What is an emotion? William James’s theory of how our bodies affect our feelings(themarginalian.org)
themarginalian.org
What is an emotion? William James’s theory of how our bodies affect our feelings
https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/01/11/what-is-an-emotion-william-james/
71 comments
My understanding is that the mind body connection is accepted. Ie, if you have a chronic physical ailment it will affect your mental state.
What is more exciting for me is Daniel Kahneman explanation for why smart people do dumb things. He brings a more nuanced explanation than fear or flight. Essentially he argues our mind usually operates in autopilot System I thinking which is full of mental shortcuts and biases. Often people get trapped in a doom loop because they are so exhausted they cannot activate System II which will alter biases and behaviors. In other words, when people are chronically stressed and exhausted they keep doing the same thing and complain they are not getting better results.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=d953fegpMFE&si=d1LN17swtSO6WNtK
What is more exciting for me is Daniel Kahneman explanation for why smart people do dumb things. He brings a more nuanced explanation than fear or flight. Essentially he argues our mind usually operates in autopilot System I thinking which is full of mental shortcuts and biases. Often people get trapped in a doom loop because they are so exhausted they cannot activate System II which will alter biases and behaviors. In other words, when people are chronically stressed and exhausted they keep doing the same thing and complain they are not getting better results.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=d953fegpMFE&si=d1LN17swtSO6WNtK
> how systems from the endocrine system to the gut microbiome interact with the central nervous system and brain to generate and modify emotions
Our digestive system has a significant neural system of its own called the ‘enteric nervous system’ and given the (perhaps sensationalist) nickname ‘the second brain.’ There’s also the ‘intrinsic cardiac nervous system’ interfacing with our heart. There have been a lot of interesting results showing neuronal reactions to external stimuli. I don’t want to overstate things, as is so often the case with laypeople in the face of scientific mystery, but, at the very least, the brain isn’t entirely isolated when it comes to cognition.
Our digestive system has a significant neural system of its own called the ‘enteric nervous system’ and given the (perhaps sensationalist) nickname ‘the second brain.’ There’s also the ‘intrinsic cardiac nervous system’ interfacing with our heart. There have been a lot of interesting results showing neuronal reactions to external stimuli. I don’t want to overstate things, as is so often the case with laypeople in the face of scientific mystery, but, at the very least, the brain isn’t entirely isolated when it comes to cognition.
I remember reading in a psychology manual years ago about an experiment where they gave people a drug which would induce a physical feeling, and verified how this "made" those people feel the corresponding emotion.
Personally I wouldn't be surprised at all if there was a complex feedback loop at work, where both bodily sensations which come from outside of the central nervous system and mechanisms internal to the latter would give raise to emotions.
Personally I wouldn't be surprised at all if there was a complex feedback loop at work, where both bodily sensations which come from outside of the central nervous system and mechanisms internal to the latter would give raise to emotions.
What negative responses do you expect? Don't feel like there are a lot of HN dualists out there.
I disagree.
There is a strong under-current on HN to be anti-"any kind of psychology/social science/human understanding". There is a belief that humans can't be understood.
Many times there are views expressed about 'humans', or 'reality', with the argument being 'it so obvious to not need to studied', without realizing that the logical conclusion is "Dualism".
Especially lately with AI.
Basically, a lot of HN expresses beliefs about AI versus human, and the argument takes the form that humans are just 'special', which actually does lead to 'Dualism', whether they realize it or not.
There is a strong under-current on HN to be anti-"any kind of psychology/social science/human understanding". There is a belief that humans can't be understood.
Many times there are views expressed about 'humans', or 'reality', with the argument being 'it so obvious to not need to studied', without realizing that the logical conclusion is "Dualism".
Especially lately with AI.
Basically, a lot of HN expresses beliefs about AI versus human, and the argument takes the form that humans are just 'special', which actually does lead to 'Dualism', whether they realize it or not.
As someone with celiac disease who often has to deal with acquaintances telling me that my stomach pain is actually emotional and "in my head", I can understand negative responses. Based on my own personal experience, eating gluten can absolutely affect my emotional state, and going through a difficult experience emotionally can also cause my Celiac to flare up. I think what isn't clear is which way the causal relationship goes, and I don't think there is any reason why it has to be just one way. Our minds affect our bodies, and vice-versa, but it can be very complex.
One thing that I've figured out in relation to all of this though, is that if I'm ever feeling emotionally bad, focusing on doing what's best for my body always helps. For example, going through a breakup or divorce is emotionally painful and I don't think most people would blame their body for that pain (I wouldn't), but any time I've gone through a heartbreak, I've found that the best remedy is to hit the gym, stay active, and eat healthy. If my body feels good, my emotions will follow.
One thing that I've figured out in relation to all of this though, is that if I'm ever feeling emotionally bad, focusing on doing what's best for my body always helps. For example, going through a breakup or divorce is emotionally painful and I don't think most people would blame their body for that pain (I wouldn't), but any time I've gone through a heartbreak, I've found that the best remedy is to hit the gym, stay active, and eat healthy. If my body feels good, my emotions will follow.
The best theory Ive read is the theory of constructed emotion by Lisa Feldman Barrett. It directly contradicts this theory. Emotions are basically very fast predictions by the brain. The whole idea of emotions being completely independent from cognition just seems pretty dated today.
Isn't trauma often permanent? Even if it's that a kid got his red fire truck stolen from him in kindergarten and now he has attachment issues. Or someone deals with horrible things in their past. It can be ridiculous or completely founded, but it's not fleeting or "very fast". It's not DNA but it _seems_ engrained, however incorrect the conclusion may be.
