “crisp”. [You could rephrase that as, if you never pay attention to anything, you are never going to be interested in anything. And if you actually pay attention to something, you would need to direct your attention to it at some point, putting in maximum attention so you grab it into focus, that is the spike.]

If life occurs in sharp spikes, why then doesn’t it feel like life occurs in sharp spikes? It seems pretty smooth to me. If it seems this way, then you aren’t realizing or paying attention to the complicated emotional and cognitive processes that are going on in your mind, life is not “all smooth” but there are changes in attention going on all the time. Each little thing you pay attention to (actually pay attention to that is, not just “absorb”) actually occurs as a spike in attention. This is because most of the time your attention isn’t extremely directed, but you need to make it extremely directed sometimes (once a minute or so) in order to properly stay awake. It is also because you don’t absorb every little thing, you only absorb a few things once in a while, and these things that you do absorb are the spikes. They are spikes because they are relative to most of your activity which isn’t absorbing things intently or deeply. Every minute or so you need to absorb something. That thing is the spike. [People think all the time, and since thinking is an intense activity (we defined it as a period of high attention), it needs to be supported by intense activities, and a spike is one of these activities. So you could spike your attention on a thought, or use a thought to pay attention to a vision, etc.]

When you pay attention to your attention (or what you are paying attention to) how does life feel to you? Does it feel smooth or rough? Life seems rough if you pay attention to it like that, with occasional spikes of interest in things. It is rough because there are many little fluctuations of interest in various things, but intensity is needed somewhere. This intensity comes from the spikes, otherwise life would just be rough and there wouldn’t be anything smooth. The top of the spike is smooth, however because it is clear and it lasts a little while (a few seconds or a few dozen seconds). Paying sharp attention to things allows you to have a clear mind for the time you are giving that sharper attention. It separates out all the other things and you focus more on what it is you processed. This clears your mind because you just received a lot of stimulation. In this way spikes can make life be smooth. Without spikes life would always be rough because of all the little things. But if you use a spike then life is smooth afterwards because you are satisfied. [So emotional stimulation could come from the spikes, since they are significant since you are paying a lot of attention they might generate more emotion. This emotion helps you to focus on the thing you are trying to pay attention to because you're more interested in it. Since you're paying attention to something now, you don't need to pay attention to other things, so life is smooth because you are being occupied. (not rough by lots of little things you're not really paying attention to)]

Life is many small variations in attention over time. There are periods of focused attention and periods of non-focused attention. The periods of focused attention are the spikes. This is very complicated if you try to follow your own spikes because there are so many things you are “spiking” and paying sharp attention to all the time. There are three groups of things, things you pay sharp attention to, things you pay attention to, and things you don’t pay attention to. You pay sharp attention to things much less often than the other two categories, and that is why the sharp attention is a spike, because it is uncommon and doesn’t last as long as the other things, so it looks more like a spike when compared with the other two categories than a leveled plain. [You might have little spikes then, things you pay a little attention to. Most of the time you're not paying attention to things, or paying attention in a steady form. But when that attention starts it is grabbed because it is something new, and if it is something new that you're not going to be paying attention to much after processing it, then it might just be a small spike because you stop paying attention to it before your interest can grow.]

Also, people’s emotions change all the time. The change probably occurs both gradually and like a series of steps. There are so many emotions in a person’s head that some of them are going to interact with each other suddenly, causing a sudden sharp change in emotion, and others are going to interact more slowly, causing gradual changes in emotion. [So some changes might even be spikes.]

It might be that the changes are just sharp, however. You could look at the mind as a system that only changes when it gets a trigger, and that would probably mean that it only has sharp changes of emotion. However those changes wouldn’t just be sharp changes. Large, sharp changes of emotion don’t just happen by themselves, but deep emotional experiences are often followed by similar emotions that are less intense. That is, if you experience emotion A, emotion A is going to linger in your system. [That is, you would need a spike to produce a major change, but a minor change might be induced by a smaller spike (but still a spike relative to the emotion after the change) so emotional spikes would work like attentional spikes, starting with a spike because there is an initial period of interest.]

