Continuing yesterdays’ post…
In the examples above, the categorization schemes worked because they categorized something with an underlying structure — the photon and its wavelength, the atom and its nucleus and electrons, natural selection and DNA, the (so far) fundamental particles and the laws governing their interactions.
But not everything with patterns has an underlying structure. Let’s look at anatomy, for example. As we’ll see, it will reveal a lot about emotions and motivations.
Notice that despite common characteristics across life, no one has created a periodic table of anatomy.
Why not?
Because anatomy has no underlying structure like those other categorization schemes.
We know several unpredictable factors affect how a species’ anatomy evolves — for example, that species’ current anatomy, its environment, and natural selection. Since major parts of environments change independent of species and DNA mutates randomly, what looks like underlying structure often isn’t. For example, as climates change, so do species’ anatomy, yet you can know everything about a species and never know how its climate will change. The same holds for geography, the introduction of new species into its habitat, disappearance of existing species, and so on. Randomness affects how species’ anatomy changes that doesn’t enter the periodic table or light spectrum.
Anatomy is more like a bunch of design patterns that sometimes emerge to solve similar problems in similar environments. You see a lot of similarities between distantly related species not because of underlying structure but because of similarities in their environments.
We have legs and bugs have legs, but they probably aren’t related the way one element on the periodic table is similar to another element, just with a different number of protons and neutrons. All we can say is that the legs helped each species survive and reproduce in its environment.
Instead of a periodic table of anatomy, the best we understand anatomy is by realizing how one type of anatomy evolved into another and solved related problems in their environments.
That knowledge still helps us improve our lives. Knowing how legs work in other species may help runners train. Knowing how the appendix works in other species can help us understand our own and why we have it.
Knowing life’s family tree can help us understand anatomy better, but it doesn’t help us predict, one of the main ways science helps us improve our lives. We can’t predict how some anatomical trait will succeed or fail because we can’t predict how environments will change, what other species might enter or leave the habitat, or how its DNA will mutate, etc.
We can go the other way and use changes in anatomy to tell us about a species’ environment, which helps us know about our worlds, but that doesn’t help us improve our lives directly like finding a periodic table of anatomy or emotions would.
The more we understand behavior and emotions, the more we realize that they result from evolutionary processes and environmental change, like anatomy. Emotions are like design patterns that sometimes emerge in species too. The patterns and lack thereof we see in emotions are like the patterns and lack thereof we see in anatomy.
(You could say that since emotions and behavior emerge from our nervous systems, emotions are a subset of anatomy).
Let’s look at some of the patterns and see how emotions relate to anatomy.
Very basic emotions like hunger and thirst we have in common with our most distant ancestors like ancient reptiles. We share with them and all common descendents, including all modern reptiles and mammals related anatomy like mouths and tongues. We also share common brains structures that implement those emotions and motivate using the body parts. For that matter we have mouths in common with older species like ancient fish and before them.
Less basic emotions like those around social interactions we share with less distant ancestors. We share with some mammals anatomy that conveys social interaction, like faces and facial expression. We also share common related brain structures.
Since social behavior solves many evolutionary problems, other animals may have social behavior, like ants and bees, with whom we share no common anatomy or nervous system structure related to it.
Recently human emotions, like to invent and use tools, we share with only close relatives, like other apes, with whom we may share common anatomy, like grasping thumbs and the brain power to use them.
So what’s the point of all this? How does realizing we won’t find a periodic table of emotions help?
For one thing we don’t have to waste time on a pointless endeavor.
We can also understand ourselves better, knowing that each emotion we possess motivated a behavior in an ancestor that helped lead to us. We never have to see an emotion as random. Any time you feel an emotion or motivation, you feel it for a reason based in the emotional system you inherited from your ancestors and your environment. No counterproductive emotion likely endured long because natural selection weeds out things that don’t work so well (though we have to adjust for how we’ve changed our environments recently that evolution hasn’t caught up with yet). Hatred and rage aren’t negative — they were just useful behavioral solutions to an ancestral problem. Love and happiness aren’t positive — they just solved other problems.
We can use that understanding to bring about the lifestyles we want by looking for structures in other directions. That’s what my Model and Method do.
Most importantly, we can see where to search for self-awareness and emotional intelligence (beyond personal experience in life). We can seek to understand our evolutionary background. How can we advance beyond Aristotle and Buddha? By using knowledge they didn’t have access to. Darwin illuminated a lot and we’ve learned a lot since his time — discovering DNA, game theory, observing more animals, etc. All of these fields tell us more about ourselves.
Personally, I love reading evolutionary psychology just because I like learning about nature, but combined with the time-tested advice to know thyself, the field gives us an extra billion years or so of thyself to know.
Pingback: There will never be a periodic table or spectrum of emotions, part 1 | Joshua Spodek
I love this inquiry, yet disagree with what I believe is an erroneous premise: “There will never be …” I beg to differ.
As a former senior Apple engineer and personal growth junkie, I’ve spent 2/3 of my lifetime as a logic driven intellectual who’s made a living with my mind, and 1/3 of my life developing my EQ so I can make a living with my heart as well. I do bring a considerably logical mind to this topic of emotions that I’m also very passionate about. Hence, this rebuff.