Trauma can be lifelong if it isn’t worked through, but some trauma can be worked through (and hallucinogens are showing promise of working through trauma quicker than medication&talk therapy alone). I think the actual emotional trauma response however is individually maybe 10-15 mins long at maximum, but feeling the emotion often causes you to think other triggering thoughts or behave in a manner exacerbating the trigger, thus making an individual 10-15 minute thing take hours to sort itself out.
> The best theory Ive read
You can't judge a theory just by reading about it.
You can't judge a theory just by reading about it.
Yes, you can.
If the theory is well-formulated, rests on vetted facts, and you understand the context sufficiently, you can say: "This is a good theory." If it's not well-formulated or does not rest vetted facts, and your understanding is sufficent, you can say: "Bad theory."
There's an entire world of variation between those 2 extremes, but there's no reason implicitly why you can't understand a theory just by reading about it.
If the theory is well-formulated, rests on vetted facts, and you understand the context sufficiently, you can say: "This is a good theory." If it's not well-formulated or does not rest vetted facts, and your understanding is sufficent, you can say: "Bad theory."
There's an entire world of variation between those 2 extremes, but there's no reason implicitly why you can't understand a theory just by reading about it.
Only true if collecting "vetted facts" is considered to be just reading and not doing hard, real work.
Totally wrong.
If the goal is to evaluate a theory's virtues, there's nothing stopping you if you have access to the correct documentation (provided it exists). Not sure what you think is missing.
If the goal is to evaluate a theory's virtues, there's nothing stopping you if you have access to the correct documentation (provided it exists). Not sure what you think is missing.
Give examples
Not a dementi, rather an open question I have: How does the constructed emotion theory contradict the idea that emotion is generated as a response to observed "behavior" and other sensual input such as own and other's body language? (As opposed to the believe that a certain emotion induces specific behavior.) Cognition and emotion would only be separable if body language and other relevant stimuli (which are believed to be largely outside conscious control) could be turned off, to prevent the generation of a fitting emotion - so the separation seems to be mostly conceptual/hypothetical.
She builds upon these theories as her main argument is that Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, and James were mostly "fixed" perceptions of physical states. Hers includes more "dynamic" means like sensory input, past experiences, culture/locale, and contextual factors.
But I don't see that. When I read James or Spinoza, I consider the same factors she includes from her book. They all generally believe in the bi-directional power of the mind-body connection and how that relates to someone's driving philosophical system.
But I don't see that. When I read James or Spinoza, I consider the same factors she includes from her book. They all generally believe in the bi-directional power of the mind-body connection and how that relates to someone's driving philosophical system.
> Emotions are basically very fast predictions by the brain
This predicts that basically ChatGPT has emotions.
This predicts that basically ChatGPT has emotions.
and why not?
Both are neural nets.
Carbon versus Silicon.
It's just scale at this point. At this point, maybe human neurons and connections are more complex than what can be done in a machine, but not for long.
Humans only think they are special, that a machine can't feel.
But that is only our subjective experience of ourselves, which itself is also just interpretation. It seems like everyone is in agreement that our perception of the outer world is fallible. But so is our perception of our internal processes. Our inner thoughts are just as opaque to us as the outer world.
"Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills." Schopenhauer.
It's just scale at this point. At this point, maybe human neurons and connections are more complex than what can be done in a machine, but not for long.
Humans only think they are special, that a machine can't feel.
But that is only our subjective experience of ourselves, which itself is also just interpretation. It seems like everyone is in agreement that our perception of the outer world is fallible. But so is our perception of our internal processes. Our inner thoughts are just as opaque to us as the outer world.
"Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills." Schopenhauer.
Neural nets and brains are fundamentally different. If you cut open a brain you won't find attention blocks. There's no evidence as far as I know that back propagation actually happens. It's a nice model but it is a model.
I think the latest neuroscience would disagree.
Maybe if you cut open a brain, you wont find a printout with backpropagate code.
But you do find neurons, in a network.
Humans do learn right? They take in information and encode it in their brain.
Why does it have to be back propagation to qualify. Bayesian? Minimum Entropy?
There are a lot of forms a machine neural network can take. There are a lot of theories on exactly how the brain 'calculates'/'processes'. With all of the advancements in Neuroscience and AI in last 5 years, it is bit hubris to say we'll never be able to figure out the brain, and also be able to model it.
There are a lot more like this. The field is moving too rapidly for me to go find every paper today. But it is dozens, and not even so cutting edge there isn't already books on it.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/some-neural-networks-learn-la...
Maybe if you cut open a brain, you wont find a printout with backpropagate code.
But you do find neurons, in a network.
Humans do learn right? They take in information and encode it in their brain.
Why does it have to be back propagation to qualify. Bayesian? Minimum Entropy?
There are a lot of forms a machine neural network can take. There are a lot of theories on exactly how the brain 'calculates'/'processes'. With all of the advancements in Neuroscience and AI in last 5 years, it is bit hubris to say we'll never be able to figure out the brain, and also be able to model it.
There are a lot more like this. The field is moving too rapidly for me to go find every paper today. But it is dozens, and not even so cutting edge there isn't already books on it.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/some-neural-networks-learn-la...
To add, there is a whole field of biologically-plausible learning. Predictive coding is one such method. It is isomorphic to SGD[1], and doesn't require global computation. ie it's backprop-free optimization. Although slower than SGD on silicon, it's massively parallelizible which ends up making it more biologically plausible rather than less.
1. 2020 PREDICTIVE CODING APPROXIMATES BACKPROP ALONG ARBITRARY COMPUTATION GRAPHS https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.04182.pdf
1. 2020 PREDICTIVE CODING APPROXIMATES BACKPROP ALONG ARBITRARY COMPUTATION GRAPHS https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.04182.pdf
Because human cognition is fundamentally affected and controlled by it's body and its sensorimotor interactions with the environment (read: "Six Views on Embodied Cognition" by Margret Wilson) which LLMs don't have and will never have.