That excludes the staircase model, but there still could be something like a staircase, only instead of steps at a 90 degree angle they would be something like an 80 degree angle. With 10/360 percent being the emotions that hang around after an initiating event. That would be just emotion changes resulting from large events, however. Either a large event within your own system (something like a thought or a feeling, or a mix of thoughts and feelings), or a large external event (like something happening outside your body). [So an attentional spike might result in an emotional spike, or vice versa.]

There must be other stuff going on in the mind, however. While a clash or mix of two feelings or emotions or thoughts could be figured out, and that would probably result in a noticeable emotional change (the staircase or spike model). There are probably other things going on in your conscious or unconscious mind. That is, some things that happen to people take a long time to recover from. But the main point is, everything, whether or not is a slow, gradual change or a sudden, quick change, resulted from some mix of emotions and feelings and thoughts and external events happening.

Furthermore, any mix of those things, when they interact, is going to be a large change. That is because it is a large change relative to your normal state, which is most of the time feeling nothing, because nothing is going on most of the time. People experience events in life and things in life and they occur in individual units.

Thoughts, emotions, and feelings are the three main components of the brain. “Everything” isn’t stimulating enough to cause sharp spikes. There is vision, that is, you see things all the time, but your emotion doesn’t go up or down a lot when you close or open your eyes. Unless you are looking at something that is causing a feeling, of course. But even then that feeling is only going to last a few seconds before it dies off. Therefore vision clearly functions with the sharp spikes pattern.

The same with hearing, if you hear something interesting, there is a sharp spike of initial interest, and then it dies down to almost normal. That must mean that feelings and emotions are probably a combination of thoughts, feelings, and emotions. That you almost think about the event that is occurring, and that when you think about it there is a large spike upwards. That the combination of feeling and emotion with thought results in large spikes, which form our best and common regular life experiences. [So in other words, the spikes are like thoughts because they are a period of high attention (which we defined thought as) even though they might be mostly emotional, they can still be like thoughts as well.]

That is, you can’t really tell you are thinking about it because it isn’t verbal. But it feels like you are thinking about it during that brief time. That means that your attention is going to be focused on it, basically. Sometimes when someone is in a depression these spikes can be very large because that person is very upset. A large spike would result in emotional damage, furthering the depression, thereby causing the depression to go down like a staircase. It is easy to do emotional damage, but it can’t be repaired in a series of spikes, as it would go up gradually (still small compared to the spikes however). [So if you are going through a hard time, what makes that time hard might not just be a higher level of sadness, but there might be more complicated traumatic feelings which are intense mixed in (like spikes).]

Just think of it as fabric; damage needs to be mended, and mending takes time. It is easy to do damage to the fabric, you can only mend it slowly. No one just “snaps out” of a depression. Furthermore it is easy to stimulate the fabric, just poke it. That poke would be similar to a life experience, the poke has ripples, but the main event was the poking. [So spikes are significant beyond just the spike, they can help you to pay attention to what you spiked, or cause damage if it was a negative spike.]

The sharp spike occurrences show just how short of attention span humans have. That for brief periods we are capable of almost perfect attention, and during those periods is the height of the spikes. These spikes actually look more like lumps since they go up gradually and cause a stay in attention for a few seconds, but they are so fast that they are best called spikes. Say looking at an attractive girl/guy causes a feeling. The first few seconds you look at her/him, you are going to have perfect attention, but then it is going to die off. Everything else in life is somewhat like that, whether you are looking at your pencil, or your computer, or whatever. The item you are looking at needs to be initially processed, and your attention needs to be directed to it first off.

Everything in life needs to be processed before it enters your system, and that process is going to be a sharp spike of emotion, feeling, and thought. After you process looking at the computer you can move along to just wandering your eyes throughout the room. If you pause at any one of the things you are wandering your eyes around, you will experience a sharp spike of emotion/thought/feeling. That is, looking at things also causes emotion as well as the thought needed to direct your attention to it, if you are paying more attention to something which causes emotion, then logically you are going to feel more emotion from it.

