Emotion as a whole is not affected by our condition, only those triggered by social-mindset associations.
We retain all innate sources of emotion. If we did not have these sources of ’emotion’, we would not survive.
- Pain or threat to survival continues to lead to distress or anxiety and aversion of the source of the threat.
- Satiation by food or drink continues to reduce the anxiety caused by hunger and consolidate reward.
- Sexuality, although unable to be significantly activated by social-mindset associations (in my case), remains in full force when activated by visual sexual imprints.
The triggering of the emotion is done by things other than the episodic memory. As such, due to all the difficulties with eating we have, we consider it a massive chore and something we wish we didn’t have to do. The same goes for other everyday activities such as sleeping.
Pleasure or displeasure is never associated with the act of doing these things. For eating, it is triggered by the internal satiation brought about by the ingestion of the food. The act of eating results in a lot of difficulty and displeasure for us.
Likewise, the body’s need to sleep brings about the reward or pressure to sleep. The act is not episodically associated with this pleasure; sleep is seen as a nuisance that we would much rather have the time spared to use for other things.
Essentially, similarly to how episodic memories attached to the social-mindset mechanism are in a conflict with those that regulate the innate survival centres (i.e. by causing harm to the self), episodic memories that regulate all other innate survival centres are in conflict with each other.
At age 20, my friend stated:
‘I can never get to sleep when I’m forced to sleep at a certain time. I can only go to sleep when I need to go to sleep. All this bullshit about insomnia and people not being able to sleep and people taking tablets: it shouldn’t exist. It’s because people are going to bed at unnatural times.
They’re not going to bed to satisfy a tiredness. They’re going to bed because it’s part of a social routine at a specific time, so of course they’re not going to get to sleep, but they will do if they’ve been awake 40 hours.
Sleep should only come at a time where it is a must. It’s utterly stupid. I’m not going to be tired at a fixed time on the clock. I’m going to be tired when I’m tired. It’s not going to be a fixed time on the clock. It’s going to be whenever it is.’
At age 21, I stated:
‘It’s funny how [both sleeping and eating is] what they can’t get their mind off, and yet, it’s what we absolutely hate having to do. They cannot go without talking about loving sleeping and eating.’
My friend replied, ‘I notice that paradigm time and time again:
- 1) I absolutely hate and strive to block out and avoid and have had lengthy discussion about something, yet
- 2) people with the social mindset strive to engage in and have had lengthy discussion about how much they love that same thing.
I’m making ridiculous attempts to avoid, and they’re making ridiculous attempts to embrace. It couldn’t be more opposite.
It’s like they’re doing it on purpose, like they’ve been instructed to say the absolute binary opposite of every word in the sentence. It’s like a mathematical operation.
- 3) It is then subconsciously assumed that it applies to me, and then they constantly are pestering me what I want to eat and what I want to eat next and when I am sleeping.
I am treated like I must be having the same yearning as them, and it’s like they’re trying to put me out of the misery or discomfort they’d be suffering.
So they’d be constantly trying to make attempts out of care to suggest things that I want to eat, but actually it irritates me. It’s like a drill in the side of my head, when my thinking is on a different plane.
I’m trying to think about some serious scientific matter, and I’m constantly being engaged in a low-level conversation I don’t want to be part of, diverting my chain of thought, worsening my situation, because I start feeling like I’m being unproductive and falling behind.’
At age 21, I stated:
‘I’m not using the word anhedonia again, because it’s wrong; it’s lack of positive or negative emotion or sexual arousal or any given brainstem response.
Regular people assume anhedonia because hedonia what most social-mindset features bring about, and that’s simply because the individual spends more time in the parasympathetic state than the sympathetic state. It’s that simple.
More time is spent outside fight-or-flight than in it, which means that while the social-mindset mechanism does its thing [attaches these responses to episodic memories], more pleasurable feelings are appropriated among the social group than unpleasurable ones in association with various objects/things/concepts.
So yes, basically, among humans, there is a certain heightening of all emotions in terms of their frequency, but the differentiating factor is not that; it’s that they’re episodically associated. They are associated with episodic memories, so basically, all of them are attached to some random odd thing. Episodic memories become triggers.
