#And look up more Greek mythology and ares for research purposes

[fodlansbestmom]

I’d need to research it properly but what if Sothis has some sort of ptsd. Like I know she’s a deity but I think Ares has something similar from what I remember after his time being locked in a cage or something?? And that’s affected him for quite a while.

I mean. She has (constant) nightmares, fear and mistrust (after memories come back but mistrust is more a thing in Hopes, I believe). Intrusive memories she doesn’t want, she wants to avoid remembering the bad traumatic experiences (mainly comes up with anything involving Nemesis), heights (she was shot down and wings were torn off, even if it was as Sirius). Her spine/back is a major trigger point if touched right and the (not mentioned) scars/pain of her legs from the Agarthans.

I know there’s a lot more to mention or discuss so I’ll probably make a huge hc post about this about some point. Idk how it all works bc it’s just more than trauma. It affects her physically and mentally, and then emotionally when memories are unlocked. In a way her amnesia is a blessing bc she’d be such a completely person (like on Hopes, which I need to play to get a better diagnoses just how different).

in the war phase she does have most, if not all, her memories before her brutal death, and her trauma is only doubled during the time skip for, yknow. Obvious reasons as she was tortured and blinded. (Which I should add in somewhere how and why she’s permanently damaged and how she hasn’t healed like with everything else. Something something Agarthans have god ouchie weapons).

tho I’m unsure if in my portrayal is included with seteth has part of the whole unwanted memories since I hc that his dad is nemesis and she’s think of him constantly just looking at her son. Which I do have that in a way but it doesn’t affect too much how she thinks of her baby.

[thevampiremarie]

So I’m gonna be honest w you halogenwarrior I wrote this propaganda as a not serious thing because people are taking a tumblr poll over most tragic character way too seriously and I thought it was goofy. My propaganda is deeply unserious, just like this beef the Antigone fandom has with the aforementioned tumblr post.

1. No, as an Asian person myself, I don’t particularly think Ninjago is like the epitome of Asian representation. It’s a goofy comment. But if you must know the Ninjago team apparently did do a lot of actual research into Japanese culture and the history of ninjas in their development of the show.

2. “The modern day glorification of Ancient Athens is to the detriment of the rest of Greek history and is linked to the formation of Western supremacy/white supremacy.”

Let me break this down for you in incredibly simplistic terms.

1. Racism was not invented yesterday

2. Racism was invented a long time ago

3. Racists make up a fun little story using history/science about how racism is natural to the to justify racism. See: scientific racism justifying slavery, how Nazis use Norse mythology to justify Nazism

4. “Classic European stuff”, to use your words, I’m assuming denotes anything that is under the academic field of “classics”. “Classics” comes from the Latin adjective “classicus”, in this case meaning “ pertaining to the highest class of citizen”

5. The academic field of “classics”, which was created by MODERN DAY western scholars to study primarily Ancient Rome and secondarily, Ancient Greece, thus places value on Ancient Rome and Greece as being of “the highest class”/the utmost intellectual importance/exemplary.

6. Why do we do this? Let me explain, dearest reader. What we view of as Western civilization fully developed around the fall of the Roman Empire, when Christianity (specifically ROMAN catholicism) took over as the predominant religion.

7. Assuming you know very little of Western history, Christianity is one of the driving historical forces in the development of Western civilization and later in the development of white supremacy.

8. In order to justify Western Christian dominance over the world and perpetuate colonization/invasions/forced conversions, the fledgling West needed to have a suitably glorious origin myth.

9. The Romans did this with the Pax Romana, and they would’ve gotten it from the Athenians, who I already explained were also doing this by creating national myths about how they were intellectually, ethically, morally, economically, etc superior to Sparta to justify taking over control of that whole region.

10. Just as the Nazis pointed to myths of Norse culture to say “look at how strong our “ancestors” were - but we’re even better”, the whitewashing and co-opting of Ancient Greece and Rome took place for a similar purpose. See: Dante’s Inferno, ft. Roman poet Virgil as a guide to Dante. Virgil is still in Hell because he’s a godless pagan, but he is buddies with Dante and passes on knowledge to Dante, who is not going to Hell.

11. The Western cultural fixation on Ancient Greece and Rome is meant to replace the actual history of the West with an idealized, mythologized myth about our glorious forefathers who were intellectually superior to everyone else (but not as superior as us), therefore we have the right to expand our culture and our empires.

It is actually an EXCEEDINGLY hot topic in the classics field of study about the inherent, ingrained racism in the disciple, along with the ingrained sexism, homophobia, etc.

So the reason why “old classic European stuff gets accused of being Eurocentric” is because what it means to be Eurocentric is to center European languages, history, people, cultures, to the detriment and silencing of everything non European. Which means that in order to be Eurocentric, something needs to be assigned more social value for being European.

Also literally no one is denying modern day tv is not Eurocentric who is not themselves racist. Literally nobody. That argument is being made towards a wall.

Lloyd Garmadon Ninjago propaganda/ anti Antigone propaganda:

- Ninjago universe is a representation of more than just Eurocentric concepts of philosophy, culture, myth, and folklore in the tragedy genre because Asian people deserve to have great tragic stories too

- Ninjago and specially Lloyd’s arc contends with the implications and effects of child soldiers, conquest and colonization, war and who benefits/profits from it, among others

- The play Antigone by Sophocles, which everyone is referencing, was as part of a larger play cycle that used the myth of Oedipus as Athenian supremacist propaganda after Athens lost the Peloponnesian War to Sparta. Specifically, these plays (including Antigone) criticize Sparta while lionizing Athens as a beacon of democracy, morals, and the favor of the gods. Friendly reminder that Athens actually conquered/colonized the rest of Greece later and was NOT a true democracy and also had some of the strictest rules limiting the rights of Athenian women. The modern day glorification of Ancient Athens is to the detriment of the rest of Greek history and is linked to the formation of Western supremacy/white supremacy

- on a less serious note Lloyd is superior to Antigone in every aspect so vote for him

[Propaganda]

[antiloreolympus]

6 Anti LO Asks

1. wasnt there a myth where ares dates demeter? (sometims erinyes instead) and they have a CHILD together? i know RS doesn't really research so it wont come up, but ... how awkward would that family reunion be? "hello, barely-legal version of the teenage girl i tried to mack on, i knocked up your mother"?