1
Agree with embodied issue. Humans have a large amount of sensory input, from the 'body'. I'd disagree that AI will never have this, considering the large number of sensory technologies that already exists and are being developed.
It only takes wiring them together. Eyes, smells, touch, these are all existing and being refined.
2.
LLMs? AI research is far more vast than just LLM's. LLM's just happen to be the latest shiny thing.
"never"?. That is bold, 5 years ago people said the abilities in current LLM's were a "never", yet here we are.
Agree with embodied issue. Humans have a large amount of sensory input, from the 'body'. I'd disagree that AI will never have this, considering the large number of sensory technologies that already exists and are being developed.
It only takes wiring them together. Eyes, smells, touch, these are all existing and being refined.
2.
LLMs? AI research is far more vast than just LLM's. LLM's just happen to be the latest shiny thing.
"never"?. That is bold, 5 years ago people said the abilities in current LLM's were a "never", yet here we are.
What makes it best?
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It's been a while since I read it, but one of the central ideas is that we construct instances of emotions based on sensory data (from the internal systems that detect and predict our energy needs) in a similar way to how we construct instances of concepts from other sensory modes, e.g. seeing a particular cluster of visual features and concluding "that's a bee". When we feel anger, that's our brain's best guess as to the appropriate interpretation of a bunch of internal measurements -- raised blood pressure, high arousal, etc -- based on context. The same internal state in a different context could be interpreted as a different emotion, so there is no consistent or unique biological fingerprint behind a given emotion.
It's counter-intuitive, but it fits better with what we know about how the nervous system works than the commonly accepted fingerprint idea.
Emotions are the brain's attempt at constructing the concepts that best explain and account for our body's energy budget.
It's counter-intuitive, but it fits better with what we know about how the nervous system works than the commonly accepted fingerprint idea.
Emotions are the brain's attempt at constructing the concepts that best explain and account for our body's energy budget.
What’s the “fingerprint idea”? That’s not mentioned in the article.
I don’t see why this theory contradicts the one in the article, in your own examples you’re using bodily states as the input to emotional processes.
I don’t see why this theory contradicts the one in the article, in your own examples you’re using bodily states as the input to emotional processes.
I have to admit I didn't actually read the article so wasn't trying to compare it with LFB's model, just wanted to expand on the mention of it. The bodily states are the inputs, but the interpretation and generation of emotions is context- and culture-dependent.
The fingerprint idea is that emotions are caused by body states without that layer of interpretation/construction, so you could look at bare metrics like blood pressure, arousal, and facial expression and derive which emotion the person must be feeling directly from them.
The fingerprint idea is that emotions are caused by body states without that layer of interpretation/construction, so you could look at bare metrics like blood pressure, arousal, and facial expression and derive which emotion the person must be feeling directly from them.
[deleted]
Novelty most likely.
Came across a similar idea a few years ago: emotions are our perceptions of our bodies internal state.
Our subconscious responds to external events, releasing hormones and making other internal changes to our bodies. Whilst we can directly feel the impact of those changes (breathing rate, alertness, blood pressure, ...), like with our other senses, what we consciously pay attention to - what we "feel" - is the perception, which are our emotions.
Our subconscious responds to external events, releasing hormones and making other internal changes to our bodies. Whilst we can directly feel the impact of those changes (breathing rate, alertness, blood pressure, ...), like with our other senses, what we consciously pay attention to - what we "feel" - is the perception, which are our emotions.
Is this not just an obvious scientific fact on the verge common sense? Why would anyone (who's not a religious nut or something) not think exactly that?
Because if you’re not paying really, really good attention to what’s going on, it doesn’t really feel like that’s what’s happening. At least for most people!
They would describe, “anger makes my skin hot” not “my skin getting hot makes me experience anger.”
They would describe, “anger makes my skin hot” not “my skin getting hot makes me experience anger.”
That's a good answer, but it doesn't take much questioning for it to break down. What is this "anger" other than its collection of symptoms? If you strip away all of its properties and effects, then what's left for it to be? It becomes rather ghostly then.
Well that’s exactly James’ point. We’re both sitting 150 years downstream of his major philosophical breakthroughs so it’s a bit hard to ask “what’s all the fuss.”
Seinfeld effect going on here :)
Seinfeld effect going on here :)
My point is it's so trvially obvious that you don't need to hear about it from anyone else.
Which to me make emotions an immune response.
As someone who works with color theory and art, it fascinates me how emotion and color are classified in such similar ways: both as discrete values mapped on a circular plot.
This diagram shows emotion catagogies overlaid a cooormwheel...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion_classification#/medi...
This diagram shows emotion catagogies overlaid a cooormwheel...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion_classification#/medi...
The parallels with harmony in music are also interesting, including notes opposite each other on the circle of fifths being tritones, for which complementary colors are a great analogue.
the likeness of color Harmony with that of music is no surprise. Music harmony has been known since Plato. Goethe called upon platonic ideas when he wrote about color harmony.
Do you have any resources on learning colour theory? I can make things look good through experimentation, but I rarely understand why.
I am not a color scientist, I do work in VFX though. Pixels and their generally-vector-valued contents are what we've mostly delivered to our clients for many years.
I'm not code-shy, but I haven't worked on our color pipeline very deeply myself - I did definitely get the impression from those around-me that did, that some of the hoop-jumping we've had to do to deliver the expected result color-wise have been quite complex indeed (especially if you rewind 10-15 years!)