This doesn’t mean that you aren’t thinking/feeling when you don’t pause or stop. You could say that people are thinking, feeling, and are having emotion all of the time just in amounts so small it is hard for them to detect. That these amounts only go up in sharp spikes when they actually pay attention to something either in their mind or outside it. This “paying attention” doesn’t have to be conscious or deliberate. If two feelings interact within your mind it could cause you to pay conscious or unconscious attention to them.

Something like, your girlfriend meeting your ex girlfriend would cause a clash of feelings for your new girlfriend, with feelings for your old girlfriend (possibly). But that clash of feelings wouldn’t occur in a thought spike, it would occur in an emotional spike. It would also be a slight rise of tension in the feeling between which one you like more. Also, the rise in that feeling wouldn’t be significant compared to if you thought about that feeling at the same time. When you think about the feeling it would result in a sharp spike, and that spike would last a few seconds, then die away. That is because that feeling was a potential explosive one, one that exploded when you thought about it, resulting in a spike. Also, thought about anything else, a feeling, a vision, whatever, results in lesser spikes of thoughts/feelings/emotions. That anything and everything, when thought about, is interesting for the first few seconds, but then that interest dies off. It is the same principal when you pinch yourself. When you pinch yourself the first time, it hurts the most. That is because the first time you are thinking about it a lot more, after that your interest in it dies off. Amazing how much our attention can fluctuate to cause life to occur in short, sharp spikes. [So some experiences and emotions can produce spikes easier than others. Though an emotional spike like in that example isn't a "fast" one that just grabs attention, but is one that stays around as high attention for a while. There are minor spikes when you grab your attention to something or have an emotional change, and there are longer ones where you stayed "grabbed" for a while.]

Although there are spikes of emotion and feeling, spikes of thought are needed to direct attention. Not thought in the verbal sense, but thought in the sense that it is under your control and feels more similar to thoughts. Thought occurs as basically a bunch of spikes, and since people think all the time and about everything, life occurs in those spikes. They don’t feel intense because it is just thought. But basically whenever something new comes into your vision or your attention there is an initial sharp spike of interest. And if you are going to be doing the same thing for a long period of time, then it is going to take additional sharp spikes every couple of seconds or every minute to keep your attention. It is easy to test that, try and read something with the same bland expression as when you start reading it (but after your initial interest at the beginning when you notice the piece) and you just can’t do it. To maintain attention your mind needs to snap back to what it is paying attention to. Feelings and emotions are going to follow the thought, however (that is emotions and feelings are imbedded in thoughts). That is why people need to think all the time, to maintain a healthy level of mental activity, it is a part of life. Emotions and feelings can also be described as thoughts, however, so those spikes continue even after you stop thinking, just in the form of emotion-feeling-thoughts (they are still more similar to thoughts however since they are short and spiky). [So a "thought" is required to direct attention. That is because to direct attention you need to pay sharp attention, and any thought is something which you are paying attention to. Something could grab your attention unconsciously, and it could be more like an unconscious thought that pulls you in. That shows that there is going to be degrees of consciousness to which your attention is grabbed, sometimes you do it deliberately, and sometimes you spike your attention without thinking about it at all.]

Basically your attention needs to be initially “grabbed” for anything that you are going to pay attention to. That grabbing is the initial period of paying attention to it. During that first period of paying attention to something is where the spike is because you are processing the item/object. You need a spike to grab your mind and attention, otherwise you wouldn’t be paying attention to anything. You can still process most of life without the spikes, but that is only because spikes had brought you back to reality in the first place in order for that attention to be grabbed. Furthermore it is going to be easier to process new things based on what the spike was about, that is, it is going to be easier to process similar things more related to the spike then to other things in the area. If you focus on a school bus, then you are going to be more attentive to the other school buses you see for the next few seconds or minutes because you were just paying attention to one school bus, and your mind is wired to notice school buses. [That is because you are probably going to have a higher emotional interest in the school bus, making you more aware of it. Even if the thing you saw generated a negative emotion, you still would pay more attention to it (unconsciously) because you are alerted to it. It is in your mind, so when you see it you can process it better.]