2. (Bit of a rant so be warned) I wish that RS had characterized everyone better, I mean I still can’t get over how Apollo was characterized (I got into LO before I fully delved into mythology and once I read on how Apollo really was I didn’t know how to feel about the story). It would’ve been so amazing if she portrayed them differently than they were in the myths in a way that made sense, like Aphrodite given a fully developed personality outside of being a bitch with a pretty face (she was a very loving mother in the myths and very much loved Ares, who adored her as well). And let’s be honest, persephone being a “cinnamon roll that can secretly kill you” trope is kind of getting boring, RS could have had some more fun with her character by portraying her much differently. Another trope that’s getting old is Demeter being an overprotective, controlling mess of a mother towards persephone which sucks once you really think about it (I mean the poor woman lost her daughter in an instant and didn’t know what was going on until she had to go to Helios to find out, she deserves a better portrayal than what RS gave her). Heck my favorite portrayal of Demeter that feels accurate to how she is mother-wise in the myths is from Mythic the Musical (“Mother’s Do What Mother’s Have to Do”). Also don’t get me started on how dirty she did Thetis (I love her design but my god was she done wrong personality and even role wise). I remember when I first started reading this and read through the majority of the comic and I genuinely loved it, not thinking about how weird it was until I read through this blog and it kind of just hit me. Hades is a creep in LO and he could’ve just not been written that way, she didn’t have to write Persephone as a literal 19 year old (even 119 is young for gods but at least that would’ve been a more comfortable number) the baby shower gift thing was gross once I thought about it again. If I had to put my main frustrations with this series I would put these as the main problems: Gods/Goddesses being done dirty in terms of personality and role in the story, Hades being a high key creep, I heard that Chiron is being portrayed as female which defeats one of the purposes of his character (he’s a genuinely kind man which is rare to find in Greek Mythology, he’s awesome), not utilizing other Greek mythological figures to help move the story along or even help persephone (for example, Ganymede who’s story starts off very much like hers or even other figures who were SA by gods), and Persephone not only being a self insert but a major Mary Sue which is a massive yikes when it comes to a serious storyline. Oh and her “erasing” the incest factor of Greek Mythology is hysterical because even with how she changes it up, Hades and Persephone are STILL technically related because Demeter is Hera’s sister, who is married to Zeus (Hades’ brother) still making Hades her uncle by marriage smh. Demeter considers Persephone her daughter so that doesn’t erase the incest completely. At least Percy Jackson made it clear that it was a thing, and they handled it very easily: they’re divine beings that don’t have blood and they’re not mortals, despite that Percy and the other demigods express obvious disgust at the topic. Done and done. At the end of the day I’m still not sure how I feel about LO and maybe I’ll continue reading it for the hell of it or just give it up since from what I’ve heard, the story has gone off the rails

3. i like how just off that timeline, we're supposed to feel like "aw look both hades and persephone had traumatic childhoods and important life changes at 19!" instead of being like yooooo this seven year beat the shit out of his dad and took him out? why would i care about hades' teen angst and then late 20s man pain whi lusts after a 9 year old when a goddamn second grader can kick ass? also yeah depending on this timeline theyre all pedos and zeus is actually a vicim 🤷🏼‍♀️

4. Okay, I could be misremembering things but, didn't Hera have a file on Persephone (which listed her under the TGOEM program) that she made for "possible suitors" purposes? And she included Hermes and Ares and Hades?

Again, I could be misremembering this but doesnt the TGOEM require the goddesses to, not be in relationships? Romantic or otherwise? And if thats the case, then why the f*ck was Hera making a "compatibility chart" of possible husbands for Persephone?

Was it because she noticed that Persephone and Hades had a thing for each other? Even though she was potentially still having an affair with Hades at the time And knowing he was having an off and on again relationship with Minthe?

Also isnt Persephone in college on the TGOEM scholarship? So wouldn't Hera want to like, talk to Athena + Hestia about that? And be like "Hey so I know Kore is in your program, but.... I want her to marry Hades" And I know Hera is technically Queen of the gods but wouldn't she still check with them?

Also, I had a seperate thought. So I know Hades says something like "I thought we agreed not to (see each other) back in the 80's" - now it feels like because Hera is/was having an off-and-on againa affair with her brother in law that her putting Hades and Persephone together and setting them up as a couple is an excuse for her to cover up her affair.

(Like if Zeus ever got wind of Hera's affair with Hades and he was upset she could just try to side sweep it by being like "oh, no thats not what was happening. I was really checking to see if Hades is a good match for Persephone and he is!" So she doesnt get in trouble for having an affair).

5. okay, legitimate question: if artemis having a ton of uber-devoted female followers is enough to make her a lesbian ... why is ares not gay? because like ... not only were soldiers/male athletes famously homosexual, a lot of them basically ritually gave themselves to ares. it's heavily implied that this means that they considered themselves spiritually his eromenos'. the whole practice's bad implics aside ... ares should be SUPER gay? oiled up gym-rats wrestling nude levels of gay.

6. Okay so normally I don't care and or don't want to know, but - in this case I am a bit curious - is Persephone just RS's self insert character / Mary sue? Because if she is then that means that all the other male characters simping over Persephone (Hades, Hermes, Ares, Apollo, etc) gets a lot more concerning.

[theoi-crow]

hi i want to ask you something, i’m a baby witch, and i’m not pagan so i don’t have deity. but since i was little i always felt connected to Aphrodite. i researched about to stuff i can do,like self love etc.,. (because of aphrodite) is that disrespectful?

Hi! 

Not at all. You felt connected to Aphrodite which to me means you were drawn to her because Aphrodite was reaching out to you. I explain this in more detail in another post: (LINK)

Even if you are no longer drawn to her today, it does not mean that you didn't feel a connection back then and it's normal for connections to change like when I was younger and no longer working with Ares, I was VERY drawn to Demeter. Today, I don't work with Demeter (although I still have a very soft spot in my heart for her.) Demeter guided me while I was in denial about my connection with Aphrodite because I didn't think I looked like someone whom Aphrodite would want (this happens to a lot of followers) so Demeter helped me until I accepted it and as soon as I did, our relationship changed but these things happen.

Some gods will be there with you for a bit and some will be there for longer or even forever.  

Also, researching Aphrodite made you feel the need to improve yourself through self-love which is peak Aphrodite worship in my eyes and the thing she is always wishing for those who work with her, even if it's just for a while. You learned to value yourself more and to understand that you are deserving of love and especially self love. 

Another thing I want to say is this is an OPEN and not a closed Religion.

