Re: Reason-Induced Emotion
It's easy enough to say "replace negative feelings/thoughts/beliefs" with positive ones". But more difficult to get biochemical leverage over the feedback loops that produced those feelings/thoughts/beliefs. Between the surface level (conscious series of words, images, feelings) and the biochemical level, there has to be a buildup of control...let's say the brain codes "willpower" as an internal voice with specific parameters and settings (a voice tone with rising and falling dynamics, resonance, etc) and a feeling of fullness in the chest...saying to yourself "I am a confident person" in a depressed, hesitant monotone won't work.
Let's say "willpower" is in competition with "arrogance" or "trepidation", each of which comes with its own voice tones, imagery and feelings. If the conscious mind is unconscious of all the parameters involved, it may find itself clinging to "arrogance" if it is available, in order to overcome "trepidation" because the parameters for "willpower" are offline or scrambled (imagine a video editing station where things keep rewinding unexpectedly...you can't yell at the machine "stop that!"...you have to understand how the mechanisms beneath the control panel work).
So we often yell at ourselves to "try harder" when really we lack a map capable of changing the territory. We then yell at others to relieve the frustration. But what if, instead of trying to override unconscious biochemical loops with words, we could directly change the way those loops function, as an enzyme changes the shape of a protein? Would those enzymes (clusters of words, feelings, tones, etc) have to arise organically from what is already there, or could we interfere "top down" with unconscious processing?
Any ideas welcome on that subject...
Michael
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