For example our desire to do-color-well more easily led our sister-company 'Rising Sun Research' to develop a sophisticated color-management, calibration and viewing-environment software product called: 'CineSpace'! (which was ultimately acquired by Cine-Tal and is now owned by THX.)
I guess the above is all to try to help illustrate that color (and its representation/manipulation as values on a computer) can be a very complicated topic indeed!
I do think though, that making-things-look-good might not be something that color theory is really going to help directly with?! Of course, knowing your tools better is always a good thing! With greater capabilities can come increased flexibility and perhaps speed/efficiency advancements too. Definitely worth exploring if it piques your interest!
Not particularly good links I apologize! But hopefully somewhat-of-a-springboard for investigation?:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_space
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_model
If you're going to delve in, you might like to look up some of the following topics too:
"Linear-to-Light Color" (this is probably the most important one for VFX/CG in my opinion, it affects everything from CG rendering/lighting to comp or even mip-map generation.. warping, image resizing (anything that 'filters' values), the list goes on! It's very important (and helpful!) to use values that are linear-to-real-world-light-intensities in cases where it is called-for!)
"Display Gamma" (This should explain why colors on most computers are all stored pre-raised to a particular power!)
"HSV/HSL Color Spaces" (transformation of color between spaces, sometimes the operation you want to do is trivial in another space and if you have good to/from transforms you can use, that can unlock some really powerful things!)
"High Dynamic Range Color" (This seems obvious in a way, but how bright is looking-at-the-actual-Sun compared to a full-white image (or an image of the sun) on a computer screen?!.. Using a less-limited-range (ie float values instead of integers, simplifying somewhat) to represent color is hugely important in some cases. It's mostly an issue on the very-bright-side but is also sometimes important on the dark-side too.)
Maybe for fun could you look into 'Spectral' color models?.. I find the idea fascinating but have not played with it much yet myself.
None of that is gonna help heaps with the creative side much though I wouldn't think.. but hopefully interesting if you're into this kinda stuff!
I'm not code-shy, but I haven't worked on our color pipeline very deeply myself - I did definitely get the impression from those around-me that did, that some of the hoop-jumping we've had to do to deliver the expected result color-wise have been quite complex indeed (especially if you rewind 10-15 years!)
For example our desire to do-color-well more easily led our sister-company 'Rising Sun Research' to develop a sophisticated color-management, calibration and viewing-environment software product called: 'CineSpace'! (which was ultimately acquired by Cine-Tal and is now owned by THX.)
I guess the above is all to try to help illustrate that color (and its representation/manipulation as values on a computer) can be a very complicated topic indeed!
I do think though, that making-things-look-good might not be something that color theory is really going to help directly with?! Of course, knowing your tools better is always a good thing! With greater capabilities can come increased flexibility and perhaps speed/efficiency advancements too. Definitely worth exploring if it piques your interest!
Not particularly good links I apologize! But hopefully somewhat-of-a-springboard for investigation?:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_space
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_model
If you're going to delve in, you might like to look up some of the following topics too:
"Linear-to-Light Color" (this is probably the most important one for VFX/CG in my opinion, it affects everything from CG rendering/lighting to comp or even mip-map generation.. warping, image resizing (anything that 'filters' values), the list goes on! It's very important (and helpful!) to use values that are linear-to-real-world-light-intensities in cases where it is called-for!)
"Display Gamma" (This should explain why colors on most computers are all stored pre-raised to a particular power!)
"HSV/HSL Color Spaces" (transformation of color between spaces, sometimes the operation you want to do is trivial in another space and if you have good to/from transforms you can use, that can unlock some really powerful things!)
"High Dynamic Range Color" (This seems obvious in a way, but how bright is looking-at-the-actual-Sun compared to a full-white image (or an image of the sun) on a computer screen?!.. Using a less-limited-range (ie float values instead of integers, simplifying somewhat) to represent color is hugely important in some cases. It's mostly an issue on the very-bright-side but is also sometimes important on the dark-side too.)
Maybe for fun could you look into 'Spectral' color models?.. I find the idea fascinating but have not played with it much yet myself.
None of that is gonna help heaps with the creative side much though I wouldn't think.. but hopefully interesting if you're into this kinda stuff!
What books I would recommend would depend upon what application you would put them to. User Danwills mentions color spaces, which are the means by which colour is expressed and also the means by which color is 'transcribed' from one device to another. For this I would highly recommend Kuehni, R.: Color Space and its Divisions: Color Order from Antiquity to the Present. Wiley-Interscience, 2003. A great read.
It sounds as if you have an interest in the aesthetic application of colour. The standard tomes are Itten's The Art of Colour and Goethe's Colour Theory. In my opinion, both of them are semi-incoherent messes that have done more harm than good to painters. Bruce McEvoy's website 'Handprint' evidences a man who knows more about colour that Itten ever did. https://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/water.html Its good to see that he is finally getting round to writing a book.
The way I teach color application to my students is broadly as follows.
Firstly, the 'thinking' color space for an artist (digital or traditional) should be Hue, Saturation and Lightness (HSL). Using these values the colors of an aesthetic image can be 'conceptually disassembled'. To demonstrate this, I ask my students to describe the colors they are each wearing in terms of pairwise comparisons of HSL (e.g. 'A' is the same saturation as 'B' but of a different hue and slightly lighter).
For lightness, the simple rule of thumb is to ensure that the tones are approximately separate into three bands: light, middle dark (LMD). To this one might add black and white as the top and tail. Of courses, there is not an absolute rule, and without even blinking I could show you painters who have successfully employed only two-tone bands. Novices tend to overload the lower end of the tonal range. To demonstrate tone organization, I draw a posterise curve on Photoshop's Curves. It is important to know that the M of LMD is not absolute (with M as 50% with 0 as black), but instead tends to lay around 40%. It can also be observed that most paintings extend from black to white. However, again without even trying I could name a dozen exceptions (for example, check out the low tonal range of some of Gwen John's painting).