It may be disrespectful if these were gods that required you being initiated or being born into the religion but unless you are interested in joining a specific reconstruction Hellenic pagan group like the YSEE who has their own initiation rights, it's an open religion. 

Plus the Greek gods are often seen as concepts by psychologists like Carl Jung and would be used to understand complicated concepts like Love and Wrath as physical personifications.

I often meet non-witchy people who work with the gods as philosophical concepts or even secular witches who observe Ares as the personification of the rage of war while Athena is the personification of war tactics and strategy. 

These concepts began to be popular during the renaissance in the 15th century so painters and sculptures could recreate mythological stories in their art pieces while avoiding the strict "Thou shall not believe in any other god" law that would often get people executed. 

The gods survived as mythological stories and were picked up by psychologists and philosophers as personifications of concepts to better explain human behavior or theories.  

My point is, no, it is not disrespectful. Regardless of the purpose, you were inspired to improve yourself and honestly, for me, that is something Aphrodite always wishes for her devotees

regardless of whether you were seeing Aphrodite or the concept of love. 

I hope this helps! 

[thebookishgoddess]

ELLA DISCUSSES: AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT - AN INTERVIEW WITH ELIZABETH TAMMI

Hello everyone! Today, I’m going to talk about a new author that I’m sure you’ll all love simply based off the amazing synopsis she has for her book. Her name’s Elizabeth Tammi, author of Outrun The Wind, a mythology-inspired sapphic novel based off the Greek female warrior, Atalanta, to be released on November 27, 2018! If that doesn’t spark up your interest yet, I don’t know what does!

I have had the utmost pleasure of interviewing her about her upcoming novel, her journey into writing it and a fair little advice for any aspiring authors out there. But first, we all have to wonder--who exactly is Elizabeth Tammi?

Elizabeth Tammi was born in California and grew up in Florida, but is currently double-majoring in Creative Writing and Journalism as an undergraduate at Mercer University in Georgia. When she’s not writing, you can probably find Elizabeth at rehearsal for one of her vocal ensembles, or at work for her university’s newspaper and literary magazine. Her other interests include traveling, caffeinated beverages, and mythology. Outrun the Wind is her debut novel. (Taken from Goodreads)

Honestly, I am so impressed because the fact that she can handle university and writing an entire novel tells us so much about her dedication as both a student and writer. And it definitely shows how she definitely must have put all her heart into writing that she got a book deal not long after. 

But enough of my rambling and awe. Read on to see my interview with the amazing Elizabeth Tammi!

What inspired you to write Outrun The Wind? 

Spite, honestly! I was simultaneously captivated and frustrated by Atalanta's original mythology, and wanted to tell my own interpretation! Plus, I had lots of other interests about Greek mythology that I wanted to explore via long-form fiction, like the huntresses of Artemis, relationships between the gods, and the oracles at Delphi.

What makes Outrun The Wind unique from every other mythology-inspired novel? 

I think-- or hope, at least-- that Outrun the Wind stands out because of its exploration of a lesser-known myth and deals heavily with themes like female strength, sexuality, and is told from the perspective of two teenage girls. It's a younger and female twist on a mythology that isn't very kind to women, so I hope readers enjoy that point of view.

Who is your favorite non-main character from your book and why? 

Probably Nikoleta, a demigoddess daughter of Ares who also serves Artemis as one of her huntresses. Nikoleta has a super deep personal connection to me, because the very first draft of a book I ever finished was actually her story of growing up in ancient Sparta with quite a harrowing destiny; while that first manuscript was pretty terrible, I still have hopes of returning to it someday, and I was so glad that she got to make an appearance in Outrun the Wind-- it feels very fitting, since she's been with me from the start of my writing journey.

Who or what inspired you to start writing? 

My parents really raised me as an avid reader, so I don't remember a time in my life when I didn't love books. As early as about seven years old, I knew I wanted to write my own. Now, I didn't actually start writing seriously until I was about 16. Prior to that was just some random snippets, and of course, some fanfiction haha (which was actually, looking back, a great way to learn how to structure scenes, dialogue, descriptions, etc. in an environment I felt comfortable in)! Anyway, I think being surrounded by so many fantastic YA stories growing up just really pushed me to try writing my own. Obviously, Rick Riordan was probably my biggest 'hero', but other authors like Leigh Bardugo, Kiersten White, and Maggie Stiefvater also definitely inspired me!

Tell us what the journey was like in writing Outrun The Wind, from the start of the idea up to the point of having it published. 

This whole journey with Outrun the Wind actually only spans about 2.5 years from first getting the idea to the book being published on November 27, 2018-- which felt like forever, but ask any other author, and they'll tell you this was ridiculously fast haha. I got the initial idea when I was 18, the summer before I left for college, since I had been reading up on more Greek mythology and stumbled across Atalanta. She was a character I knew a bit about, but after reading her whole story, I was left feeling instilled with some sort of purpose/passion to tell her story as I imagined it. I drafted the first terrible version during the first semester of freshman year, worked with my critique partners, and started sending it off to various publishers and agents during the end of my freshman year. 

Ultimately, Flux offered me a book deal last fall, during my sophomore year. From then, I went through three rounds of edits with my fabulous editor to make sure the book was ready for publication, and the very final version was sent off this past March. Then ARCs went out in May, and are being read/reviewed as we speak, in preparation for its official release date of November 27th-- nearing the end of my fall semester of junior year! Whew. Looking back, I know this was actually really fast from start-to-finish, partially because I'm a somewhat quick writer, and partially because I'm not with a Big Five publishing house. But when I was in the thick of it, it felt like there was so much waiting involved. That's just the publishing industry though!

If you could tell your younger writing self anything, what would it be? 

Start sooner! I know 16 isn't old by any means, but it frustrates me that I knew I wanted to be an author by the time I was seven...but it took me almost a decade to start pursuing it seriously! I keep thinking what more I could have accomplished already if I'd started when I said I wanted to, haha. But that's okay, I'm glad to be doing it now. The moral is, if anyone reading this wants to be an author, there's no better day to start than today!

Writing a book is no easy feat. What's the one advice you wish you had upon writing your novel that you could give to aspiring writers wanting to get their work out there? 

You're so right-- there's really nothing easy about writing a book, but it's a challenge that I get joy out of. Anyway, I do wish someone had told me when I first started writing my own novels that comparison is so, so toxic, frustrating, and pointless. In this industry specifically, every author has their own struggles and had their own path to publication, so it's impossible to try and compare successes. Every single writer feels insecure to a degree and that's not going to go away once you get a book deal. It's important to be disciplined and consistent, but also remember that this isn't a race, and you should never rush into something that feels sketchy or uncomfortable. If you're querying, do extensive research on where you're sending your work out to!

