Emotions: What, Why & How?
An explanation of what your emotions really are.
How are you feeling right now?
Or rather, what are you feeling?
Why is that?
As far as most people know, humans feel emotions depending on the situation they’re in, how their day went, their mental health, and other outside elements. But emotions go far deeper than this, they are most of the time simulations and simulated for different reasons in different ways.
Some emotions affect your physical expressions, for example crying, getting butterflies in your stomach, and suddenly feeling hot. Some emotions rise up to protect your body or get your body what it wants or needs, for example by making you be cranky due to hunger, more productive due to stress, and even making your mind go blank during a test.
But where do emotions come from and why do they occur as do they do when they do? What are emotions?
What an Emotion Is
Starting with Memory Association
To understand what emotions really are, one must understand how the brain processes and thinks.
From the moment we’re born, we never stop absorbing data from all of our senses, and it’s up to our brain to process and interpret it all. The reason that we grow and understand more as we get older is that our brain uses past experiences to save time and energy while trying to understand the data it’s being given at the moment. However, there’s simply too much information for our brains to be having to manually process data every time we receive it (which is constantly by the way).
Instead, we use concepts.
These are basically labels or categories that refer to connotations built from previous meetings for us to understand everything around us.
With concepts, our brain can work faster so that we constantly process data efficiently without having to rack through every single memory we have in order to get to a single definition of what the current data is.
For example, when you hear the word “water” you may be thinking of how refreshing it is, how blue it may be in the ocean, how it is used to clean, or other things depending on the situation and whatever concept fits best according to your past experiences with it. We encounter water constantly, and having concepts based on previous experiences just helps the brain quickly identify what it is and what it means.
Emotions are Simulations
Our concepts also include emotions tied to connotations formed from past experiences. We have concepts of emotions.
For example, if someone finds out that they’re going to have a baby cousin they may feel happy and excited, their heart may beat a bit faster and they may be smiling. This is the brain using various concepts to simulate emotions in response to this event, it takes concepts such as receiving good news, birth, and other positive events to figure out that this person should feel the emotion “happy”.
Because our emotions can influence our actions and our means of survival, the brain has to be very quick when sending out emotions in response to our surroundings. Just passively interpreting data while we receive is too slow, our brain goes ahead and starts reacting even before it has received all data or before the event has already occurred. It takes information from around us to predict what might happen next, then provides us with action or feelings based on that. The brain acts as a puppet master over us by using our past experiences to simulate the appropriate emotions to deal with the situation at hand in a timely manner.
The emotions we feel are simulations of what the brain thinks the person needs to feel in order to reciprocate and process the information in the correct way. Our brain making simulations is important for our survival and day-to-day events, these simulations help the brain explain what is happening to us as well as direct us as to how we should react accordingly.
For example: when someone is about to hit their toe on the side of a bed they start to scrunch up their face as in pain even before they actually hit it and feel the pain, their brain used signals that the person received by seeing that they were about to hit their toe and their body jerking to move away to pull the concept of pain and anger to the person. Usually, people ball up their fists to stop feeling the pain and get angry at themselves or whatever is around them. These are all emotions coming into play from simulations to make the person react.
The Origins of Your Emotions
The brain uses a variety of factors to create emotions as well as figure out what type of emotion needs to be produced for specific or unique situations. There are external and internal factors that the brain needs to take into consideration constantly.
Our brain receives information externally about the outside world from our senses. Sounds, textures, air pressure, and temperature are some examples of this. We receive more external information about our inner world or ourselves from the interoceptive network in our brains. This means that our brain is constantly monitoring what is happening to us, some examples would be getting aches, shivering, and body tightness (Patrick Zimmerman).
Our internal information comes from our past experiences and concepts that were already stored in our brains and/or are still constantly being created and labeled. While our brains are scanning and assessing the outside world, it is also using concepts to predict and create simulations of what may happen in the near future to keep us prepared and help us survive.
An example of this all coming to play would be someone driving and seeing a small road on the side of a mountain coming up, their brain is taking the external information, the person seeing the road and gripping the wheel tighter, and combining it with internal information, past experience of driving on thin roads, to figure out what concept best fits, having to be careful because of thin roads, to create a simulation of what might happen, the person will drive on the road and could fall off if not careful. This makes the brain produce simulations of subtle anxiety and fear to protect the person driving and make them more attentive on the road so they don’t die. Then this encounter is stored and will help the person be more comfortable on thin roads in the future because they now know how to drive on them and that they did not have a bad experience.
Aside from concepts and the mental parts of creating emotions, the brain also uses our chemicals, organs, and all parts of the body to help us truly feel our emotions, not just hold them conceptually. Without feeling them we would just have ideas and understanding of them but not actually have emotions.
Scientists haven’t fully grasped what parts of the brain produce what emotion, but they have been able to pinpoint the origins of many common emotions as well as figure out that the limbic system in the brain has a strong role to play. A limbic system is a group of interconnected structures located deep within the brain. It’s the part of the brain that’s responsible for behavioral and emotional responses. There are 4 structures that are generally accepted as part of the limbic system:
- The Hypothalamus: It is involved with controlling emotional responses, sexual responses, hormone release, and regulating body temperature.