Furthermore there is a similar way in which your mind processes each spike. For spikes that are under your control, first the spike would be a period of thought about something, say a school bus or a coffee machine. Then what you just saw or thought about becomes an emotion, or an unconscious series of thoughts. That is you are less focused consciously on what it is you are seeing or whatever but your mind is still processing it. Next, after your mind processes the unconscious thoughts it becomes a feeling, you then feel something about what it is you were focusing on. So it isn’t when you look at something you immediately get a feeling, that doesn’t make any sense. First you think about it, then you feel it in a general way (an emotion) then after you understand what that feeling is, you feel it. That is because you know what it is, you know where it is, and you know what to focus your attention on. An example of unconsciously processing something you see is when you look at match you then think about fire. Then after you think about the fire you can almost “feel” the fire, following the pattern of thought to emotion to feeling (you think about the match, then something happens unconsciously (this unconscious thought process is emotion (remember emotion is unconscious thought) which then causes you to feel the fire – a feeling). [Not everyone is going to feel fire when they look at a match, and for the people that do, that feeling is probably going to be unconscious. That was just an example of how things can be thought about more than just what they are, and since they are going to be thought about, they are going to go from thought to emotion to feeling (emotion more similar to thought than feeling). Since it is a spike of thought that directs attention, the spike dies off, so it goes from thought to emotion, since the emotion is less intense than the thought, after the thought period (or the spike period) you don't need to think about it anymore since you already processed it consciously, you simply then think about it further unconsciously.]

It could be that a few minutes passes before a conscious spike occurs (that is a spike that is under your control). A spike is basically just anything that you are going to start paying attention to. During those first few seconds of when you are going to pay attention to something there is a sharp spike upwards. Without these periods of attention humans/animals would never pay attention to anything. Basically once every few minutes or so you need to pay attention to something or your brain is going to be too inactive. After you pay attention to one thing, however, your general attention is grabbed and you don’t need to have another spike for at least a few minutes.

Everything that is processed, not just spikes, follows the sequence of thought to emotion to feeling. That is because thoughts are clearer than emotions and feelings, and emotions are more similar to thoughts than feelings are (discussed previously) so when you see something or hear something or whatnot for the first time, it is clearer in your mind. Then it becomes less clear and you think about it unconsciously. You think about it unconsciously because it takes further processing in order to isolate the feeling that that things gives you. Some things are just too complicated to feel them right away. Other things, however, can be felt right away, say if you are touching something the feeling arises right away. That is because the physical stimulus is more immediate than emotional stimulus. [Emotion is very complicated, so the emotions something gives you you aren't going to understand well. That also shows how this thought-emotion-feeling pattern occurs quickly, and is just based off of the thought period "dying off" and becoming less and less like a thought, and more and more like a feeling. You could think about it later and spike it again, and then the series would repeat. This doesn't mean that everything occurs as thought to emotion to feeling, only when you have a thought the thought is going to be brief, and when it goes away a feeling is left. Feelings and emotions last longer than thoughts (in fact, you're feeling all the time, but only thinking specific things some of the time).]

Emotional things, however, are simply to complicated to “feel” them right away, they need to be processed first. That is logical, just take looking at anything, say a book. In order to feel the feelings that the book causes in you, you are going to have to at least unconsciously think about it first (that is, after you start paying attention to it, which you do by starting to think about it or just see it and notice it more than you usually notice things in the area). Since you don’t need to think about physical stimulus since it is just a physical stimulus, (not something like vision) you don’t really unconsciously process it.