It has been such a honor interviewing this incredible author! Let’s get a glimpse of her amazing debut novel, and what Outrun The Wind is really about:

The Huntresses of Artemis must obey two rules: never disobey the goddess, and never fall in love. After being rescued from a harrowing life as an Oracle of Delphi, Kahina is glad to be a part of the Hunt; living among a group of female warriors gives her a chance to reclaim her strength, even while her prophetic powers linger. But when a routine mission goes awry, Kahina breaks the first rule in order to save the legendary huntress Atalanta. To earn back Artemis’s favor, Kahina must complete a dangerous task in the kingdom of Arkadia— where the king’s daughter is revealed to be none other than Atalanta. Still reeling from her disastrous quest and her father’s insistence on marriage, Atalanta isn’t sure what to make of Kahina. As her connection to Atalanta deepens, Kahina finds herself in danger of breaking Artemis’ second rule. She helps Atalanta devise a dangerous game to avoid marriage, and word spreads throughout Greece, attracting suitors willing to tempt fate to go up against Atalanta in a race for her hand. But when the men responsible for both the girls’ dark pasts arrive, the game turns deadly.

Again, you guys, Outrun The Wind comes out on November 27, 2018! Copies are available over at NetGalley to request for if you can’t wait to read it. I myself am quite excited to read this book because you all know I have such a soft heart for anything mythology-related! Make sure to click that Want To Read on Goodreads! ;)

You can follow Elizabeth Tammi on many of her social media platforms such as Tumblr at (annabethisterrified), Twitter at (@ElizabethTammi), Instagram at (elizabeth_tammi), and at elizabethtammi.com!

[kristablogs]

Where does fear actually come from?

Convention thinking says that the root of all fear lies in our brains. But what comes before then? (The National Museum in Oslo/)

Excerpt from Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear by Eva Holland. Reprinted with permission of The Experiment.

Fear, it seems at first, should be easy to identify and define. To borrow from that old judicial decision about the definition of obscenity: we know it when we feel it.

Putting that feeling into words can be harder. G. Stanley Hall, the nineteenth-century founder of the American Journal of Psychology and the first president of the American Psychological Association, described fear as “the anticipation of pain,” and that seems like a pretty good general definition to me. Fear of violence? Anticipatory pain. Fear of a breakup, the loss of someone you love? Anticipatory pain. Fear of sharks, of plane crashes, of falling off a cliff? Check, check, and check.

But what we need, really, isn’t just a solid catch-all definition. What we need, to understand the role of fear in our lives, is to examine the layers and varieties of fears that can afflict us.

There’s the sharp jab of alarm when you sense a clear, imminent threat: That car is going to hit me. There’s the duller, more dispersed foreboding, the feeling of malaise whose source you can’t quite pinpoint: Something is wrong here. I don’t feel safe. There are spiraling, sprawling existential fears: I am going to flunk this exam, tank this interview, fail at life. And there are precise, even banal, ones: Pulling this Band-Aid off is going to hurt. How do they all fit together? Or, put differently, to what extent does each stand apart?

According to Greek mythology, Ares, the god of war, had two sons, who accompanied him into battle: Phobos, the god of fear, and Deimos, the god of dread. That seems like a useful distinction to start with—fear versus dread—and it’s one that’s echoed today by our distinction between fear and anxiety. Fear, generally speaking, is regarded as being prompted by a clear and present threat: you sense danger and you feel afraid. Anxiety, on the other hand, is born from less tangible concerns: it can feel like fear but without a clear cause. Simple enough, at least in theory.

In Fear: A Cultural History, author Joanna Bourke gamely attempts to parse the distinctions between fear and anxiety. “In one case a frightening person or dangerous object can be identified: the flames searing patterns on the ceiling, the hydrogen bomb, the terrorist,” she writes. Whereas “more often, anxiety overwhelms us from some source ‘within’: there is an irrational panic about venturing outside, a dread of failure, a premonition of doom ... Anxiety is described as a more generalized state, while fear is more specific and immediate. The ‘danger object’ seems to be in front of us in fear states, while in anxiety states the individual is not consciously aware of what endangers him or her.”

But as Bourke points out, that distinction has serious limitations. It’s entirely dependent on the ability of the fearful person to identify the threat. Is it legitimately, immediately dangerous? Or is the fear abstract, “irrational”? She offers the hydrogen bomb and the terrorist as examples of potentially clear and present threats, but both can also serve as anxiety-inducing spectres, ominous even when absent.

Nerve by Eva Holland. (Courtesy of The Experiment/)

The distinction between fear and anxiety, then, can be murky, even as it can also be a useful and even necessary line to draw. But setting the issue of a threat’s clear presence aside, there’s the matter of our “fear” response.

The scientists who study our emotional lives make distinctions between different categories of feelings. There are the primary emotions, our most basic and near-universal responses, found across cultures and even appearing, or at least seeming to us to appear, in other species: fear, anger, disgust, surprise, sadness, and happiness.

Think of them like primary colors, the foundational elements of a whole rainbow of emotion. Just as red and blue in combination can be used to create all the shades of purple, you can imagine some more precise feelings as being built by the primary emotions. Horror, for instance, is fear mixed with disgust—and, maybe, some shadings of anger and surprise. Delight could be happiness with a bit of surprise stirred in. And so on.

There are also the social emotions, the feelings that don’t stand alone like the primary emotions but are generated by our relationships to others: sympathy, embarrassment, shame, guilt, pride, jealousy, envy, gratitude, admiration, contempt, and more.

Of all these, fear is perhaps the most studied. But what does it really mean to study fear? What do we even mean, exactly, when we say “fear” in the context of scientific research? That’s a more complicated question than you might expect.

Traditionally, scientists have studied “fear” in animals by measuring their reactions to threatening or unpleasant stimuli—a rat’s freezing response when it is subjected to a small electric shock, for instance. In studying humans, scientists have more options and a broader array of tools. Most importantly, humans can self-report, verbally or in writing: Yes, I felt afraid.

The complicating factor is that those two responses—the freezing and the feeling—are separate and distinct. As the neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, an expert on the brain circuitry of fear, emphasizes in his book Anxious, we know that the physical fear response and the emotional feeling of fear are produced by two different mechanisms in the body.