Saturation is the intensity half of the chromatic component of colour. In common with lightness, it exists as a 'ramp' value bound by a min and max. For this reason, it can mostly be treated in much the same way as lightness. For most of art history, the saturation map of a painting followed its lightness map. It was the development of the chemical and dying industry in France that introduced artists to a wider range of intense pigments. The saturation map of Gericault's Still Life with Lobsters is remarkably different to its lightness map. If you don't have access of MATLAB or Nuke or suchlike, you can make a saturation map in Photoshop using the Selective Colour adjustment. Just cycle through the colours in the drop-down menu and set the black value of each one to -100%. For the white, neutral and black, set the black value to +100%. Seeing the saturation of a painting expressed in this way is something that the impressionists would have murdered for.
Hue is the difficult beast in the HSL triumvirate. To get a grip on it you have to side-step into the RYB colour space. It is in the RYB colour wheel that the hues are arranged in their perceptually antagonistic pairings: red/green, yellow/purple, blue/orange. These pairings have been know for 100s of years, even before Newton's colour wheel was a thing. It is uniquely difficult to get a handle on hue... it defies easy conceptualisation. There is also a huge amount of bullshit in the wild on the subject of hue. Check out adobe's colour wheel: color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel See all that stuff about triadic complementary etc? Most of it is mostly hot air. How do I know? I have personally reviewed the hue histogram of hundreds of paintings. From this I can say that the organisational strategies that artists employ are, at best, approximate. Certainly, they are not as clear as the art books tell us. However, the following is generally true... painters avoid: hues that span no more than one half of the RYB hue wheel, hue that are evenly distributed on two halves of the RYB hue wheel, hue that occupies 360 degrees of the RYB hue wheel.
The final key wisdom that I expect of my students is to understand contrast as a structural phenomenon. This can be understood as manifesting in two (main) ways. The first is ratio contrast, which is simply the contrast between two values. In painting, these values are usually averages. Separately considered can be the contrast between neighbouring regions and those which are not. The former are perceptually prime and can overwhelm our ability to perceive those regions which are distant to each other. The second contrast is global contrast. An image which extends from black to white has higher global contrast that one which extends from dark grey to light grey. These two ways of understanding colour contrast can be extended in many dimentions. For example, the way that they manifest between (ratio) and within (global) the depth planes of a landscape.
As for what constitutes effective colour contrast: one observation holds true of all painters, writers, filmmakers etc.: that their task is to exaggerate life. This they do in two dimensions: exaggeration of difference and exaggeration of similarity (though Ruskin expressed this as a difference between affinity and contrast).
It sounds as if you have an interest in the aesthetic application of colour. The standard tomes are Itten's The Art of Colour and Goethe's Colour Theory. In my opinion, both of them are semi-incoherent messes that have done more harm than good to painters. Bruce McEvoy's website 'Handprint' evidences a man who knows more about colour that Itten ever did. https://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/water.html Its good to see that he is finally getting round to writing a book.
The way I teach color application to my students is broadly as follows.
Firstly, the 'thinking' color space for an artist (digital or traditional) should be Hue, Saturation and Lightness (HSL). Using these values the colors of an aesthetic image can be 'conceptually disassembled'. To demonstrate this, I ask my students to describe the colors they are each wearing in terms of pairwise comparisons of HSL (e.g. 'A' is the same saturation as 'B' but of a different hue and slightly lighter).
For lightness, the simple rule of thumb is to ensure that the tones are approximately separate into three bands: light, middle dark (LMD). To this one might add black and white as the top and tail. Of courses, there is not an absolute rule, and without even blinking I could show you painters who have successfully employed only two-tone bands. Novices tend to overload the lower end of the tonal range. To demonstrate tone organization, I draw a posterise curve on Photoshop's Curves. It is important to know that the M of LMD is not absolute (with M as 50% with 0 as black), but instead tends to lay around 40%. It can also be observed that most paintings extend from black to white. However, again without even trying I could name a dozen exceptions (for example, check out the low tonal range of some of Gwen John's painting).
Saturation is the intensity half of the chromatic component of colour. In common with lightness, it exists as a 'ramp' value bound by a min and max. For this reason, it can mostly be treated in much the same way as lightness. For most of art history, the saturation map of a painting followed its lightness map. It was the development of the chemical and dying industry in France that introduced artists to a wider range of intense pigments. The saturation map of Gericault's Still Life with Lobsters is remarkably different to its lightness map. If you don't have access of MATLAB or Nuke or suchlike, you can make a saturation map in Photoshop using the Selective Colour adjustment. Just cycle through the colours in the drop-down menu and set the black value of each one to -100%. For the white, neutral and black, set the black value to +100%. Seeing the saturation of a painting expressed in this way is something that the impressionists would have murdered for.
Hue is the difficult beast in the HSL triumvirate. To get a grip on it you have to side-step into the RYB colour space. It is in the RYB colour wheel that the hues are arranged in their perceptually antagonistic pairings: red/green, yellow/purple, blue/orange. These pairings have been know for 100s of years, even before Newton's colour wheel was a thing. It is uniquely difficult to get a handle on hue... it defies easy conceptualisation. There is also a huge amount of bullshit in the wild on the subject of hue. Check out adobe's colour wheel: color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel See all that stuff about triadic complementary etc? Most of it is mostly hot air. How do I know? I have personally reviewed the hue histogram of hundreds of paintings. From this I can say that the organisational strategies that artists employ are, at best, approximate. Certainly, they are not as clear as the art books tell us. However, the following is generally true... painters avoid: hues that span no more than one half of the RYB hue wheel, hue that are evenly distributed on two halves of the RYB hue wheel, hue that occupies 360 degrees of the RYB hue wheel.
