Posted by Eddie Sylvano on November 6, 2003, at 17:06:10
In reply to Drugs to help FEEL, posted by scatterbrained on November 5, 2003, at 19:58:58
A lot of what I've read indicates that emotional intensity has a strong correlation with the novelty of one's environment. Your thoughts are influenced by your immediate environment, and your brain has a stockpile of emotional connections to environmental cues. The fewer cues your brain can find to its current environment, the more emotion can range freely. This is why children have a much deeper daily emotional experience than adults.
Things like music, unusual surroundings, drugs, and activity can elicit such emotional arousal. Someone could also access emotions by thinking about past unusual events, or putting themself in a setting where they had previously experienced strong emotions.
The problem, then, is largely one of environmental routine, and an overly hardwired response table to it. The vast majority of who you are and how you act are determined by systems out of your concious control, and formed automatically when you were a child. Understanding how you can plainly influence these systems is more useful than any concious thoughts about them.
poster:Eddie Sylvano
thread:276980
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20031105/msgs/277253.html