Spikes are dramatic rises in attention. They can be assisted by load noises or something dramatic visually, but they don’t need to be. In other words they can be internal or external. You can pay sharp attention to something in the real world or something in your own head. If there is a load sound in the environment, it is most likely that your spike in attention is going to occur during that period. It doesn’t have to, you could pay attention to something else in spike form, but the main point is that you have to have about one sharp spike in attention a minute at least. That is, you have to pay attention to something in your environment or something in your head, sharp attention in the form of a spike (lasting a second or a few seconds) every minute or so.

Otherwise the world would just go by you and you’d be completely out of it. You don’t just need to pay attention to things, you occasionally need to pay sharp attention to things. Furthermore this attention in the form of a spike can’t be dissipated and spread out, it is always going to occur in a spike. If, in between the spikes, you are trying to get the highest attention you can in an attempt to spread the spike out, (that is, if you are trying to spread out your attention instead of having spikes) the normal spike would still be a spike relative to even the extra attention you gave to the non spike period, because that attention would still be too low, so you couldn’t give it that high of an attention level, as it would be very low compared to the spike still. Spikes of emotion and feeling also need to occur every few minutes or so. The human system needs to be “shocked” into reality because you need to pay attention to life.

Say it is time for another sharp increase in attention (that is you waited too long without focusing on anything) and something occurs like a dog barking. Then you are going to focus on that dog barking intently in the form of a spike. So if the dog continues to bark for the next few seconds or minutes, your attention will be on that more because you paid attention to it initially more so than other things in your environment. This is very important because if someone doesn’t use their spikes say to someone they are talking to, they could be talking to that person and not be paying attention at all. You could hear what they are saying but not really be interested in it nearly as much as you would in a normal conversation (if you choose not to think about the person talking to you – remember if you do think about the person talking to you then naturally you are going have a thought spike because that is how thought initiates when thinking about new objects, the new object needs to be grabbed and processed first).

If you direct your attention spikes away from the things you don’t want to hear (say if there is a loud noise in the background, just don’t pay sharp attention to it) then most of your attention will follow along suit. If attention was uniform then people wouldn’t be able to direct their attention easily. In order to ignore the other things in your environment and just focus on one thing, the only way to get just that one thing into your focus would be to use a spike in attention. After that spike the thing you “spiked” would be in your attention at a low level, but the other things around you would be at an even lower level. The spike is necessary to differentiate what you are paying attention to, to differentiate the new thing which you are paying attention to from everything else. You can’t just go to a slightly higher rise in attention for one thing (you can pay attention to something new, but you wouldn’t be paying more attention to it than other things in the environment already, you’d just be isolating that thing, it wouldn’t be a rise in attention, or an insignificant one), because people can only focus on one thing at a time for this reason. Because of the spikes in attention, people can isolate (focus intently on) one or a few things.

That limitation (of only being able to focus intently on a few things) happens because each spike eliminates the other things which they were paying attention to previously. You can spread out one spike to different things, however (if you do it at the same time), that is how your attention can be spread. You can’t do a series of smaller spikes because that confuses your mind, it is like saying, pay attention to this, then pay attention to that, and then pay attention to that. It is too confusing. It is easier to say at once, pay attention to this that and that, and then you can do it.

That explanation also explains why spikes occur at all – because it is much easier to pay a lot of attention in a short period of time then to keep jolting yourself over and over at each thing that you want to pay attention to. That way is too jarring and much less smooth. You don’t notice the spike when it occurs because it is more like a refocusing than a spike. People basically need to be focused on little things continuously, and this focus is directed by short periods of refocusing labeled here as spikes. One way in which these spikes occur is that when something is first presented it takes more energy and brain power to process it at first because it is new. It is easier to try and comprehend the entire thing at once than to comprehend it in pieces, as the latter just doesn’t make any sense. People comprehend things as wholes not as parts added up over time. The other reason these spikes occur is to initially catch your attention and hold it at a high level on something. That is, in order to go from a state of inactivity to a state of activity, you cannot just go up to the level of activity, but you need to motivate yourself to get there by having a spike (this spike is also the initial processing of the new object/event and occurs because of that as well).

In order to get someone’s attention they can’t just lazily look at you like they are looking at everything else, but they need pay sharp attention to you fo