For a long time, the working theory held that the feeling came first, in response to the fear stimulus, and then the physical response followed from the feeling. This is what’s known as the commonsense, or Darwinian, school of thought. But that was more an assumption than a proven mechanism, and these days it has fallen out of favor.

Instead, as science has turned its attention to working out that elusive mechanism more concretely, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has come up with an answer that, while provocative, ultimately feels right to me. The feeling, he argues in a pair of funny and wise books, Descartes’ Error and Looking for Spinoza, is actually derived from that same menu of physical reactions that we would typically view as accessories of, or adjacent to, our emotions.

For the purposes of his argument, Damasio makes an unusual distinction between “emotions”—by which, in this context, he specifically means the physical, measurable reactions of the body in response to an emotional stimulus, the physical fear response—and “feelings,” the intangible expressions of emotion in our minds. That may seem odd, or even nonsensical, but it’s a key to his case, so keep it in mind.

“We tend to believe that the hidden is the source of the expressed,” he writes in Looking for Spinoza. But he argues, instead, for a counter-intuitive reversal of that order: “Emotions”—again, meaning the physical reactions here—“and related phenomena are the foundation for feelings, the mental events that form the bedrock of our minds.”

All organisms have varying abilities to react to stimuli, from a simple startle reflex or withdrawal movement all the way up to more complex multi-part responses, like the description of our physical fear processes above, which are Damasio’s “emotions.” Some of the more basic responses might sometimes look, to our eyes, like expressions of the feeling of fear, and in fact the machinery that governs them is also implicated in the more complex processes. (My startle reflex, one of our oldest and simplest reactions, has certainly come into play at times when I’ve also felt afraid. Hello, raptors in the kitchen in Jurassic Park!) But the “emotions” are at the top of the heap in terms of complexity, and as such not all organisms are capable of generating them.

Unlike some of the simpler “fear” reactions in simpler organisms (poke a “sensitive plant,” watch its leaves curl up), our emotions can be generated by stimuli both real, in the moment, and remembered—or even imagined. That’s the gift and the burden of the human mind.

But for now, let’s stick with an in-the-moment example, like a strange noise heard in the night. The fact of the noise is captured by the sensory nerves in the ear and is relayed to the brain structures involved in triggering and then executing a response. Now your body is reacting in all the ways described above.

So far, so good? The next step, in Damasio’s formulation, is the creation of the feeling itself. We know that our bodies are laced with neurons, and that they not only send out information from the brain, they also receive it.

So after the outgoing messages have gotten our hearts pumping, our sweat beading, and so on, a series of incoming messages returns to the brain, bearing all of that information about our physical state. Our brains, Damasio explains, maintain incredibly complex maps of the state of the body, from our guts to our fingertips, at all times.

And here’s the core of his argument: when the incoming messages bearing news of the body’s physical fear-state alter these maps, that’s when the feeling itself arises. Your brain learns from your body that your heart is pounding, your pupils are dilated, your goosebumps are standing at attention. Your brain does the math and says, Aha! I am afraid!

In his 1884 essay, “What is an emotion?” the philosopher and psychologist William James wrote,

If we fancy some strong emotion and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind, no “mind-stuff” out of which the emotion can be constituted, and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is all that remains. . . . What kind of an emotion of fear would be left if the feeling neither of quickened heart-beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of gooseflesh nor of visceral stirrings, were present, it is quite impossible for me to think.

Damasio picks up where James left off. But he doesn’t just draw on Victorian-era philosophizing to make his argument. He also works from case studies and his own research; for instance, the case of a Parkinson’s patient in Paris. The woman, who was sixty-five years old and had no history of depression or other mental illness, was undergoing an experimental treatment for her Parkinson’s symptoms. It involved the use of an electrical current to stimulate motor-control areas of the brain stem via tiny electrodes.

Nineteen other patients had undergone the treatment successfully. But when the current entered the woman’s brain, she stopped chatting with the doctors, lowered her eyes, and her face slumped.

Seconds later, she began to cry, and then to sob. “I’m fed up with life,” she said, through her tears. “I’ve had enough ... I don’t want to live anymore ... I feel worthless.” The team, alarmed, stopped the current, and within ninety seconds the woman had stopped crying. Her face perked up again, the sadness melting away. What had just happened? she asked.

It turned out, according to Damasio, that instead of stimulating the nuclei that controlled her tremors, the electrode, infinitesimally misplaced, had activated the parts of the brain stem that control a suite of actions by the facial muscles, mouth, larynx, and diaphragm—the actions that allow us to frown, pout, and cry. Her body, stimulated not by a sad movie or bad news, had acted out the motions of sadness, and her mind, in turn, had gone to a dark, dark place. The feeling arose from the physical; her mind followed her body.

This whole thing seemed counterintuitive to me at first, reversing as it does the “commonsense” view. But then I sat back and really thought about my experience of fear. How do I recall it in my memory? How do I try to explain it to other people? The fact is that I think of it mostly in physical terms: that sick feeling in my gut, the tightness in my chest, maybe some dizziness or shortness of breath.

Think about how you actually experience the feeling of happiness, of contentment, or ease. For me, it manifests in the loosening of the eternally tense muscles in my forehead and jaw, in my neck and shoulders. My eyes open wider, losing the worried squint. I breathe more deeply.

Or think about the sheer physicality of deep grief, how it wrecks your body as well as your mind. When I look back on the worst of my grief after my mom’s death, I remember it as headaches, exhaustion, a tight chest, a sense of heaviness, and lethargy. I felt sad, yes—sadder than I’ve ever been—and it was my body that told me how sad I was.

[scootoaster]

Where does fear actually come from?

Convention thinking says that the root of all fear lies in our brains. But what comes before then? (The National Museum in Oslo/)

Excerpt from Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear by Eva Holland. Reprinted with permission of The Experiment.

Fear, it seems at first, should be easy to identify and define. To borrow from that old judicial decision about the definition of obscenity: we know it when we feel it.

Putting that feeling into words can be harder. G. Stanley Hall, the nineteenth-century founder of the American Journal of Psychology and the first president of the American Psychological Association, described fear as “the anticipation of pain,” and that seems like a pretty good general definition to me. Fear of violence? Anticipatory pain. Fear of a breakup, the loss of someone you love? Anticipatory pain. Fear of sharks, of plane crashes, of falling off a cliff? Check, check, and check.

But what we need, really, isn’t just a solid catch-all definition. What we need, to understand the role of fear in our lives, is to examine the layers and varieties of fears that can afflict us.

