Feeling Emotion

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In my last post, I talked about color and colorblindness, and how color was such a personal experience. That statement got me thinking, because, when it really comes down to it, everything we experience is a personal experience. No one ever feels the same way. We may use the same general terms to attempt to describe our experiences, but in the end only we really know how we feel. Our senses and emotions have a deep connection. Another blog I found from Tufts University states that "what we sense triggers a feeling" which becomes a conceptual association. This could be anything- the blog goes into how seeing a cup of coffee, tasting coffee, hearing a coffee maker, smelling coffee beans can make us feel energized or happy. This happens all around us, though we may not know it. The sun after a long winter, for example. I feel refreshed and excited and energized on that first beautiful morning of spring, and that conceptual association leads me into my day happy. Most of the time, if we have a specific emotional feeling, it is likely that there is a sensory trigger nearby influencing our emotional state. Sometimes I think that this extra sensory awareness could even be our sixth sense popping up in a variety of ways, because we are not always super aware of our surroundings (on a conscious level, perhaps in our subconscious we are).

I keep coming back to feeling, however. It is a touching verb, but we use it all over the place. "I feel sad, I can feel your eyes, I can feel the thump of the bass at a concert" are just some of the ways we use this verb, and there are many more. What do we really mean when we use it? It has sort of become the use-all, end-all word to describe, well, how we feel. Its not just the "feeling" though, I am interested in how our sensual vocabulary came about. How did we first learn to describe the things that we were sensing? In addition to learning all about the senses and their impact on various religions, I would be very interested to learn how our senses, and the language we associate with them, evolved over the years. Why is our language so emotional and sensual? Is it because what we sense is such a personal experience, that we use any words we can to try and connect with others who may or may not be experiencing the same thing?


Here is the link for the Tufts Blog.

http://sites.tufts.edu/emotiononthebrain/2014/10/09/emotion-and-our-senses/

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