7.2 Emotional Thinking

There is a very fine line between "hobby" and "mental illness." —Dave Barry

Most of the time your thinking proceeds in routine, uneventful streams—but sometimes you run into obstacles that interrupt your orderly progress. Then you’ll have to find something else to do, and this may lead to a spreading cascade changes in the way you think.

Changing the subject. Whatever you are doing now, there are always other things you could do, so whenever you get discouraged with one, you might want to switch to another.

Self-Determination. If you are tempted to abandon your task, you can renew your motivation by bribing yourself with imagined rewards, or with threats of the prospect of failure

Self-Conscious Reflection. If that doesn’t work, you might start to imagine how you (or your imprimers) would feel if your performance conflicted with your ideals.

But when none of those methods turns out to help, one still can use several ‘last resorts.’

Self-Regression: When your situation seems to become so complex that you see no way to deal with it, you still can ask yourself, “How did I deal with such things in the past?” Then you may be able to ‘regress’ to some earlier version of yourself, from an age when such things seemed simpler to you.

Cry for Help! If you can’t find a way to do something yourself, you might attempt to exploit the resources of your friends. As infants, we were designed to do this, using signals that hijack more powerful minds.

Emotional thinking: A flash of impatience or anger can cut through what seems like a hopelessly tangled knot. Each such ‘emotional way to think' is a different way to deal with things, and some can increase your persistence or courage, while others can help you simplify things.

In any case, after each such change, you may still want to pursue some similar goals, but now you’ll see them from new points of view— because each switch to a new Way to Think may initiate a large-scale cascade. Then, depending on how long those changes persist, you (or your friends) might recognize this as a change in your emotional state.

Various parts of our states of mind can continue for different scales of time. Some last for no more than the blink of an eye, but infatuations persist for days or weeks. However, when other ‘dispositions’ endure for substantial spans of a individual’s life, we see as aspects of that person’s personality,’ and we call these characteristics or traits.

For example, when solving a problem, some people tend to accept a solution that still has some deficiencies—so long as it seems to work well enough: you might describe such a person as realistic, pragmatic, or practical. Another person may tend to insist that every potential flaw must be fixed—and you might call such people fastidious—except when they make you uncomfortable, in which case you call them obsessive instead. Other such dispositions include being Cautious vs. Reckless, Inattentive vs. Vigilant, Unfriendly vs. Amicable, Reclusive vs. Sociable, Visionary vs. Down-to-Earth, or Courageous vs. Cowardly.

In fact, in the course of everyday thought, each person is likely to frequently switch among such views or attitudes, and we usually don’t even notice this. However, when we encounter more serious trouble, our Critics may make enough changes to start the large-scale cascades that we describe in terms of emotional states.

Psychiatrist: What would happen if too many Critics were active? Then your emotions would keep changing too quickly. And if those Critics stopped working at all, then you’d get stuck in just one of those states.

Perhaps we can see an example of this in Antonio R. Damasio’s book, Descartes’ Error, [1] which describes a patient named Elliot, who had lost some parts of his frontal lobes in the course of removing a tumor. After that treatment, he still seemed intelligent—but his friends and employers had the sense that Elliott was ‘no longer himself.’ For example, if asked to sort some documents, he was likely to spend an entire day at carefully reading just one of those papers—or at trying to decide whether to classify them by name—or by subject or size or date or by weight.

Damasio: “One might say that the particular step of the task at which Elliot balked was actually being carried out too well, and at the expense of the overall purpose. … True, he was still physically capable and most of his mental capacities were intact. But his ability to reach decisions was impaired, as was his ability to make an effective plan for the hours ahead of him, let alone to plan for the months and years of his future.”

The damaged parts of Elliot’s brain included certain connections (to the amygdala) that are widely believed to be involved with how we control our emotions.

Damasio: “At first glance, there was nothing out of the ordinary about Elliot's emotions. … However, something was missing. … He was not inhibiting the expression of internal emotional resonance or hushing inner turmoil. He simply did not have any turmoil to hush. … I never saw a tinge of emotion in my many hours of conversation with him: no sadness, no impatience, and no frustration with my incessant and repetitious questioning.”

This led Damasio to suggest that “reduced emotion and feeling might play a role in Elliot's decision–making failures.” However, we could also consider this opposite view: that it was Elliot's new inability to make such decisions that reduced his range of emotions and feelings. For, perhaps the damage in Elliott's brain was mainly to some of the Critics (or to their connections) that formerly set off the large-scale cascades that we recognize as emotional states. Then he would have lost those precious cascades—and hence, the emotions that he once displayed—because he could no longer could exploit those Critics to choose which emotional states to use.