8.1 Emotions–Who Feels It, Knows It

“Most of us think of ourselves as thinking creatures that feel, but we are actually feeling creatures that think.”

― Jill Bolte Taylor, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey

How to ‘Play’ a Piano Without Touching It

When I was growing up, we had an unusual plaything in the garage: an old upright piano that we were allowed to experiment with. My siblings and I routinely took the front panel off so we could see the inner workings, look at how the pedals worked, and hit the strings with different things. Then we made the discovery that you didn’t have to hit the strings at all: if you held down the loud (sustain) pedal and sang loudly in front of the piano, it would sing back! The vibrations from our voice created a sympathetic resonance in the piano strings. You can do the same thing with a guitar: sing the right note into a guitar, and if the frequency you produce in the air matches the frequency of the string, the guitar will “sing” that note.

This provides an intriguing model of how emotion and communication work. If you watch an actor perform an emotionally powerful scene, or a singer perform an achingly beautiful solo, why does that make you cry? That actor or singer isn’t reaching into your mind and making you feel an emotion, but is just expressing the feeling themselves; when it matches emotions that you already experience, your “heart strings” hum along. Then again, there have been times when I’ve seen an actor or singer attempt to create this emotional power, and I felt nothing: either it was too obvious that they were trying to pluck at those hearts strings and I resented the manipulation, or I just couldn’t relate to the feeling (the frequencies didn’t match). It’s not just actors and singers, of course: I’ve had the same responses to ordinary citizens in the news expressing their reactions to an event, or students tearfully asking for a deadline extension, or protest leaders pounding on the podium with an angry fist — sometimes my heart hums along, and sometimes it doesn’t.

This is an extension of the Lego model of communication from Chapter 1: the idea that communication is not about putting thoughts (or feelings) into another person, it’s about using channels of communication to get them to recreate a construct similar to yours. This time, it’s a feeling instead of an intellectual idea.

The thing about emotions is that they are easier to share than thoughts; as the discussion of “abstraction” in Chapter 4 noted, even if someone’s experience is different from yours, the underlying emotions can be relatable and form a connection. This is one of the reasons people enjoy art in all its forms: it taps into universal emotions, while perhaps taking you into new realms you haven’t experienced before. I’ve never been a superhero who could fly through the cityscape and defeat villains with super strength, but when Peter Parker realizes he ruined a white shirt by washing it with his Spiderman suit, I can relate. This is why movies about tragedies don’t focus only on the tragedy itself; there are always scenes depicting how the characters are experiencing that tragedy, and if the audience relates to the character, they can put themselves in their shoes and feel the same reaction. (Imagine Titanic without Rose and Jack — it would just be a story about a ship sinking).