You’re on my mind lately each time you talk about a feeling, because I’ve just learned a useful distinction. For the past thirty years of my career as a psychiatrist I’ve used “feelings” and “emotions” synonymously. Semantically loose, maybe, but until now, no one has challenged me to be more precise about the difference between feelings and emotions. Now that I’ve been challenged, I’m challenging you to join me.
This lesson in semantics comes now because neuroscientists finally have learned what feelings are in the mind, brain, and body, and how they differ from emotions. I’m taking this lesson from two senior voices in this arena, Eric R Kandel, the Nobel Prize winning author of The Age of Insight and Richard Davidson, author of The Emotional Life of Your Brain .
The first event in the sequence that leads to a feeling is a perception, say the sight of a snake or the whiff of her perfume. The second event is so automatic and quick that we don’t know it’s happening: a constellation of physiologic responses in our bodies, such as a tightening in the lining of the stomach and a shortening of the breathing cycle, or a relaxing of the nostrils at the same time as blood rushes to the genitals. This unconscious constellation of physiologic responses is the emotion that drives reflex reactions, such as a startled jump back or a swooning forward, well before the mind is consciously aware of these physiologic events.
The third event, the conscious awareness of the feeling, terror or carnal excitement, comes later—seconds, sometimes minutes, sometimes never, because the pathways to the cortex of the brain are longer than the pathways to the emotional brain, and many signals come together to add up to the awareness we call a feeling.
This transformation of a constellation of signals from the body into a conscious feeling happens primarily in a patch of cortex the size of a postage stamp, called the insula ), located just over the ears at the place where the sensory cortex for the skin meets the temporal lobe. It’s a close neighbor to the amygdala and the hippocampus, where we remember previous emotions.
The most fascinating feature of the insula is that it contains a map of the organs of the body. Signals from the gut come to one part of the insula, the heart another, the lungs another. Here is where the constellation of responses from the internal body meet signals from the skin and muscles of the face. Add them all up and call them terror, lust, or call them nothing at all and down a stiff drink instead. Then, if you’re still not sure what’s going on in your insula, write a poem.
So the semantic lesson is this. Use “emotions” for those lightning fast, unconscious sets of physiologic responses to perceptions that later lead to feelings. Use “feelings” for the subtle variations on the primary feelings of grief, rage, love, fear, and joy—the more conscious awareness of a particular state of your body, one of our most powerful guides to action: emotion tempered by memory and reason. Does knowing better what a feeling is make it easier to talk about it?