I find the flaw in the logic of comparing emotions to anatomy is this: Physical anatomy is just that. Physical. Hence, it’s built of the physical stuff found in the periodic table of elements. Emotions are arguably related to consciousness, thought, awareness. And while emotions are certainly influenced or even controlled by hormones and other chemistry built of the stuff found in the periodic table of elements, they’re not actually made of physical stuff. They’re more akin to an electromagnetic field than to a gallbladder. Your analogy fails there.
My degree is in electronic engineering, and while designing cool things like robots and iPads, I often leaned on the strong analog between the domains of electronics and mechanics to solve problems in one domain that were difficult for me to visualize in the other. It might be challenging for me to explain to a non-techie the underlying operating principles of the switching power supply for his iPhone. Yet I’ve successfully explained it many times using the analog of fluid mechanics because of the tremendous analog to electronics.
I have a strong suspicion that a period table of emotions could be developed. I’ll give you two “molecules” that I currently posit are built of lower-level molecules or elements:
1. Courage = desire + fear (of failing). The “molecule” of courage has more desire than fear, so the desire dominates and the person feeling courage moves into action.
2. Resignation = desire + fear (of failing again). The “molecule” of resignation contains more fear than desire, so the fear dominates and the person feeling resignation is bound up and withdrawn.
3. Sadness = Love + loss. Look underneath sadness, and you find there was something you loved—a thing, a person, a pet, a feeling—and a sense of loss associated with it. The resulting “molecule” of emotion is sadness.
The question is, are desire, fear, love, and loss at the elemental level, or are they also molecules comprised of “smaller” stuff? Regardless, I’m finding it EXTREMELY helpful to know that someone’s resignation contains desire and fear. I can then be in an informed conversation with that person to look into both elements (if I can call them that). And knowing that sadness has love and loss contained within it? How powerful to be able to have a conversation exploring and validating the love? The loss? Powerful, IMHO.
Access to these deeper conversations is through awareness of the structure of these emotional molecules.
This Universe we occupy has analogs across all disciplines and genres. I’ve seen this enough in other areas, and am already seeing the seeds of it in the emotional realm. Hence, I believe a periodic table of emotions IS possible, and will take many passionate, self-aware people like you and me looking within, having collaborative conversations about what we find, and writing it down. I encourage you, reading this, to look within for yourself. And share. Share. Share.
Onward and inward, my friends!
-Alan Cooney, founder
http://www.truyu.com
http://www.medisaytion.com
Your idea of a periodic table is different than what I meant. I can see an underlying order. I believe complex emotions comprise simpler ones, as you described.
Either way, I find the more I learn about emotions in general, the human emotional system, and my emotions in particular, the more I improve my life and relationships.
School didn’t teach anything relevant at least through college. In the U.S. schools seem to move the opposite direction, removing what teaches social and emotional skills like sports and art (creating it, not history of it). Administrative bureaucracies do what maintains them more than what helps students become adults and citizens.
Hey Joshua,
I hear that you didn’t mean the periodic table of emotions as I’m suggesting it. So I apparently missed something. What did/do you mean?
And, BTW, it says there are three comments to this post, though I can’t seen any of them. I’m curious to read what others have said, as well as have my own voice heard publicly.
Respectfully,
Alan
I’m oversimplifying, but if you know about protons, neutrons, electrons, and the Schrodinger Equation, you can construct most of the periodic table. A small number of components and rules ground most of it. There are a lot of details you won’t get, but most of it. As far as we know, it formed from the universe cooling down after the Big Bang.
The human emotional system resulted from a different process — adaptive responses to environmental challenges. Some of those challenges persist and our responses still work. Some don’t yet the systems still respond to them. You can know all about neurons and biology, but you have to know the details of our evolutionary path to learn why and how the neurons connect how they do. You can’t reconstruct the human emotional system only from knowing its parts.
That’s what I meant. Does the view make sense?
Regarding reading the posts, the page has bugs and I hear some responses don’t show but I can’t tell problems until readers tell me so I appreciate the bug report. I’ll look around and try to find the problem. Sorry about that.
That makes perfect sense, yes. I really missed that in your articles. My mistake, I’m sure.
And it occurs to me that “never” is a very long time indeed. We’re such infants in our understanding of the Universe. We’re more like curious children, swarming about, poking and prodding this most amazing and complex of puzzles, and converting secrets to science minute by minute.
As we probe into emotions, who really knows what’ll show up? There’s so very much we don’t know. And never is a very long time.
I was doing a LOT of research for my belief transformation work (www.truyu.com), and was surprised to discover the fundamental lens of reality for humans is beliefs. Some inherited, some learned. And with all the quantum coupling we’re finding, perhaps some from others beyond lineage. I didn’t see that coming, until I dug very deep within myself and others. The next puzzle piece was figuring out how to shift beliefs. More research. More surprises.
Right now I’m probing the depths of emotions within the context of a mindfulness company I’m spooling up (www.medisaytion.com).
You seem like someone who’d not only grok it, but dig it. I strongly suspect we’d enjoy chatting—maybe over some of your legendary cooking one day when I’m in town.
With appreciation and respect,
Alan
Long dialog. I’ll take the liberty of emailing you to see if interested in following up by talking.