There’s the sharp jab of alarm when you sense a clear, imminent threat: That car is going to hit me. There’s the duller, more dispersed foreboding, the feeling of malaise whose source you can’t quite pinpoint: Something is wrong here. I don’t feel safe. There are spiraling, sprawling existential fears: I am going to flunk this exam, tank this interview, fail at life. And there are precise, even banal, ones: Pulling this Band-Aid off is going to hurt. How do they all fit together? Or, put differently, to what extent does each stand apart?

According to Greek mythology, Ares, the god of war, had two sons, who accompanied him into battle: Phobos, the god of fear, and Deimos, the god of dread. That seems like a useful distinction to start with—fear versus dread—and it’s one that’s echoed today by our distinction between fear and anxiety. Fear, generally speaking, is regarded as being prompted by a clear and present threat: you sense danger and you feel afraid. Anxiety, on the other hand, is born from less tangible concerns: it can feel like fear but without a clear cause. Simple enough, at least in theory.

In Fear: A Cultural History, author Joanna Bourke gamely attempts to parse the distinctions between fear and anxiety. “In one case a frightening person or dangerous object can be identified: the flames searing patterns on the ceiling, the hydrogen bomb, the terrorist,” she writes. Whereas “more often, anxiety overwhelms us from some source ‘within’: there is an irrational panic about venturing outside, a dread of failure, a premonition of doom ... Anxiety is described as a more generalized state, while fear is more specific and immediate. The ‘danger object’ seems to be in front of us in fear states, while in anxiety states the individual is not consciously aware of what endangers him or her.”

But as Bourke points out, that distinction has serious limitations. It’s entirely dependent on the ability of the fearful person to identify the threat. Is it legitimately, immediately dangerous? Or is the fear abstract, “irrational”? She offers the hydrogen bomb and the terrorist as examples of potentially clear and present threats, but both can also serve as anxiety-inducing spectres, ominous even when absent.

Nerve by Eva Holland. (Courtesy of The Experiment/)

The distinction between fear and anxiety, then, can be murky, even as it can also be a useful and even necessary line to draw. But setting the issue of a threat’s clear presence aside, there’s the matter of our “fear” response.

The scientists who study our emotional lives make distinctions between different categories of feelings. There are the primary emotions, our most basic and near-universal responses, found across cultures and even appearing, or at least seeming to us to appear, in other species: fear, anger, disgust, surprise, sadness, and happiness.

Think of them like primary colors, the foundational elements of a whole rainbow of emotion. Just as red and blue in combination can be used to create all the shades of purple, you can imagine some more precise feelings as being built by the primary emotions. Horror, for instance, is fear mixed with disgust—and, maybe, some shadings of anger and surprise. Delight could be happiness with a bit of surprise stirred in. And so on.

There are also the social emotions, the feelings that don’t stand alone like the primary emotions but are generated by our relationships to others: sympathy, embarrassment, shame, guilt, pride, jealousy, envy, gratitude, admiration, contempt, and more.

Of all these, fear is perhaps the most studied. But what does it really mean to study fear? What do we even mean, exactly, when we say “fear” in the context of scientific research? That’s a more complicated question than you might expect.

Traditionally, scientists have studied “fear” in animals by measuring their reactions to threatening or unpleasant stimuli—a rat’s freezing response when it is subjected to a small electric shock, for instance. In studying humans, scientists have more options and a broader array of tools. Most importantly, humans can self-report, verbally or in writing: Yes, I felt afraid.

The complicating factor is that those two responses—the freezing and the feeling—are separate and distinct. As the neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, an expert on the brain circuitry of fear, emphasizes in his book Anxious, we know that the physical fear response and the emotional feeling of fear are produced by two different mechanisms in the body.

For a long time, the working theory held that the feeling came first, in response to the fear stimulus, and then the physical response followed from the feeling. This is what’s known as the commonsense, or Darwinian, school of thought. But that was more an assumption than a proven mechanism, and these days it has fallen out of favor.

Instead, as science has turned its attention to working out that elusive mechanism more concretely, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has come up with an answer that, while provocative, ultimately feels right to me. The feeling, he argues in a pair of funny and wise books, Descartes’ Error and Looking for Spinoza, is actually derived from that same menu of physical reactions that we would typically view as accessories of, or adjacent to, our emotions.

For the purposes of his argument, Damasio makes an unusual distinction between “emotions”—by which, in this context, he specifically means the physical, measurable reactions of the body in response to an emotional stimulus, the physical fear response—and “feelings,” the intangible expressions of emotion in our minds. That may seem odd, or even nonsensical, but it’s a key to his case, so keep it in mind.

“We tend to believe that the hidden is the source of the expressed,” he writes in Looking for Spinoza. But he argues, instead, for a counter-intuitive reversal of that order: “Emotions”—again, meaning the physical reactions here—“and related phenomena are the foundation for feelings, the mental events that form the bedrock of our minds.”

All organisms have varying abilities to react to stimuli, from a simple startle reflex or withdrawal movement all the way up to more complex multi-part responses, like the description of our physical fear processes above, which are Damasio’s “emotions.” Some of the more basic responses might sometimes look, to our eyes, like expressions of the feeling of fear, and in fact the machinery that governs them is also implicated in the more complex processes. (My startle reflex, one of our oldest and simplest reactions, has certainly come into play at times when I’ve also felt afraid. Hello, raptors in the kitchen in Jurassic Park!) But the “emotions” are at the top of the heap in terms of complexity, and as such not all organisms are capable of generating them.

Unlike some of the simpler “fear” reactions in simpler organisms (poke a “sensitive plant,” watch its leaves curl up), our emotions can be generated by stimuli both real, in the moment, and remembered—or even imagined. That’s the gift and the burden of the human mind.

But for now, let’s stick with an in-the-moment example, like a strange noise heard in the night. The fact of the noise is captured by the sensory nerves in the ear and is relayed to the brain structures involved in triggering and then executing a response. Now your body is reacting in all the ways described above.

So far, so good? The next step, in Damasio’s formulation, is the creation of the feeling itself. We know that our bodies are laced with neurons, and that they not only send out information from the brain, they also receive it.

So after the outgoing messages have gotten our hearts pumping, our sweat beading, and so on, a series of incoming messages returns to the brain, bearing all of that information about our physical state. Our brains, Damasio explains, maintain incredibly complex maps of the state of the body, from our guts to our fingertips, at all times.

