I’m partway through reading the book, “Looking for Spinoza” by Antonio Damasio. In it he describes a procedure on a Parkinson’s patient where they implant tiny electrodes in her brain stem so that the passage of a low-intensity, high-frequency electrical current can change the way in which some of the motor nuclei operate. They can effectively stop some symptoms immediately. In this case, they miscalculated where they used the stimulation and the woman burst into sobbing tears and misery. All her facial expressions, demeanour and body language suggested profound grief. Soon her words matched with language telling of despair and hopelessness.
The doctor realized what was happening and stopped the current. Her sobbing stopped immediately. She smiled, relaxed and joked and asked what that was all about?
Dimasio goes on to suggest that in this case the emotion was physically triggered by the current and the patient then quickly came up with feelings to match her physcial manifestation of sadness.
In other words, her electrically triggered symptoms of grief needed an explanation and she quickly provided it to match.
Dimasio says, “This entire repertoire of actions was engaged in a well-rehearsed instrumental concert, every step in its own time and place so that the effect apeared to manifest, for all intents and purposes, the presence of thoughts capable of causing sadness- the presence of emotionally competent stimuli. Except, of course, that no such thoughts had been present prior to the unexpected incident, nor was the patient even prone to having such thoughts spontaneously. Emotion-related thoughts only came after the emotion began.”
We so often think sad thoughts and then we feel sadness, but it can often be the other way around. Perhaps there is a physiological event in our brains, hormones, or something else happening in the body and it triggers us to think the sad thoughts. So, in this case, the display of sadness was simply triggered out of nowhere. “No less importantly, sometime after the display of sadness was fully organized and in progress, the patient began to have a feeling of sadness.”
In normal conditions, the speed in which thoughts and feelings happen, there is no way to know which came first; a classic chicken or egg event. It is all part of our associative thinking.
Another study he refers to has subjects asked to move their faces in certain ways. They do not know which emotion they are asked to portray as the facial movements are abstractly defined. And yet, the feelings associated with the facial expression soon followed. So, whether psychologically unmotivated or acted, the physical expressions have the power to cause the feeling. Of course the reverse is true as well.
All this to say that it’s true that if you act confident or happy, you soon will be. Fake it until you make it baby.
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