When you experience the emotion of sadness, there will be changes in facial expression, and your body will be closed in, withdrawn. There are also changes in your heart, your guts: they slow down. And there are hormonal changes.
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Antonio Damasio Quote
“The problem that we, as living organisms, face - and not we only, humans, but any living organism faces - is the management of life.”
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When you deal with something like compassion for physical pain, which we know is very, very old in evolution - we can find evidence for it in nonhuman species - the brain processes it at a faster speed. Compassion for mental pain took many seconds longer.
When we talk about emotion, we really talk about a collection of behaviors that are produced by the brain. You can look at a person in the throes of an emotion and observe changes in the face, in the body posture, in the coloration of the skin and so on.
I continue to be fascinated by the fact that feelings are not just the shady side of reason but that they help us to reach decisions as well.
Some of us, for better or worse, develop very stable, consistent, and largely predictable machineries of self. But in others, the self machinery is more flexible and more open to unexpected turns.
Rather than being a luxury, emotions are a very intelligent way of driving an organism toward certain outcomes.