And here’s the core of his argument: when the incoming messages bearing news of the body’s physical fear-state alter these maps, that’s when the feeling itself arises. Your brain learns from your body that your heart is pounding, your pupils are dilated, your goosebumps are standing at attention. Your brain does the math and says, Aha! I am afraid!

In his 1884 essay, “What is an emotion?” the philosopher and psychologist William James wrote,

If we fancy some strong emotion and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind, no “mind-stuff” out of which the emotion can be constituted, and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is all that remains. . . . What kind of an emotion of fear would be left if the feeling neither of quickened heart-beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of gooseflesh nor of visceral stirrings, were present, it is quite impossible for me to think.

Damasio picks up where James left off. But he doesn’t just draw on Victorian-era philosophizing to make his argument. He also works from case studies and his own research; for instance, the case of a Parkinson’s patient in Paris. The woman, who was sixty-five years old and had no history of depression or other mental illness, was undergoing an experimental treatment for her Parkinson’s symptoms. It involved the use of an electrical current to stimulate motor-control areas of the brain stem via tiny electrodes.

Nineteen other patients had undergone the treatment successfully. But when the current entered the woman’s brain, she stopped chatting with the doctors, lowered her eyes, and her face slumped.

Seconds later, she began to cry, and then to sob. “I’m fed up with life,” she said, through her tears. “I’ve had enough ... I don’t want to live anymore ... I feel worthless.” The team, alarmed, stopped the current, and within ninety seconds the woman had stopped crying. Her face perked up again, the sadness melting away. What had just happened? she asked.

It turned out, according to Damasio, that instead of stimulating the nuclei that controlled her tremors, the electrode, infinitesimally misplaced, had activated the parts of the brain stem that control a suite of actions by the facial muscles, mouth, larynx, and diaphragm—the actions that allow us to frown, pout, and cry. Her body, stimulated not by a sad movie or bad news, had acted out the motions of sadness, and her mind, in turn, had gone to a dark, dark place. The feeling arose from the physical; her mind followed her body.

This whole thing seemed counterintuitive to me at first, reversing as it does the “commonsense” view. But then I sat back and really thought about my experience of fear. How do I recall it in my memory? How do I try to explain it to other people? The fact is that I think of it mostly in physical terms: that sick feeling in my gut, the tightness in my chest, maybe some dizziness or shortness of breath.

Think about how you actually experience the feeling of happiness, of contentment, or ease. For me, it manifests in the loosening of the eternally tense muscles in my forehead and jaw, in my neck and shoulders. My eyes open wider, losing the worried squint. I breathe more deeply.

Or think about the sheer physicality of deep grief, how it wrecks your body as well as your mind. When I look back on the worst of my grief after my mom’s death, I remember it as headaches, exhaustion, a tight chest, a sense of heaviness, and lethargy. I felt sad, yes—sadder than I’ve ever been—and it was my body that told me how sad I was.

[kristablogs]

Where does fear actually come from?

Convention thinking says that the root of all fear lies in our brains. But what comes before then? (The National Museum in Oslo/)

Excerpt from Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear by Eva Holland. Reprinted with permission of The Experiment.

Fear, it seems at first, should be easy to identify and define. To borrow from that old judicial decision about the definition of obscenity: we know it when we feel it.

Putting that feeling into words can be harder. G. Stanley Hall, the nineteenth-century founder of the American Journal of Psychology and the first president of the American Psychological Association, described fear as “the anticipation of pain,” and that seems like a pretty good general definition to me. Fear of violence? Anticipatory pain. Fear of a breakup, the loss of someone you love? Anticipatory pain. Fear of sharks, of plane crashes, of falling off a cliff? Check, check, and check.

But what we need, really, isn’t just a solid catch-all definition. What we need, to understand the role of fear in our lives, is to examine the layers and varieties of fears that can afflict us.

There’s the sharp jab of alarm when you sense a clear, imminent threat: That car is going to hit me. There’s the duller, more dispersed foreboding, the feeling of malaise whose source you can’t quite pinpoint: Something is wrong here. I don’t feel safe. There are spiraling, sprawling existential fears: I am going to flunk this exam, tank this interview, fail at life. And there are precise, even banal, ones: Pulling this Band-Aid off is going to hurt. How do they all fit together? Or, put differently, to what extent does each stand apart?

According to Greek mythology, Ares, the god of war, had two sons, who accompanied him into battle: Phobos, the god of fear, and Deimos, the god of dread. That seems like a useful distinction to start with—fear versus dread—and it’s one that’s echoed today by our distinction between fear and anxiety. Fear, generally speaking, is regarded as being prompted by a clear and present threat: you sense danger and you feel afraid. Anxiety, on the other hand, is born from less tangible concerns: it can feel like fear but without a clear cause. Simple enough, at least in theory.

In Fear: A Cultural History, author Joanna Bourke gamely attempts to parse the distinctions between fear and anxiety. “In one case a frightening person or dangerous object can be identified: the flames searing patterns on the ceiling, the hydrogen bomb, the terrorist,” she writes. Whereas “more often, anxiety overwhelms us from some source ‘within’: there is an irrational panic about venturing outside, a dread of failure, a premonition of doom ... Anxiety is described as a more generalized state, while fear is more specific and immediate. The ‘danger object’ seems to be in front of us in fear states, while in anxiety states the individual is not consciously aware of what endangers him or her.”

But as Bourke points out, that distinction has serious limitations. It’s entirely dependent on the ability of the fearful person to identify the threat. Is it legitimately, immediately dangerous? Or is the fear abstract, “irrational”? She offers the hydrogen bomb and the terrorist as examples of potentially clear and present threats, but both can also serve as anxiety-inducing spectres, ominous even when absent.

Nerve by Eva Holland. (Courtesy of The Experiment/)

The distinction between fear and anxiety, then, can be murky, even as it can also be a useful and even necessary line to draw. But setting the issue of a threat’s clear presence aside, there’s the matter of our “fear” response.

The scientists who study our emotional lives make distinctions between different categories of feelings. There are the primary emotions, our most basic and near-universal responses, found across cultures and even appearing, or at least seeming to us to appear, in other species: fear, anger, disgust, surprise, sadness, and happiness.

Think of them like primary colors, the foundational elements of a whole rainbow of emotion. Just as red and blue in combination can be used to create all the shades of purple, you can imagine some more precise feelings as being built by the primary emotions. Horror, for instance, is fear mixed with disgust—and, maybe, some shadings of anger and surprise. Delight could be happiness with a bit of surprise stirred in. And so on.