The final key wisdom that I expect of my students is to understand contrast as a structural phenomenon. This can be understood as manifesting in two (main) ways. The first is ratio contrast, which is simply the contrast between two values. In painting, these values are usually averages. Separately considered can be the contrast between neighbouring regions and those which are not. The former are perceptually prime and can overwhelm our ability to perceive those regions which are distant to each other. The second contrast is global contrast. An image which extends from black to white has higher global contrast that one which extends from dark grey to light grey. These two ways of understanding colour contrast can be extended in many dimentions. For example, the way that they manifest between (ratio) and within (global) the depth planes of a landscape.
As for what constitutes effective colour contrast: one observation holds true of all painters, writers, filmmakers etc.: that their task is to exaggerate life. This they do in two dimensions: exaggeration of difference and exaggeration of similarity (though Ruskin expressed this as a difference between affinity and contrast).
This school of thought in the medical field is quite popular in the Netherlands and is picking up popularity within the UK; however from personal experience and that of others I’m noticing that it’s being used by doctors to dismiss people’s symptoms - particularly that of women (N<5)
In one case I know someone who had chronic health issues who had to change doctors after one year because her former GP (who was quite young) kept insisting her health issues were phycological. Her new GP (quite experienced) was able to identify several of the physical root causes to her complaints within months of her first visit and provide appropriate treatment afterwards. I see this pattern repeated with May of my other friends who have chronic health conditions and have had to deal with both health care systems.
I have two theories why this school of thought is gaining popularity in the west;
* Allows over worked or inexperienced doctors to easily dismiss patients because in their view they’re triaging patients complaints.
* Overloaded healthcare system is able to reduce the care patients need by effectively gas lighting them by saying “you need to need your lentils health”, “deal with your trauma” instead of seeing specialists and doing tests.
In one case I know someone who had chronic health issues who had to change doctors after one year because her former GP (who was quite young) kept insisting her health issues were phycological. Her new GP (quite experienced) was able to identify several of the physical root causes to her complaints within months of her first visit and provide appropriate treatment afterwards. I see this pattern repeated with May of my other friends who have chronic health conditions and have had to deal with both health care systems.
I have two theories why this school of thought is gaining popularity in the west;
* Allows over worked or inexperienced doctors to easily dismiss patients because in their view they’re triaging patients complaints.
* Overloaded healthcare system is able to reduce the care patients need by effectively gas lighting them by saying “you need to need your lentils health”, “deal with your trauma” instead of seeing specialists and doing tests.
What you're talking about is completely orthogonal to the article, and the reality at play here:
1. Some emotional issues have physical manifestations (i.e. anxiety symptoms). But some physical manifestation have no root in mental behaviour (i.e. cancer).
2. Like we often see in software engineering, if you turn a metric into a target, it stops being useful. GPs have a KPI tracking the number of people they see in a given timeframe, thus are more likely to dismiss psychological thing because they're not easily visible and need a long time to pin down. One of the reason of the global mental health crisis, and why staff cuts make this even worse.
It is not a school of thought. It's a dysfunctional medical system. The sad reality is that medical doctors, that includes GPs and most psychiatrists, are inadequate to dealing with psychological issues that cannot be easily fixed, masked or numbed with a pill. Even a quack might be more helpful, at least they'll try to keep you around as long as possible instead of dismissing you with a script and a leaflet on meditation.
1. Some emotional issues have physical manifestations (i.e. anxiety symptoms). But some physical manifestation have no root in mental behaviour (i.e. cancer).
2. Like we often see in software engineering, if you turn a metric into a target, it stops being useful. GPs have a KPI tracking the number of people they see in a given timeframe, thus are more likely to dismiss psychological thing because they're not easily visible and need a long time to pin down. One of the reason of the global mental health crisis, and why staff cuts make this even worse.
It is not a school of thought. It's a dysfunctional medical system. The sad reality is that medical doctors, that includes GPs and most psychiatrists, are inadequate to dealing with psychological issues that cannot be easily fixed, masked or numbed with a pill. Even a quack might be more helpful, at least they'll try to keep you around as long as possible instead of dismissing you with a script and a leaflet on meditation.
Embodied cognition as a theory is older than "the last decade", and makes much wider claims than James (and is just plain wrong). Contrasting it in the subsequent sentence with much older observations doesn't do either justice.
A lot of Varela's ideas are considered in Spatial Computing VR/AR/MR also even refered to by some as Embodied Computing. XR works by expanding perception expectations (in the Lisa Feldmen Barrett sense) using an animated freedom to produce new experience but similar enough to be understood. The reasearch connecting visual processing in the hippocampus to emotional memory formation (visual thinking) is quite strong. XR and new interface formats are forcing us to look closer and explore the relationship between cognitive states and our understanding of embodiment/environment which certainly exists.
Many years ago I heard of someone who found they always had arguments in their kitchen. It was during a generation in the US where it was as very common for kitchens to be bright yellow. This person was told about the correlation between anger and the color yellow. They changed the color scheme and n their kitchen and the arguments stopped.
I call it "Soviet Yellow" whenever I see it, its a very common colour for buildings in Europe, and it is indeed rage-inducing. I feel that its a frequency of colour which produces a dissonance with ones own internal colour, which is more blue/white or blue/orange. This yellow feels very sickening whenever I encounter it.