- The Hippocampus: It helps preserve as well as retrieve memories, it also plays a role in spatial awareness.
- The Amygdala: It helps to coordinate responses to our environment.
- The Limbic Cortex: It is impacts mood, motivation, and judgment.
These structures work together to keep us safe from harm by providing us with the correct responses in the form of emotions.
Going back to the car example, we can see how the limbic system plays a crucial role. First, the Hippocampus and its trait of spatial awareness and memories allow the driver to understand the situation, a thin road on the side of a mountain. The Limbic Cortex with its traits of motivation, mood, and judgment makes sure the person has the will to live and choose to be focused and drive safely. The Hypothalamus with its traits of controlling emotional responses and hormone release gives personal feelings of fear and anxiety so that they want to overcome or avoid the bad option and drive safely. Finally, the Amygdala coordinates the correct response, driving more safely. The structures must work together in harmony to maintain equilibrium. For example, if the Hypothalamus did not make the person a bit scared then the other 3 would not have made the person be more careful even if he was aware that the road was thin.
Why We Feel When We Feel
“Emotions are more or less the complex reactions the body has to certain stimuli.” (Antonio R. Damasio).
In the example with the thin road, we can see how the drivers’ emotions subtly saved him; emotions are produced when the brain needs to explain something to our body and/or prepare our body for events. When we encounter something in real-time it sends signals to our brain, our brain then has to explain what it is and what is happening. It does this by giving us emotions to react to it or tagging it to a concept we have of it.
But we also need to understand that our emotions take place and are felt throughout our bodies. For example, when we encounter something that makes our heart rate faster, our brain has to help us register that it is happiness in reaction to an event. Often when people fall in love, they can physically feel “in love”. Our brains simulate our bodies to reflect our emotions.
We feel emotions when our brain has to explain what is happening inside our body in response to an event. Our emotions come together as chemical feelings and physical expressions.
For example, a student may be about to take a big test, their brain ties this to their concept that tests are hard and that the student often becomes nervous before tests. This means that the student may experience stomach pain or sweaty palms, but they might not know why it is happening unless they experience the emotion of nervousness and/or anxiety.
We also feel emotions when our body is trying to prepare us for events, in response to events, and/or to make us provide for our body and ourselves.
When someone is feeling hungry or craving a specific food, their body is usually trying to tell them that they need a certain nutrient or that they need nourishment. This is the brain trying to prepare the person for the “event” of eating. When someone goes through a breakup they feel heartbreak, anger, sadness, pain, and many more emotions. This is because relationships play into many factors of a person's life and taking them away brings a lot of bad side effects such as stress. To cope with this people need to feel certain emotions so that they can work on overcoming those emotions and thus overcoming the breakup. These intense emotions are in response to the “event” which is a breakup. Often when someone stays up late watching TV or playing video games they wake up feeling cranky, fatigued, and/or unfocused. This is because their body needs more rest and their brain sends signals of feeling cranky and tired to subconsciously influence the person to take some more rest.
Our emotions can often be our brain trying to subconsciously influence us into taking an action to help our bodies reach equilibrium, the state that our brain is always trying to keep us in overall.
Conclusion
Emotions are simulated, felt, and triggered in many different ways and for different reasons. They originate from past experiences, external sensing, and conceptual simulations. We feel emotions when our body needs something, in response to an event, and in preparation for an event. Our brain holds concepts of everything to be able to predict what will happen to us and understand what is happening around us, then the Limbic System in our brain carried out multiple tasks constantly to make sure we feel the correct emotions in response to events. This ensures our survival and well-being in daily situations. Without emotions, our rate of survival would drastically decrease as they take care of us as well as help us express ourselves. Our emotions help us feel alive while living in a world full of stimuli and random interactions.
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References
Damasio R., Antonio. “Feeling Our Emotions.” Scientific Explorations. 1 April, 2005. Scientific American MIND. 12 Nov, 2020. <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/feeling- our-emotions/>
Zimmerman, Patrick. “How emotions are made.” Behavioral Research Blog. 11 June, 2019. NOLDUS INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY. 12 Nov, 2020. <https://www.noldus.com/ blog/how-emotions-are-
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Seladi-Schulman, Jill. “What Part of the Brain Controls Emotions?” healthline. 23 July, 2018. 12 Nov, 2020. <https://www.healthline.com/health/what-part-of-the-brain-controls- emotions>
Forte, Tiago. “How Emotions Are Made: The Theory of Constructed Emotion” Forte Lab. 30 April, 2019. 12 Nov, 2020. <https://fortelabs.co/blog/how-emotions-are-made/>
Cherry, Kendra. “The Purpose of Our Emotions.” Verywell mind. 17 May, 2020. 12 Nov, 2020. <https://www.verywellmind.com/the-purpose-of-emotions-2795181>
