Thursday, November 10, 2011

focus = emotion?

Where is the door to our emotions?   Any answer whose basis is anywhere near the vicinity of the word "heart"......don't let the door hit you where the good Lord split you.  UNLESS you can give me a logical explanation as to WHAT a heart (pertinent to my question) is.  By logical I mean physiological and/or anatomical and/or biological.  Because however naively stupid I may sound I couldn't even throw a balloon that would be full of the amount of surprise from finding out that everyone had already made a conscious distinction between what we call our emotional heart and our anatomical heart.  Our very gestures prove that my surprise wouldn't be too much to assume.  Ask a kid where the love for his dead mother is.....he will point to his anatomical heart.  Because that is where his dad points when he asks him.  and thats because his studied, degree holding dad thinks in some deep sub-layer of his mind that emotions COME FROM where our anatomical heart is!!!!  THOUGH he would never admit to it if asked in physiologically sound prose.  "So what you are telling me is that this muscle that helps circulate our blood also makes our emotions?"  of course no one would say yes to that question.
Lets dumb it down a little bit more and see if we can get a yes out of even the lamest of laymen.  "So the organ that makes blood, also allows for us to feel emotion?"  IMPOSSIBLE!!!  no matter how you word it, if you put the two definitions we have given to "heart" in the same sentence, it makes a sense that even a dog would poop on.

We don't think our anatomical hearts are shaped like a half cleavaged/half invert-cleavaged circle like we like to iconicize with our hands.





yet we still gesture that our feelings come from/are stored there.

But alas I must admit I have slightly strayed from the purpose of this article(HAHAHA article........  And when I get my Doctorate, my name will become J.A. Gracey.......HAHAHAHAHA  cultures amuse me)

I would like to paint my original question, and also the title of this HaHArticle with an observation I have made.  but first a little background situation to get you focused.  You are walking down the street and you step over a substantial amount of money (or whatever thing you kids are hooting about these days) and you don't even try to pick it up.  Why?  All moral and ethical reasons aside.  I don't care if there was a starving monkey child about to pick it up, The "you" I am talking to would slice that kid up and barbecue it for dinner before you would let it have that money.....but you don't.  Why?

Because you didn't notice the money.  Your attention wasn't on it.  You.......were.......not.......focused. on it.

Does that mean you hate money?  I mean we know you hate starving children who need money, you ignore them all day.  But do you hate money?

OF COURSE NOT!!!!!!!  You just didn't see it.

1. Why can one person get so much out of movie while another person falls asleep from boredom?

2. Why is it so much easier to walk away from your girlfriend/boyfriend when they aren't trying to talk to you?

3. Why is it more difficult to walk past a stranger on the street when he tries to talk to you?

4. Why can you easily brush off a quick subliminal flash of something that you are morally against (pornography, racism etc.) and feel awkward or even angry when confronted with something more explicit?

#1 would be easy to answer with your emotions.  "this movie just touches me"  "that movie just didn't interest me"

#2 is still easy to answer with emotions, but a little more complicated.  you walk away because you are emotionally charged, yet you don't want to walk away forever because you have emotions for that person.

#3 is quite difficult to answer with only emotions.  You can't have more emotions for any particular joeshmoe stranger over any other. (ignoring any physical aspects that manipulate your emotions)  So why is this stranger who you are walking up to/by/away from causing even the smallest morsel of emotional reaction within you?

#4 is near impossible to answer with only emotions.  (For the sake of my HardyHarHArticle, we will ignore people who are desensitized beyond the point of recognizing any form of emotion.)  For this thought to have any validity we must first come to a consensus that we all have some form of moral backbone.

Even though this breach of our moral bed was so quick and unexpected (say some imagery during a commercial), it would be absurd to say that we didn't have any emotional reaction to it.  To say that would mean we don't have morality.  I mean this is our morality we are talking about.  We have been culturally bred to have these morals so we can react emotionally towards stuff.  Yet we don't react emotionally to it. 

But then *sex* pretend that *sex* this sentence was *sex* a commercial *sex* for *sex* deodorant and *sex* each word was *sex* a camera shot *sex* being played back *sex* to back.
You would walk away from the commercial either wanting that deodorant, not wanting it, or not caring.  but you wouldn't walk away feeling morally violated.  where is the emotion there?  (please understand that the last sentence is a joke.  Of course to read a word let alone a sentence forces to you to focus long enough to react emotionally.  A commercial consists of shots that last milliseconds, impossible to focus on with your anatomical eye.)

I think I should state this in the beginning so that it could bounce around in your head as you read the article and maybe I will in some later edit, but for now I will explicitly state my opinion.  I think the door to our emotions is our brain.  but not our brain in any old state, our brain has to be in a focused state.  We have to be focused on something in order to feel some emotional connection to it.  And the intensity of the emotion is directly linked to the length of time we focus.  You focus on something for one second, your immediate emotional reaction will be equivalent to that second of time.

I would like to point out that maybe our experience pulled some emotional strings deep within our soul.  in that case our initial response will still be equal to the length of focus, but like a bubble floating to the surface, our emotions, when they reach the top, will pop and explode with all the innate emotional connections, in all their intensity, with whatever we focused on.

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