Last weekend I had a negative realization. Nothing major, just some bad personal news, something that basically was broken and required possible expensive repairs. I immediately got in a negative mood, it was visceral but it had also a physical effect on me. I only wanted to sleep, lost all energy, just wanted to handle the negative news which was only possible on a weekday. At the same time I thought, it is crazy I feel a physical impact because of a thought affecting my mood. I could think rationally about it, but my tiredness and lack of energy did not go away.
During the week, I worked out the cause of the bad news, and this is no longer a problem. But I am somehow concerned that what was basicially a thought could have this impact on me.
During the week, I worked out the cause of the bad news, and this is no longer a problem. But I am somehow concerned that what was basicially a thought could have this impact on me.
The thought you had is affecting your meta thought about being affected by a negative thought, my friend.
All your body does is process information that passes through the brain and nervous system. Thoughts are just as primary as the senses that reflect something in the outside world. And your negative realisation was interpreted by the rest of your system as an archetypal 'bad situation out of your control'. That's being trapped, which is a very old situation for an animal to be in. Trapped animals look for a way out and if nothing yields they become inactive.
I've found reminding myself of the above helps me take whatever limited control I can of the threat (i.e. writing down and visualising what I'm going to do when I can solve it) and also taking some control of other parts of my life. You can trick your body by sending it soothing signals which are an antidote to the /type/ of situation you are in (if not necessarily actually solve it).
All your body does is process information that passes through the brain and nervous system. Thoughts are just as primary as the senses that reflect something in the outside world. And your negative realisation was interpreted by the rest of your system as an archetypal 'bad situation out of your control'. That's being trapped, which is a very old situation for an animal to be in. Trapped animals look for a way out and if nothing yields they become inactive.
I've found reminding myself of the above helps me take whatever limited control I can of the threat (i.e. writing down and visualising what I'm going to do when I can solve it) and also taking some control of other parts of my life. You can trick your body by sending it soothing signals which are an antidote to the /type/ of situation you are in (if not necessarily actually solve it).
Observing anger can be similarly humbling.
You can get ahead of the rush of cortisol enough to watch it happening and remain lucid / disconnected from it, but that's not enough (at least in my experience so far) to avoid the unpleasant physical sensation.
You can get ahead of the rush of cortisol enough to watch it happening and remain lucid / disconnected from it, but that's not enough (at least in my experience so far) to avoid the unpleasant physical sensation.
I abhor the the anger sensation in the body. I am generally in a good relaxed mood and rarely get angry but it does happen when pushed too far. Last time it happened I was observing the sensation and my reaction to the trigger without being able to make it stop. I now believe it’s okay to let it run its course, it’s perhaps better than trying to suppress it. But oh boy, that visceral feeling isn’t pleasant at all, a total mood disrupter.
The water in your body is just visiting. It was a thunderstorm a week ago. It will be the ocean soon enough. Most of your cells come and go like morning dew. We are more weather pattern than stone monument. Sunlight on mist. Summer lightning. Your choices outweigh your substance. - The CryptoNaturalist
I think our moods are the same, they ebb and flow with what our body does.
I think our moods are the same, they ebb and flow with what our body does.
That can be tied to once aspect of vipassana meditation: observe the bodily sensations, as they are tightly linked to your mind state.
I think you would make great strides in thinking about this if you differentiated between feelings and emotions, one being pretty primitive, bodily inner states and the other outward directed, complex scripts that’s are deeply social, learned and performed and shared ways to communicate feelings (take all the different ways for example “anger”, “mourning” or “lust” are performed with totally different modes of articulation and performance between cultures, times and locations. That is: mourning is not a feeling, it’s a complex, socially learned (socialized) script that is performed in a socially expected way, that is rooted in feelings but solved a communicative, social task.
(I know nothing about this topic expect for one book about the socialization of emotions that I read a million years ago).
(I know nothing about this topic expect for one book about the socialization of emotions that I read a million years ago).
TBH, I have not read the whole article yet, but to me emotions are, fundamentally an immune response.
As I have discovered that my mood disorder is in fact, an immune disorder, I am seeing this true in all aspects of emotions. In Bipolar Disorder they find the M1/M2 polarization of macrophages directly reflect the manic or depressive state.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5220016/#:~:tex....
As I have discovered that my mood disorder is in fact, an immune disorder, I am seeing this true in all aspects of emotions. In Bipolar Disorder they find the M1/M2 polarization of macrophages directly reflect the manic or depressive state.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5220016/#:~:tex....
Unfortunately the neurosciences diverged in the 1940s and 1950s when lobotomies became increasing common and emotions got tied to what you said based on what you felt. Psych-sciences have been apart from the neurosciences ever since. Better techniques like fMRI and EEGs have meant more data that’s not getting used in diagnosing and treating diseases.
Meanwhile the adrenal cortex and the autonomic nervous system has been largely forgotten. It regulates how we feel every second of every day, even when we are asleep. Good luck being happy when you are overstressed and underslept.
Meanwhile the adrenal cortex and the autonomic nervous system has been largely forgotten. It regulates how we feel every second of every day, even when we are asleep. Good luck being happy when you are overstressed and underslept.
The problem is, this is a testable idea.
If the body is key to emotion, such as the cited furrowing of the brow, then people with a sufficient injury to the related body parts should no longer be able to feel that emotion at all. You'd have literally cut it out of them.
While such injuries do have profound effects, it hardly erases emotions.
If the body is key to emotion, such as the cited furrowing of the brow, then people with a sufficient injury to the related body parts should no longer be able to feel that emotion at all. You'd have literally cut it out of them.
While such injuries do have profound effects, it hardly erases emotions.
I think you're idea is backwards. You'd have to have a person born without that body part at all.