But yes, those triggers build based on the natural, innate frequency of each brainstem response: sympathetic, parasympathetic, sexual arousal, etc. They tie them to specific episodic memories, though, and that’s the important part.
It’s not just a case of having “less emotion”; it’s what the emotion is for, what triggers it. That’s what literature on conditions like SPD [schizoid personality disorder] never get at.’
At age 21, I stated:
‘I hate when they refer to reward/aversion consolidation as “emotion” or “emotional responses”. It’s not useful language. It implies it’s useless, but the point is its use, what it does for the animal, and it either makes them want to do something more or make them not want to do something.
It’s not all emotions ever. The word “emotion” just stinks when I look at it, at least, especially in the context of neuroscience.’
Episodic memories as direct triggers of emotion
Instead, in line with the social-mindset mechanism, I have been increasingly unable to have episodic memories serve as direct triggers of an emotion.
For example, I can no longer subjectively re-trigger the level of feelings I had when I had the significant romantic feelings I had at age 15 nor the degree of anxiety I had in secondary school at ages 11–15 just by remembering them. I remember how pleasant or unpleasant or strong the feeling was factually. The difficulty is in bringing the same emotion back into the present, without the original stimulus, merely by remembering it.
There was a period at around age 15 that I heavily pursued nostalgic stimuli. I now consider nostalgia a waste of time, presumably because, aside from the state of affairs not being possible to bring back, I am not able to significantly feel the feelings I felt at the time just by remembering them, so there is no reward in doing so.
The ability is not entirely absent, and there are a few instances of it occurring recently, most notably one at age 20, in which I was able to feel nostalgic emotions but only after an hour of seeing previously unseen videos of my 3-year girlfriend, and another at around age 20, in which I was able to feel the anxiety from school but only after several minutes of reading anxious notes I discovered I had made while in the school. However, the ability does not crop up most days and is far too weak to pursue.
The same applies to sexual social-mindset associations. For almost all given ‘fantasies’ one may have, they are unable to trigger sexual arousal, as they are fictional and not realistically possible. For scenarios that are closest in line with my own self and my own experiences, there is a very latent ability to trigger sexual arousal from memories. Since it is extremely weak and considered useless to pursue, I rely on real media from a realistic scenario that I can relate to myself (which has usually been in the context of a mutual romantic relationship).
My friend has retained this ability more so than me, and he sometimes describes allowing himself to be involved in certain activities, especially those with his family, for the ‘memories’, especially those related to his childhood. He also uses memories as a significant source of sexual arousal, often negating the need for visual stimulus.
At age 21, I stated:
‘You have to think about what we do differently when our DMN [default mode network, which fetches episodic memories] is active.
There’s no fiction in my head. While other people are imagining things, I’m just not, so whatever it is is part of the DMN link that’s broken in us, because it’s not leaving the brain when it should. “Should”; if it did, our thoughts would get replaced with those of the other person, our emotions, in fact.’
I later quoted from an earlier version of the site, ‘”The DMN is active when perceiving beauty in artworks, landscapes, or architecture.[1]” My friend replied, ‘Good, because it’s something I categorically lack. I don’t even have a sliver of it, but I do get it for a mathematical sum.’
At age 21, I stated:
‘Basically, any time I try to imagine something at all now, an imaginary scenario, there’s an immediate, extremely strong counterforce acting back on it, a counterforce that says, “This is a waste of time.” “What are you doing?” “Go back to what you were doing.”
It doesn’t even let me get anywhere with it. It barely lets me begin. It’s like a car ignition that revs once and then stops. That’s how bad it is.’
References
- ^ Vessel, Edward A.; Isik, Ayse Ilkay; Belfi, Amy M.; Stahl, Jonathan L.; Starr, G. Gabrielle (2019-09-17). "The default-mode network represents aesthetic appeal that generalizes across visual domains". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 116 (38): 19155–19164. doi:10.1073/pnas.1902650116. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 6754616. PMID 31484756.