There are also the social emotions, the feelings that don’t stand alone like the primary emotions but are generated by our relationships to others: sympathy, embarrassment, shame, guilt, pride, jealousy, envy, gratitude, admiration, contempt, and more.

Of all these, fear is perhaps the most studied. But what does it really mean to study fear? What do we even mean, exactly, when we say “fear” in the context of scientific research? That’s a more complicated question than you might expect.

Traditionally, scientists have studied “fear” in animals by measuring their reactions to threatening or unpleasant stimuli—a rat’s freezing response when it is subjected to a small electric shock, for instance. In studying humans, scientists have more options and a broader array of tools. Most importantly, humans can self-report, verbally or in writing: Yes, I felt afraid.

The complicating factor is that those two responses—the freezing and the feeling—are separate and distinct. As the neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, an expert on the brain circuitry of fear, emphasizes in his book Anxious, we know that the physical fear response and the emotional feeling of fear are produced by two different mechanisms in the body.

For a long time, the working theory held that the feeling came first, in response to the fear stimulus, and then the physical response followed from the feeling. This is what’s known as the commonsense, or Darwinian, school of thought. But that was more an assumption than a proven mechanism, and these days it has fallen out of favor.

Instead, as science has turned its attention to working out that elusive mechanism more concretely, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has come up with an answer that, while provocative, ultimately feels right to me. The feeling, he argues in a pair of funny and wise books, Descartes’ Error and Looking for Spinoza, is actually derived from that same menu of physical reactions that we would typically view as accessories of, or adjacent to, our emotions.

For the purposes of his argument, Damasio makes an unusual distinction between “emotions”—by which, in this context, he specifically means the physical, measurable reactions of the body in response to an emotional stimulus, the physical fear response—and “feelings,” the intangible expressions of emotion in our minds. That may seem odd, or even nonsensical, but it’s a key to his case, so keep it in mind.

“We tend to believe that the hidden is the source of the expressed,” he writes in Looking for Spinoza. But he argues, instead, for a counter-intuitive reversal of that order: “Emotions”—again, meaning the physical reactions here—“and related phenomena are the foundation for feelings, the mental events that form the bedrock of our minds.”

All organisms have varying abilities to react to stimuli, from a simple startle reflex or withdrawal movement all the way up to more complex multi-part responses, like the description of our physical fear processes above, which are Damasio’s “emotions.” Some of the more basic responses might sometimes look, to our eyes, like expressions of the feeling of fear, and in fact the machinery that governs them is also implicated in the more complex processes. (My startle reflex, one of our oldest and simplest reactions, has certainly come into play at times when I’ve also felt afraid. Hello, raptors in the kitchen in Jurassic Park!) But the “emotions” are at the top of the heap in terms of complexity, and as such not all organisms are capable of generating them.

Unlike some of the simpler “fear” reactions in simpler organisms (poke a “sensitive plant,” watch its leaves curl up), our emotions can be generated by stimuli both real, in the moment, and remembered—or even imagined. That’s the gift and the burden of the human mind.

But for now, let’s stick with an in-the-moment example, like a strange noise heard in the night. The fact of the noise is captured by the sensory nerves in the ear and is relayed to the brain structures involved in triggering and then executing a response. Now your body is reacting in all the ways described above.

So far, so good? The next step, in Damasio’s formulation, is the creation of the feeling itself. We know that our bodies are laced with neurons, and that they not only send out information from the brain, they also receive it.

So after the outgoing messages have gotten our hearts pumping, our sweat beading, and so on, a series of incoming messages returns to the brain, bearing all of that information about our physical state. Our brains, Damasio explains, maintain incredibly complex maps of the state of the body, from our guts to our fingertips, at all times.

And here’s the core of his argument: when the incoming messages bearing news of the body’s physical fear-state alter these maps, that’s when the feeling itself arises. Your brain learns from your body that your heart is pounding, your pupils are dilated, your goosebumps are standing at attention. Your brain does the math and says, Aha! I am afraid!

In his 1884 essay, “What is an emotion?” the philosopher and psychologist William James wrote,

If we fancy some strong emotion and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind, no “mind-stuff” out of which the emotion can be constituted, and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is all that remains. . . . What kind of an emotion of fear would be left if the feeling neither of quickened heart-beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of gooseflesh nor of visceral stirrings, were present, it is quite impossible for me to think.

Damasio picks up where James left off. But he doesn’t just draw on Victorian-era philosophizing to make his argument. He also works from case studies and his own research; for instance, the case of a Parkinson’s patient in Paris. The woman, who was sixty-five years old and had no history of depression or other mental illness, was undergoing an experimental treatment for her Parkinson’s symptoms. It involved the use of an electrical current to stimulate motor-control areas of the brain stem via tiny electrodes.

Nineteen other patients had undergone the treatment successfully. But when the current entered the woman’s brain, she stopped chatting with the doctors, lowered her eyes, and her face slumped.

Seconds later, she began to cry, and then to sob. “I’m fed up with life,” she said, through her tears. “I’ve had enough ... I don’t want to live anymore ... I feel worthless.” The team, alarmed, stopped the current, and within ninety seconds the woman had stopped crying. Her face perked up again, the sadness melting away. What had just happened? she asked.

It turned out, according to Damasio, that instead of stimulating the nuclei that controlled her tremors, the electrode, infinitesimally misplaced, had activated the parts of the brain stem that control a suite of actions by the facial muscles, mouth, larynx, and diaphragm—the actions that allow us to frown, pout, and cry. Her body, stimulated not by a sad movie or bad news, had acted out the motions of sadness, and her mind, in turn, had gone to a dark, dark place. The feeling arose from the physical; her mind followed her body.

This whole thing seemed counterintuitive to me at first, reversing as it does the “commonsense” view. But then I sat back and really thought about my experience of fear. How do I recall it in my memory? How do I try to explain it to other people? The fact is that I think of it mostly in physical terms: that sick feeling in my gut, the tightness in my chest, maybe some dizziness or shortness of breath.

Think about how you actually experience the feeling of happiness, of contentment, or ease. For me, it manifests in the loosening of the eternally tense muscles in my forehead and jaw, in my neck and shoulders. My eyes open wider, losing the worried squint. I breathe more deeply.

Or think about the sheer physicality of deep grief, how it wrecks your body as well as your mind. When I look back on the worst of my grief after my mom’s death, I remember it as headaches, exhaustion, a tight chest, a sense of heaviness, and lethargy. I felt sad, yes—sadder than I’ve ever been—and it was my body that told me how sad I was.