A person that could see then went blind can experience the idea of redness. A person born blind cannot.
A person that could see then went blind can experience the idea of redness. A person born blind cannot.
The article doesn't seem to suggest that, but even if we accept your premise, it doesn't really change things.
There are plenty of people who are unable to cry, and thus have never experienced it. Those people still appear to experience the normal set of emotions. The quotes in the article directly suggest this shouldn't be the case:
> we feel sorry because we cry
There are plenty of people who are unable to cry, and thus have never experienced it. Those people still appear to experience the normal set of emotions. The quotes in the article directly suggest this shouldn't be the case:
> we feel sorry because we cry
Related topic: the gut-brain connection. The gut is essentially a “second brain”:
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-preventi...
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-preventi...
Fun fact: William James was a professor of physiology at Harvard. Now William James Hall is a literal and figurative ivory tower on campus. How many students are taught that the status of the brain in their body affects learning, memory, attention, and critical decision making?
A recommended book on the development of the crude concept of emotion [0].
[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0521026695
[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0521026695
If instinct is level 0 response mode/feedback loop (strictly cause-effect) and intellect/cognition/self-awareness is level 2 (capable to plan and analyse), emotions are level 1.
Instinct is just good enough to survive, if you want more complex behaviours you need to use a dynamic memory that is able to learn new information, thus updating its behavioural sophistication. Emotions are just that - the emotional trigger is stimulus + "perceptual filter" => emotion.
Multiple possible emotions, multiplies the complexity of a possible response: for a given scenario, because of the perceptual filter, one can feel different things: Stimulus: "i see a friend" + perceptual filter "it is a pleasure to spend time with old friends" => joy, a deactivating emotion (meaning that the behaviour it determines is one of 'staying in place and savour). Anger? perceptual filter: "this one owes me money". Etc.
Basically, emotions are quick routines that tell you what to do in a given situation. instead of just cause - effect, there is a updatable memory that by learning can give way to more and more sophisticated behavioural responses. There is a part of cognition there, as much cognition as any animal that has emotions can deliver. The installation of new perceptual filters happens through learning, as much as a dog learning new tricks, for example.
But let's shift focus on how this memory works - the emotional memory is a somatic one, if you want. We never feel emotions, we feel feelings, somatic elements, if you want. Blood boiling? Fists clenched? Anger! that is a somatic memory. A feeling-state, if you want. The whole software works like this: image acquired through senses -> cognitive assessment = threat -> emotional response = fear. At this point 2 things happen as the emotion was triggered: 1 - you feel the feelings related to the emotion, somatic element = knot in the stomach -> you respond to this feeling state by running - this is 2 - the behavioural response.
How much the rest of the systems can affect our emotional responses? Just see how easy is to get angry when you're hungry (low blood sugar).
Fun fact: people who lost the ability to experience emotions also lost the ability to take decisions. Why? Because decisions are taken emotionally: the brain runs by us a series of scenarios and the one that makes us feel optimistic that we will succeed is then implemented. This happens very fast because the memory can retrieve very easily associated patterns. Also this is experienced in cases of "l'appel du vide." In our case, to no avail, because due to no emotional responses to the retrieved scenarios, this loop doesn't break. And yes, this means that our subconscious brains take the decisions way before we are aware of them.
</rant>
Instinct is just good enough to survive, if you want more complex behaviours you need to use a dynamic memory that is able to learn new information, thus updating its behavioural sophistication. Emotions are just that - the emotional trigger is stimulus + "perceptual filter" => emotion.
Multiple possible emotions, multiplies the complexity of a possible response: for a given scenario, because of the perceptual filter, one can feel different things: Stimulus: "i see a friend" + perceptual filter "it is a pleasure to spend time with old friends" => joy, a deactivating emotion (meaning that the behaviour it determines is one of 'staying in place and savour). Anger? perceptual filter: "this one owes me money". Etc.
Basically, emotions are quick routines that tell you what to do in a given situation. instead of just cause - effect, there is a updatable memory that by learning can give way to more and more sophisticated behavioural responses. There is a part of cognition there, as much cognition as any animal that has emotions can deliver. The installation of new perceptual filters happens through learning, as much as a dog learning new tricks, for example.
But let's shift focus on how this memory works - the emotional memory is a somatic one, if you want. We never feel emotions, we feel feelings, somatic elements, if you want. Blood boiling? Fists clenched? Anger! that is a somatic memory. A feeling-state, if you want. The whole software works like this: image acquired through senses -> cognitive assessment = threat -> emotional response = fear. At this point 2 things happen as the emotion was triggered: 1 - you feel the feelings related to the emotion, somatic element = knot in the stomach -> you respond to this feeling state by running - this is 2 - the behavioural response.
How much the rest of the systems can affect our emotional responses? Just see how easy is to get angry when you're hungry (low blood sugar).
Fun fact: people who lost the ability to experience emotions also lost the ability to take decisions. Why? Because decisions are taken emotionally: the brain runs by us a series of scenarios and the one that makes us feel optimistic that we will succeed is then implemented. This happens very fast because the memory can retrieve very easily associated patterns. Also this is experienced in cases of "l'appel du vide." In our case, to no avail, because due to no emotional responses to the retrieved scenarios, this loop doesn't break. And yes, this means that our subconscious brains take the decisions way before we are aware of them.
</rant>
"Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colourless, destitute of emotional warmth."
We can actually observe this in patients with severe quadriplegia, where affect becomes flattened over time as 'polling' somatic responses becomes muted. Similarly we see changes in emotional sensitivity and expression when the gut microbiome is disrupted, when the endocrine systems is dysfunctional, or from numerous other organic disease processes.